When I work with Dalcroze teachers-in-training, the most frequent question I ask them is, “What are you teaching?” It’s easy to confuse what we are teaching (music) with how we are teaching it (Dalcroze teaching strategies). For most teaching situations, the goal of the class shouldn’t be Dalcroze teaching techniques like follows or quick reactions, it should be a musical goal like experiencing simple triple meter or syncopation. I named the blog (“Musical Subjects”) after this concept to help myself remember what my job—when I’m not training teachers— actually is: teaching music. But at the end of this school year I noticed myself pulling at the harness, and so I allowed myself (um, my other self) to loosen the reins. This took on quite two quite different forms in two different classes.
In my 5–7-year-old class, I used a scenario about inhabitants of far-flung islands who don’t yet know that other islands and people exist. The children each demonstrate how they move in their world, gradually discover each other, and come together to learn about each other’s culture, which can involve things like flag making, pageants, peace anthems, musical and dance performances. (Yes, I’m creating the actual world I want to see. I can dream, can’t I?)
I usually tie the different islands to specific rhythms, for example, if my subject is compound meter (like 6/8 or 12/8) one island may be the beat (i.e. dotted quarter notes), another is the division (groups of three eighth notes), another the long-short skipping pattern (quarter-eighth) intrinsic to compound meter, and so on. Students would move their assigned rhythms as the sun came up on their island indicated by what they hear me play. They would come together to form combination rhythm patterns as they discovered each other. Their ‘flags’ would be large notecards with their rhythms printed on them.
But as I was teaching it this time I suddenly dropped all of that and let the kids completely decide how they wanted to move. When it came time for ‘flags’, I let them create their own with crayons and paper. Though I definitely influenced their choices by the music I played to match their movement, I wanted them to feel ownership and agency in the direction the story took. We all improvised together at the end, each child with their own unique percussion instrument. I told them that after the islanders encountered each other, they decided to play so that they could hear each individual instrument well. They succeeded, much to my delight. The girl playing the finger cymbal let it ring instead of playing it as fast and loud as she could. This let us hear another child’s simple soft beat on the drum as well as another’s gentle repeating pattern on the xylophone. It needed little intervention from me once I decided that it was okay that the sounds they were making weren’t going to fit neatly onto a rhythm grid. If I were evaluating a student teacher, I might have been critical of this, but they were making their own music, not ‘teacher music’. Maybe their rhythmic inclinations did not align perfectly with my curriculum—but it was authentically and undeniably theirs. Of course, rhythmic precision and clarity is indeed an essential musical skill to learn. But who am I to say that the kids must do this all the time? The most important thing was that the kids were really aware of and listening to each other. That’s not a theoretical musical topic like beat and division, but it is an essential musical skill. I don’t think the result would have been the same in a lesson focused on an exclusive set of rhythm patterns.
In another class, I went the opposite way: from creative freedom to more structure and accountability. These kids are older (3rd-5th grade), and they’ve spent quite a bit of time with ‘loose reins’ this year. We’ve done our share of straight nuts-and-bolts Dalcroze exercises, but have also done a lot of freer, exploratory improvisation as these kids seemed to really respond to that type of work. Over the year, engagement has been up and down, and the group lately has been a bit cliquish. So instead of planning a precise lesson with sequenced events, I gave them a practice list of things to figure out and perform, such as dissociations (hands, say, do one rhythm and feet do another), conducting patterns to execute, and rhythmic systems to move (such as stepping a rhythmic pattern with divisions that change position in each measure).
I demonstrated each one and asked them to practice one thing with someone else, making sure they partnered at least once with every person in the group. I expected some resistance, but to my surprise they were completely into this. One girl who had seemed intimidated by the older girls all year left the room with a big grin. Although my main goal was breaking down the social barriers that kids this age are prone to, I realized it also tied into the essential musical skill of collaboration: orchestra members must find a way to work with their stand partners; a comping jazz pianist should support the harmonic choices of the soloist, for example.
Typical Dalcroze classes are focused on a single subject and we aim to let the subject unfold so that as much as possible students discover what they need to learn on their own. At our best, the lessons gradually unfold, building skills and understanding in an artful way. But in this class I just dumped a bunch of stuff onto the table and let them work on their own. It seemed to bring them closer together and more independent. My takeaway from this is to question the value of any kind of rigidity, orthodoxy or dogma. There can be a time for freedom and a time for control. And given the state of the world at the moment, that may be even more important than building musical skill and understanding.
I was also reminded that my teaching is not always about the kids, it’s often about me. I needed to loosen up my own expectations about what a class should contain, about what constitutes ‘good teaching’. I wouldn’t have given either class in a public demonstration. If a student-teacher taught similarly for a teaching exam, I wouldn’t have passed them. But I realized I needed to listen not just to the kids, but to myself. What do I need this week? What will prevent me from going through the motions of a lesson I know will ‘work’? I think our students, especially when they are children, respond well to us when we are being true to ourselves. They can certainly sense when we are not.
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