Teaching Humanities and Science through Music in Primary Education
10.6092/issn.2039-9715/10177
Dagli anni Sessanta, la cosiddetta “eduzione estetica” ha esercitato un influsso notevole nei programmi di pedagogia musicale americani dalla scuola primaria all’università, come hanno rilevato alcuni filosofi della pedagogia musicale come Bennett Reimer e Philip Alperson. L’educazione estetica, originariamente basata sull’idea di musica assoluta promossa da Hanslick, ha generato un approccio pedagogico strettamente formalista, il quale ha progressivamente isolato la musica dal resto del curriculum, ostacolandone l’inserimento in un contesto cross-disciplinare. Alla radice del problema vi è quello che Wayne D. Bowman identifica come “la tremenda differenza tra educare alla musica e attraverso la musica.” Nel 2015 Pierpaolo Polzonetti offrì un seminario/corso di aggiornamento intitolato Insegnare attraverso l’opera, diretto a insegnanti di varie discipline nella scuola primaria e secondaria, incoraggiandoli ad educare gli studenti in varie competenze e in forme di conoscenza in aree disciplinari differenti. Maggie Youngblood, insegnante di scuola primaria presente al seminario, ha portato avanti la collaborazione con Polzonetti, sperimentando in classe come educare sia alla musica che attraverso la musica. La loro presentazione collaborativa mostra come la differenza tra educare alla musica e attraverso la musica sia, alla fine dei conti, una falsa antinomia, come quella denunciata da Giuseppina La Face tra “far musica” ed “ascoltare.” Entrambe le antinomie sono il prodotto di pregiudizi ideologici che ci auguriamo di poter abbattere al fine di promuovere un insegnamento attivo, opposto all’accettazione passiva di principi pedagogici astratti.
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Maggie Youngblood
Musica Docta
Insegnamento inter- e trans-disciplinare
Teaching Humanities and Science through Music in Primary Education
Text.Serial.Journal
https://musicadocta.unibo.it/
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2019-12-20
2019-12-16
2019-12-20
2020-02-19
9-20
MD
Maggie Youngblood
2019/12/20
10.6092/issn.2039-9715/10177
9
Granger, Indiana
2039-9715
Insegnamento inter- e trans-disciplinare
it
20
Teaching Humanities and Science through Music in Primary Education
https://musicadocta.unibo.it/article/download/10177/10020
9
          Musica Docta. Rivista digitale di Pedagogia e Didattica della musica, pp. 9-20




                PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI - MAGGIE YOUNGBLOOD
                           Davis, California - Granger, Indiana

           TEACHING HUMANITIES AND SCIENCE
          THROUGH MUSIC IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI – Part I: Teaching through Music in Theory
     My collaboration with Maggie Youngblood began after a seminar-workshop
I offered to teachers in elementary, middle and high schools, titled “Teaching
Through Opera”. The seminar was part of an exchange initiative of the
University of Notre Dame called “Teachers as Scholars”. As the title “Teachers
as Scholars” suggests, the project aimed at encouraging scholarship in teaching,
as well as teaching as a way to advance scholarship through collaborative work
between pre-college and college educators.1
     My approach to the seminar, as suggested by the title, “Teaching through
Opera”, was meant to involve teachers specialized in different disciplines – social
sciences, sciences, language arts, and music – to use opera as an arena to foster
interdisciplinary connections, dismantle compartmentalized acquisition of skills,
and let music contribute at best to a well-rounded education. Before and after
this workshop I was involved in teaching opera in elementary schools to better
understand the challenges educators face in their daily interaction with children
under ten years of age. 2 At the cost of stating a truism, I came to the full
realization of how teaching in elementary school cannot be done without
theoretically informed practice and without the help of specialized teachers who
have acquired the knowledge of how to teach in the age-appropriate style for
each group of students. This requires advanced pedagogical skills and the
experience and ability necessary to understand children’s appropriate pace and

      1 Teachers as Scholars (TAS) is a program of the University of Notre Dame that

partners with the South Bend Community School Corporation. The program provided
me the opportunity to teach and collaborate with local teachers. I am grateful to Jay
Caponigro, Director of Community Engagement at Notre Dame, for his enthusiastic
support, and to my former assistant Lesley Sullivan for helping me with this project. To
learn more about this program see https://publicaffairs.nd.edu/programs/teachers-as-scholars/
(last accessed, 30.09.2019).
      2 I offered opera classes at Perley Primary Fine Arts Academy, an elementary

school in South Bend, Indiana, in 2016. In 2017 I observed Maggie Youngblood’s
classes at Northpoint Elementary School in Granger, Indiana. In 2018 I also offered
classes at Patwin Elementary School in Davis, California. I am grateful to Lesley Sullivan
who also assisted me in the class at Perley and to the teachers who worked with me,
especially Jeannie Pedersen-Smith and Erin Harding at Perley, and Vicki Rinne at
Patwin.




