Mel Bay's Creative Keyboard® Webzine | Misha Stefanuk - Implications of Music Education

Implications of Music Education

I teach piano, theory and composition to children and adults. Music history and philosophy have been a great supporting tool for introducing my students to creative life, and philosophical understanding of the reasoning and purpose behind musical performance. I teach almost every age group, and I have to simplify the concepts and the specific wording I use for my younger students. I have noticed that I have a similar approach to different age groups. I imagine the minds of the older students to be evolved versions of children, so I am very interested in the development of the individual mind.

I see the understanding of the way humans think as one of the greatest achievements of science. In my teaching I face all kinds of learning problems, starting with the most important learning problem- my own. The multiplicity of ideas and metaphors used in this excerpt keenly related to my own thoughts and experiences. A sponge, computer and Swiss army knife all immediately became objects of my fascination, and the main idea that I learned from this document is our inability to simply answer complex questions about learning. Every one of the proposed models seemed to be very effective in limited areas, but none covered all problems. Similar to the article, my personal tendency to simplify once again failed to succeed.

Another idea was the developmental nature i the mind, and its similarity to computer models. It seems that building modules, is something that computer game designers do. This approach is based on expert systems, which are a particular area of AI (Artificial Intelligence,) with which I am somewhat familiar. However, AI is often based and advocated using psychological terms, so the metaphor does not completely explain or answer more global questions about the learning process and the work of the mind. Similarly sponge idea is great as a starting point of an argument but could create major contradictions with Fodor's Swiss Army knife structure. Other systems mentioned in the document are equally attractive, and also insufficient to win one over another.

Two very specific instances of discussing autism were very helpful to me. I have an autistic student, who is doing very well, but my understanding of the specifics of how his brain works was developed while teaching him. Statement that autistic children are unaware of others having any thought process is very similar to what I have learned from this student and from his parents. I have successfully started teaching piano to children four-and-a-half years old many times. I have not had any problems explaining the concepts of music to them or reaching my teaching goals. They always played well, and enjoyed learning. However I now see that my understanding of their thinking process was far from the truth, but I never underestimated their abilities similar to older child psychology research. I am definitely rethinking the diversity of theories of mind that exist, and I am still searching for the global theory of learning process that would be unlimited to specifics and more comprehensive.

Lets dicsuss in more detail the genealogy of existing theories of thinking, starting with Piaget, and again it relates to my teaching and child's psychology and shows the limitations of the older child psychology views, due to incomprehensive methodology and using popular assumptions as a part of the research project. The outrageous statement that children under six have no appreciation of mental life could not and should not be used to draw any conclusions, but understanding of children's realism, egocentrism and animism should be used to raise the sensitivity to a child's understanding of the world.

In excerpts from A User's Guide to the Brain, John Ratey introduces the evolution based theory of the development of the brain from Reptilian through Paleomammalian and into Neomammalian, including the formation of the Cerebellum. And as skeptical as we can be in regards to evolutionary theory in the ways the mind works, this explanation and the physical nature of the "hardware," seems to be very instrumental in our understanding of the mind.

Implications of this knowledge for teaching music are wide open. The simple understanding of the complexity of the way the mind works and a child's inability to sometimes just absorb and replay the information like a sponge later leads to the realization that we could be dealing with seven different types of intelligence. Our teaching has to be diversified to accommodate each student rather than make students adapt to a certain teaching style. Teaching is a much more complex process than setting goals and giving instructions. It is my understanding that any successful teacher understands that on some level, however the readings mentioned above definitely broaden the level of my understanding of the ways the mind works.

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