“Yet another item for the collection…”

So, a more personal and chatty blogpost than usual this week….

I found the topic and readings on video game cultures and gaming literacies for the week to be very interesting, and each of the readings gave me plenty to think about from the perspective of an “outsider” who has never played video games. I will confess that most of the time I struggle to see the point of games, apart from FIFA in its yearly incarnation (I like the idea of playing with MY Arsenal team rather than Wenger’s!) and games that are designed to help build children’s skills through another mode of “play.” As someone who really knows nothing about what is out there, I have always worried about the violence many games seem to encourage, the huge amounts of time games like Civilization seem to require, and the real addiction I see among friends and the children of friends. Despite my doubts about the video game “thing,” I came to the readings willing to engage with the issues. In the end, each of the articles made me think about the relevance of theorizing about gaming in a much deeper way, and I thought the readings reflected the richness of the topic through their breadth and scope.

That being said, I am not going to write about video games! And yes, that may yet be rooted in my ambivalence still towards gaming. However, one of my the issues I have been struggling with in my teaching this year has been the significant one of striking a balance between teaching content and teaching skills, and the fact that Patrick Gee addresses this issue overtly in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy seemed fortuitous, given that yet again this week I tweaked my Teaching Philosophy Statement for yet another job application!

The traditional model of teaching music history is similar to other historical disciplines in that it rests on the transfer of content. Particularly in my history survey classes for music majors, there is a huge amount of information that I am expected to impart to my students regarding style, periods, genres, composers, schools, and particular musical works. It is an often overwhelming amount of material, and one that has increased over the past decade with the inclusion of new topics previously considered non-canonical but now necessary, like that of women composers and women’s patronage. The message still predominantly seems to be that our students need to know ALL of this material; somehow we try to get through it, because it is difficult to make the decision to leave something out when there is so much of value to study.

It is an issue that musicology friends and I often talk about, and I am always surprised at how many of them are deeply committed to the idea of content. I am also surprised at how often they transfer the problems of student learning to the students themselves; music history is “hard,” the students don’t work hard enough, they don’t have the writing or reading skills and so on!

So I have been “collecting” challenges to the notion of content over the past nine months or so, due largely to the viewpoints I have encountered in my writing seminars. I use the word “collecting” self-consciously: I am accumulating a master list, I “take items out” and examine each one regularly, I look forward to finding yet another instance of resistance. A lot of the items in my “collection” stress the importance of writing as a way of learning, and the value of allowing time for the processes and transformations that occur when writing is an important part of the classroom experience. From the WID movement, I have “collected” the concept that, beyond content, we need to introduce students to what it means to be a part of a discipline and to encourage them to practice the skills they need to be a member of that community, in this case musicology. My “collection” has challenged me to begin to find new ways of balancing my teaching of content and my teaching of skills. As non-tenured faculty, my risk-taking can only be limited, but things are happening there.

So why am I adding Gee to my collection, and perhaps thinking this might be a more featured, showcased item than some of my others? First, I enjoyed playing with Gee’s concept of social domains and thinking about musicology as a social domain from several perspectives. His discussion of social domains echoes ideas of communities of readers and disciplinarity that are at the forefront of how I think about my field. Beyond this, Gee got me thinking about ways in which musicology participates in multiple social domains and therefore requires multiple literacies. Of course what we do is a product not just of content but also a set of distinctive social practices. I think it would be valuable at some point to list what might be included in the musicology set of social practices! It might be scarily David Lodge-like!

I’m not saying that Gee’s concepts are necessarily new, but they are very clearly stated and supported by good examples. For instance, active learning is not new to my vocabulary, but I feel when I discuss it in the future I can draw on his clarity and common sense approach. I found myself asking questions of how what I do in my classroom to promote active learning relates to points he make.

Gee also validated me as a teacher and my developing attitudes towards content vs. active learning. It is occasionally nice to read something and think that, oh yeah, I’m sort of doing that already - for example, in some new lesson plans I am doing with my 101 students that attempt to give them a perspective on classical music today on the meta-, critical level.

From a less reflective and more practical perspective, Gee provides vocabulary and terms that I feel will be useful for future statements about my current teaching and goals for the future. I only wish I had absorbed his concepts before I wrote my latest teaching statement! Terms such as internal and external views of semiotic domains, affinity groups, design grammars, specialist and lifeworld domains, among others, refer to concepts that I can usefully incorporate into statements of my teaching philosophy.

So far I have focused on Gee’s chapter 4, which I found very pertinent to some of the challenges I have been facing this year. Of course there are incredibly practical things to consider and possibly use in formulating the why, if not the how, of my attempts to reach my students in ways that create more valuable learning situations for them. The eight principles he discusses at the end of chapter 4 and his insistence on the need for embodied as opposed to rote learning are really validating for my attempts at modest experimentation. I found chapter six less specifically applicable to my “collection” but thought provoking.

Usually I love my theory, but it was interesting to see practicality take over in my response to this week’s reading!