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modes of learning. 3 Maggie Youngblood, who masters these skills in the
classroom, took ideas I introduced in my seminar on “Teaching through Opera”
and made a further step ahead by applying the concept to music in general. I
learned a good deal observing her 3rd-grade classes. Children sit on a carpet,
surrounded by musical instruments. Classes continuously alternate between
activities of playing, listening, moving, and writing about music - she uses
interactive technology called “Easy Interactive Tools”, allowing traditional
whiteboards to function like a tablet by manipulating content projected on the
wall using digital pens. I was amazed to see the high verbal, motor, scientific,
and mathematical skills children acquire through music.
     Teaching through music is a controversial approach in music education. As
Bennett Reimer reminds us, the so called “aesthetic education” has heavily
informed American (and not only American) pedagogy of music at every level
from early development to University since the 1960s.4 Philip Alperson points
out how “aesthetic education” is grounded on Eduard Hanslick’s idea of
absolute music, generating a “strict formalist emphasis” in teaching arts,
including visual arts, especially in public schools, and a “cluster of concepts” in
the educational approach to music, resulting in a familiar arsenal of ideologically
charged terms, including “disinterested perception”, “music appreciation”,
“originality”, “genius”, “masterpiece”, and “connoisseurship”.5 The bottom line
is the idea that music should be experienced in itself, for its own sake and value,
in order to contemplate the sublimity of its creators. In radical aesthetic
education contextual and representational qualities are ignored or banned as
corruptive of music’s absolute beauty. The result is the isolation of music as a
discipline in education, which is hurting the perception of its function, or rather
lack thereof, in the core curriculum.
     A new, different approach is encouraged, among others, by Wayne
Bowman, who calls attention to the “tremendous difference between educating
in and educating through music”. Educating through music, requires a new kind
of music educator who – Bowman writes - is not only a “music specialist”, but
someone who “recognizes and responds to the plurality and diversity of
students’ needs and those of an ever-changing society”. The reason why teaching
through music is a more effective approach to integrate music in general

     3 The   inspiration to teach opera in elementary school came from Silvia Cancedda,
“Ascolto e comprensione dell’opera: due percorsi didattici per la scuola primaria,” in
Insegnare il melodramma: saperi essenziali, proposte didattiche, ed. by G. Pagannone, Lecce,
Pensa, 2010, pp. 99-144.
      4 B. REIMER, A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision, 3rd edition, Upper

Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. 8-9. Reimer remains an advocate for
“aesthetic education” even though he is opposed to a dogmatic approach to it.
      5 PH. ALPERSON, “What Should One Expect from a Philosophy of Music

Education?”, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, XXV, n. 3, 1991, pp. 215-242: citation
on p. 219.




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education is that, quoting Bowman again, “specialized training for a ‘talented’
few, which passes for music education in many parts of the ‘developed’ world,
is hardly the kind of instruction that benefits all – the general student, or society
at large”.6 In order to promote ‘learning through music’ as a way to “explore the
possibilities for using music to access the wider school curriculum”, Alison
Daubney encourages “double-focus” learning: first acquisition of advanced skills
in separate disciplines and then the combination and merging of skills. 7 This
approach has been theorized by Jonathan Barnes, who recognizes the
importance of music, along with art and drama, as fertile fields for cross-
curricular learning.8 Barnes also sees the risk of “hierarchical cross-curricular”
approaches, observing that, “the danger is that in thematic curricula some
disciplines like Music, Art, Dance […], may become cast forever in this
subservient, serendipitous and submissive role”. 9 For this reason, he prefers
instead a more horizontal “interdisciplinary cross-curricular” approach.10 The
case studies involving music Barnes proposes in Cross-Curricular Learning are
nevertheless somewhat disappointing, privileging making music to promote
“development of language and communication with emotional and social
health” through creating and performing lullabies; the “involvement in practical
music activity to “develop skills of coordination, confidence, and an
understanding of pattern and structure”; or, the use of music to manage
emotions. 11 This approach is indebted to the kind of cognitive theory promoted,
among others, by Juslin and Sloboda.12


