Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

I just received a fascinating email from Cambridge Journals, the publisher of one of the leading music education research journals, the British Journal of Music Education (BJME). BJME just published a research study conducted and written by a 12-year old student, Eleanor Denny. Working with researchers and other children at Open University, Eleanor designed, conducted, and wrote up a fascinating study about why students participate in musical experiences.

Here is her abstract:

I undertook this project as a 12-year-old student while studying research methods at the
Children’s Research Centre at the Open University. It has already been shown that doing
music improves children’s Mathematics and English scores. The aim of this study was to
find out if it also raises the aspirations of the children taking part. A questionnaire was
given out to 80 Year 7 children at two schools in Milton Keynes. Questions investigated
the children’s musical participation and future aspirations as well as their parents’ attitudes
and education.

The most important findings are that the musical participation of the children is
positively correlated with their future aspirations. Musical participation is most closely
linked with parental enthusiasm for it. Parental pressure and education were found to
have no link with musical participation, but families with low incomes may find affording
musical activities hard to maintain.

It is recommended that more money be put into music education so children of low
socio-economic backgrounds can have more of a chance to play musical instruments.

You can download and read the full research article here. Dr. John Finney from the University of Cambridge wrote a wonderful response to her article here.

Implications for music education

Why don’t we involve our students more in our research? Is the traditional “top-down” approach the best way to affect change in music education? I love John Finney’s idea that we should involve our students as “co-enquirers” in our research. All too often, we place ourselves as teachers and researchers in the role of “most knowledgeable” when, perhaps, our students should be seen in that role.

It is a great day in music education when one of the world’s leading music education research journals publishes a research study conducted and written by a 12-year old. Congratulations Eleanor!

Mojiti.com and Ning.com

Mojiti.com is a useful tool for those of us who need to annotate video clips. You can either upload your own video to Mojiti or link to another video online (perhaps stored over at youtube.com or video.google.com) and add your own text and graphics as a layer on top of the video. As your video plays back, your subtitles, or comments, or graphics appear and disappear. Here are some ideas for the music classroom:

• Post a video of your rehearsal and invite your students to create their own overlay/spot organizer adding comments about the rehearsal
• In music education methods courses and student teaching supervision, videos of student teaching could be uploaded to Mojiti and both the student and the teacher could provide embedded comments right at the spot in the video where the comment was relevant. I have started having my student teachers upload their video and add their comments before I watch and give my own.
• In a technology-infused music class, you could ask your students who were creating original soundtracks to video clips or creating multimedia projects involving video to add their own directors/composers commentary layer describing the processes they used as well as their expressive intent.

Click here to see Mojiti in action.

Ning.com (special thanks to Steve Bizub for showing me this site) is a free social networking site that you can set up for your music classes. It enables you to create a collaborative web site for your classroom similar to myspace.com or facebook.com while keeping everything private. Students can create their own profiles and blogs, as well as upload photos and videos. One feature they plan on announcing soon is the ability to upload streaming audio files which would be perfect for a music class. Not only will you as teacher be able to upload audio files, but the students will as well… all within a private, password-protected space.