Whose Music Education is it Anyway?
Musical Futures is changing the face of classroom and instrumental music the world over and is recognised as a leading global K-12 educational innovation because:
- It is a 21st century approach that is inclusive, accessible, creative and student centred
- It has been developed over more than a decade through the practice of thousands of teachers worldwide
- It’s an approach that emerged from ground-breaking research
- It has been proven to remove barriers to participation
Musical Futures International is working with instrumental teachers in a variety of music education contexts across the world. From China to New Zealand to the USA, our vision is to work together with all teachers of music and the organisations who support our aims of building a continuum of student voice, engagement, relevance and personalisation within the formal contexts of the instrumental music education system.
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Aims: To work with instrumental teachers and organisations to keep more people playing more music for longer.
What we do: teachers experience our workshops as participants then reflect on how they might be able to implement creative approaches to instrumental teaching and learning into their practise.
- Practical workshops that explore approaches to instrumental teaching that grow from the core Musical Futures pedagogy of informal learning and non formal teaching
- Explore the role of the teacher in the context of instrumental teaching considering also the expectations of parents, employers and students with regard to their music education
- Understand how lessons could be enriched by placing more of an emphasis on student agency and creativity in instrumental teaching
Benefits of Musical Futures for instrumental teachers
- To introduce instrumental teachers to an approach that is commonly used in the academic curriculum to work towards consistency between academic and instrumental music
- To encourage musical music teaching that fits alongside a more formal or traditional approach to instrumental learning
- To encourage instrumental teachers to think about teaching in ways that are broader than just satisfying the demands of the graded music exam system of assessment
- To support the academic team in increasing uptake to GCSE and A-level
- To help students to develop wider listening skills and creativity - improvising/composing in addition to performing
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Objectives: There are many ways to learn music. We help instrumental teachers think about how and why they teach it including:
- What relevance might engaging with popular music have to traditional instrumental teaching?
- How could students' own musical interests be accommodated in an exams-driven teaching situation and more importantly why might this be necessary?
- Would getting parents to play music alongside their children have any impact on their expectations of a music lesson?
- How can approaches to learning based on large group music making be translated into one to one and small group instrumental learning?
The Role of the Teacher: who makes the choices?
Our practical activities will support teachers to consider a balance between the following when it comes to the whats, hows and whys of instrumental teaching. We will look at the following in the context of one to one, small group and large group instrumental music learning and teaching:
Repertoire vs Playlist
Academic vs Practical
Composition vs Songwriting
Recreation vs Creation
Formal exam vs peer audience
Notation driven vs Aurally inspired
Sequence vs By Demand
Musical Futures recommends that all teachers weave their way through these, personalising learning for the students they have in front of them regardless of whether they teach in one to one, small group or larger group settings.
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Repertoire vs Playlist
Academic vs Practical
Composition vs Songwriting
Recreation vs Creation
Formal exam vs peer audience
Notation driven vs Aurally inspired
Sequence vs By Demand
Musical Futures recommends that all teachers weave their way through these, personalising learning for the students they have in front of them regardless of whether they teach in one to one, small group or larger group settings.
Read more...
It’s the way we learn:
Based on Lucy Green’s Hear, Listen, Play! How to Free Your Students' Aural, Improvisation, and Performance Skills, our practical workshops explore a variety of different ways to learn and teach music including:
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- I play, you play
- Listen and copy
- Notation as support
- Be creative (compose and improvise)
- Play together
- Play while the music plays
- Pulse and rhythm
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Bespoke your workshop
We build workshops tailored to the different instrumental teaching contexts of organisations we work with (one to one, group learning, ensembles etc.). Choose from our comprehensive list of learning models and we will organise 1/2, 1 or 2 day workshops to work with your teachers allowing plenty of time for planning and discussion for how to embed our approaches into your specific instrumental context.
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Working together: Take, Use, Innovate, Share
Musical Futures grows and develops from communities of teachers who become early adopters, helping to shape our approaches as they use and mould them in their own contexts.
With networks of music teachers engaging with Musical Futures across the world, we challenge the reality of instrumental teaching that often happens in isolation by bringing teachers together to learn through playing and creating music.
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With networks of music teachers engaging with Musical Futures across the world, we challenge the reality of instrumental teaching that often happens in isolation by bringing teachers together to learn through playing and creating music.
Read more...
Find out more
If you would like to find out more about Musical Futures for instrumental teachers, please contact us for a chat info@musicalfuturesinternational.com