     6 W.    D. BOWMAN, “Music’s Place in Education,” in An Oxford Handbook in Music
Education, 2nd edition, 5 vols., vol. 1, Music and Music Education in People’s Lives, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 19-37: 25-29 (emphasis added). For a similar
position, encouraging “creative thinking” and “interdisciplinary connections”, see Peter
R. Webster’s “Foreword” to Patrick Schmidt and Richard Colwell (eds.), Policy and the
Political Life of Music Education, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. ix-xvi: xi.
This volume collects essays with refreshing international perspectives, but there are
virtually no signs of a real intention to apply Webster’s ideas to actual policies. A
position more clearly in favor of interdisciplinary approach to music in view of forming
a well-rounded education is advocated and better articulated by C. DETELS, Soft
Boundaries: Revisioning the Arts and Aesthetics in American Education, Westport, CT, Bergin
and Garvey, 1999.
      7 A. DAUBNEY, Teaching Primary Music, London, SAGE, 2017, chapter 9, pp. 136-149.
      8 J. BARNES, Cross-Curricular Learning 3-14, 3rd edition, London, SAGE, 2015, p. 59.
      9 Ivi, pp. 66-67.
      10 Ivi, pp. 72-75.
      11 Ivi, pp. 88-89, 140-141, 155.
      12 Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. by P. N. Juslin and J. A. Sloboda,

Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, and their other edited volume, Handbook of
Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, and Applications, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2010.




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     Teaching humanities, social sciences, and sciences through music is highly
praised in theory but remains counter-current in practice and does not reflect
the general position of the US National Association of Music Education.13 Yet,
there is some new hope. As Campbell and Kassner point out in their last book,
the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)
encourages the integrated curriculum, which empowers students to make
connections across disciplines. For Campbell and Kassner “integrating curricula
[…] helps children learn the standards of each discipline and connect common
ideas across disciplines”. The risk is illusionary integrated curricula occur when
teachers fall into the trap of “infusion”, which happens when a discipline
becomes subservient of another, as in the case of teaching the alphabet song,
hence using music as an aid to memorize letters. Instead of “infusion”, then,
teachers should practice “integration”, which “leads students to a greater
understanding of each subject involved and shows equal respect for the value of
all disciplines”.14 Maggie Youngblood practices learning through music as well
as music learning in primary education through both making and listening to
music, overcoming the false dichotomy, emphatically denounced by Giuseppina
La Face, between “far musica” and “ascoltare”, too often misunderstood as a
dichotomy between making music, upheld as active learning vs. listening,
mispresented as passive learning.15

MAGGIE YOUNGBLOOD – Part II: Teaching through Music in Practice
     I would like to relate what I do, in practice, with my students in order to
allow them to develop skills for the study of the humanities and sciences through
music. My approach does not imply any imposition of knowledge in order to
understand music or other disciplines. Rather, I hope to stimulate students to
think outside the box and to develop imagination and creativity in music making
and music listening. For this reason, my methodology for teaching music in
primary school is diverse and diversified. In class my primary goal is to expose

      13 The attitude dominating the National Association of Music Education

(NAfME), former Music Educators National Conference (MENC) is to advocate the
right to provide music education for every child, while there is virtually no emphasis on
the need to promote a kind a music education that is conversant with other disciplines
in the chore curriculum: see the “Centennial Declaration of MENC” (2007), in
https://nafme.org/about/history/menc-centennial/a-centennial-declaration-of-menc-the-national-
association-for-music-education/ (last accessed, 30.09.2019), and Music Education at a
Crossroad: Realizing the Goal of Music for All, ed. by J. R. Barrett, MENC, The National
Association for Music Education, 2009.
      14 P. S. CAMPBELL - C. SCOTT-KASSNER - K. KASSNER, Music for Elementary

Classroom Teachers, New York and London, Norton, 2017, pp. 21-22.
      15 G. LA FACE BIANCONI, “La musica e le insidie delle antinomie,” in La musica tra

conoscere e fare, ed. by G. La Face Bianconi and A. Scalfaro, Milan, FrancoAngeli, 2011,
pp. 11-23.




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students to as many different activities as possible, including, but not limited to,
singing, playing instruments, reading, writing, improvising, composing, listening
to, describing, and movement, including dancing to music. How do we instruct
our students to talk about, think about, and write about music? In the United
States, at both the elementary and secondary level, there is a heavy emphasis on
music as a performance class. I am also convinced that in order to acquire status
as a core subject in our education system, music needs to be considered a part
of a much larger educational score, which includes language and literature
(English), sciences, and history.
      Pierpaolo Polzonetti and I met to discuss a project, or set of lessons, to
focus on bringing more classical music studies to the elementary music
classroom, and also to focus on how we think about, talk about, and write about
music. After discussing these ideas, I came up with a list of classical-music pieces
that would be both enjoyable and engaging for my students to listen to, and that
would allow us to make cross-curricular connections. I choose pieces for my
classes based on their potentials to allow students to make connections between
the music itself and other realms of perception and knowledge so that students
not only learn through music but also learn music through other acquired areas
of knowledge or through other non-musical skills.
      For first-grade students I chose The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-
Saëns. Chiara Sintoni, in her article in this journal about teaching The Carnival of
the Animals to elementary-school students, convincingly shows how this
collection of small pieces for chamber orchestra can be a formidable tool to
introduce children to attentive listening. She proposes to use guided movements
and gestures in order to allow children to develop the ability to recognize
structural parameters of music, such as pitch content, dynamics, pace and note
lengths, large-scale forms, small-scale periodicity, phrasing, rhythmic cells, etc.16
Sintoni recognizes how corporality is connected to intellectual dimension, which
justifies how the corporal dimension can be effective for the development of the
understanding of music in order to produce “reflective listening” (“ascolto
riflessivo”), which is based on “understanding” music itself “objectively”,
“rationally”, and “competently”, as opposed to “projective listening” (“ascolto
proiettivo”), which is based on projecting subjective responses in the attempt to
make sense of what any music piece is about.17
      Sintoni’s approach is useful and very effective as a way to allow students to
grasp how music works. The way I use Saint-Saëns’s and other pieces discussed

     16  C. SINTONI, “Gesto e movimento per la comprensione musicale. Ascolto dal
‘Carnevale degli animali’ di Camille Saint-Saëns”, this journal, II, 2012, pp. 123-139,
https://musicadocta.unibo.it/article/view/3225 (last accessed, 30.09.2019). I thank Pierpaolo
Polzonetti for helping me translate this article. This paragraph reflects our discussion
of its content in relation to our collaborative project.
      17 SINTONI, “Gesto e movimento”, pp. 123-125, based on theoretical concepts

introduced by M. DELLA CASA, Educazione musicale e curriculum, Bologna, Zanichelli, 1985.




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below is informed by the idea of teaching not only music, but also through
music. My goal is to allow students to use knowledge they already have when
approaching a new thing, like symphonic music. Most six- and seven-year-old
children have had experiences with animals, whether with pets, wild animals (in
Indiana we have many visiting our backyards), or in the local zoo. Through their
acquired knowledge the music itself will appear more familiar, and this music
can also stimulate them to reflect on elementary notions of zoology. The other
advantageous aspect of using this suite for first graders is the fact that all of the
pieces are relatively short. I knew it would be a challenge to get the children to
listen to something longer than a few minutes. Like in the case of Sintoni, one
skill I wanted them to develop is to associate animals with concepts of
movement, at first movement of bodies in space and then purely musical
movement as rhythmic pace and tempo. I also encourage students to make
connections between music terminology and extra-musical referents, such as
visual or personality characteristics of different animals, or non-musical sounds,
like animal sounds. For example, after listening to “Royal March of the Lion” I
asked the students to move around the room like a lion, highlighting the
glissando in the music that represents the lion’s roar (see Fig. 1).




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Figure 1 – First-grade students enacting the “Royal March of the Lion” from The
Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.




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After we listened to both “Lion” and “Elephant”, I asked the students to
illustrate an animal other than a lion or elephant and write a sentence, describing
how that animal could fit with the music, even though it is a different animal
than they had to associate to this music. This way I encouraged students to break
free from the univocal association of one movement with one animal and open
up to a more creative but still analytically informed listening experience.
      For students age 7 to 8 (2nd grade) I chose Holst’s The Planets. By age 7-8,
most students are familiar with space and the various celestial bodies.18 In our
school, they have also visited the planetarium and the Star Wars saga is their
equivalent of Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid. Each class brainstormed a list of
ideas that the piece “Mars” could be about. The only prerequisite information I
gave them was that the topic had something to do with science. Rather than
teaching them scientific facts about Mars and its mythology first, and then
introducing the music, I started with the music and had them come up with
thematic ideas based on what they heard. Using the music to teach through the
subject, instead of teaching about the subject, is a much more engaging process
for children of this age. I used the piece to teach them to listen critically to the
music; I did not project the thematic content of the song onto them before
listening (in this case, “The Bringer of War”). The factual knowledge about the
music, and its scientific source material, came last, and it showed the students
that they were in tune with what was happening in the music and that they were
on the right track in their observations of the thematic content – many of them
mentioned fighting, war, or Star Wars in their initial observations. After listening
to both “Mars” and “Venus”, we made a Venn diagram as a class to compare
the pieces (see Fig. 2).




     18J. R. FALLIN - M. G. TOWER, Using Music to Enhance Student Learning: A Practical
Guide for Elementary Classroom Teachers, New York and London, Routledge, 2015,
pp. 138-139.




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Figure 2 – Venn diagram comparing “Mars” and “Venus” from Holst’s The Planets.

      Their observations astounded me. They were very perceptive to things
happening in the music and ideas that were both similar and different between
the two pieces. Splitting up into smaller groups of two or three, I asked the
students to come up with creative movements to characterize either Mars or
Venus. We discussed what types of movements would be a good fit with each
piece before attempting this task.
      For third grade, I used material from Pierpaolo Polzonetti’s workshop to
introduce the students to opera, namely Rossini’s Cenerentola, and develop literary
skills about fairy tales, plot and dramatic development, and so on. In this
instance, we started by brainstorming the main characteristics of a fairytale, from
their work in language arts classes and their own personal experiences. They
expressed thematic ideas such as good triumphing over evil, magic, love stories,
and sometimes even talking animals. From there, we set out to write our own
fairytales, both as a class and individually. What interested me most, though, was
the ability to make these connections while listening to purely instrumental
music, namely the overture of the opera, and encourage students to recount their
story based on the music. We used the overture to Rossini’s Cenerentola as a sort
of film score set to the narration of their stories, which was something they really
enjoyed. It was amazing how well their plot elements matched the pace and
mood of the orchestral moments of the overture!
      Finally, for fifth grade, my focus is to approach social studies through music.
Social studies receives a lot of attention in our fifth-grade curriculum and I




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wanted to include a topic that they were already studying in their regular
classrooms. I chose Appalachian Spring and Rodeo by Aaron Copland, as each
tackles the subject of the American West and westward expansion in different
ways. 19 Venn diagrams and T opinion graphs help in this case to compare
different pieces about the same topic and abstract the idea of the American West
emerging from Copland’s music (see Fig. 3).




Figure 3 – Venn diagram comparing Copland’s Rodeo and Appalachian Spring.

     The difference now is the introduction of geographical space, especially the
openness of the West, so well reflected in Copland’s music, but also historical
contextualization – how that idea of space reflected the American mentality, and
the social problems involved in taking that space, especially in taking it away
from Native Americans. This social approach does not preclude a creative
approach, both in listening, moving and making music. For example, I asked the
students to recreate or imitate either Appalachian Spring or Rodeo with a mix of
instruments (see Fig. 4). I found that students learn more thoroughly through
music when making music, once they understand the cultural and historical
context of a specific composition.




     19   Ivi, pp. 163-164.




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Figure 4 – Students recreating concepts studied through Copland’s Appalachian Spring
and Rodeo using different instruments.

     To summarize all four units of study, I strongly believe that in listening to
and discussing both the conceptual framework behind these pieces and the
cross-curricular connections to which they were related, my students gained a
better understanding of musical topics such as form, composition, and
movement, while simultaneously strengthening their learning and understanding
of science, language, and history. The students are at the forefront of producing
the knowledge about these various subjects; the knowledge is not given to them
ahead of time so that they can regurgitate the knowledge in connection to the
music. Rather, they make discoveries about their own knowledge base and their
own intuition about the classical music pieces as we learn together. Learning
through music, while still accessing and approaching music standards, is an
immersive, multidisciplinary approach to teaching that I plan to continue in the
future. I should point out that there are many sources of learning theory and
research behind this topic; this paper is simply a recounting of my practical
teaching and learning experiences that took place with my students in my music
classroom. My students were great sources of inspiration during these units of
study, and it was exciting to see them process music and think about other topics
of study in a new way.

PIERPAOLO POLZONETTI - MAGGIE YOUNGBLOOD – Conclusion
     After working independently and in collaboration, we reached the
conclusion that teaching through music, especially through an eclectic and
holistic approach, does not preclude but enhances aesthetic appreciation. Active
learning does not imply choosing between performing or listening, but it requires




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engagement of as many physical and mental activities as possible. We should
reflect more on the difference between active and creative teaching and the
passive teaching that results from uncritical acceptance of abstract pedagogical
tenets.
                                                                myoungblood@phm.k12.in.us
                                                                    ppolzonetti@ucdavis.edu




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