Communicating through Music - Norway

Communication is the C that our group was handed for our intermission work. Considering that communication is maybe the key factor in a teacher’s work, there is a lot to choose from as far as material goes.

I teach middle school (8-10th grade) and my subjects are English, social studies, religions / ethics, Spanish and music, so I have a wide variety of opportunities to choose from to implement communication into the learning process.

After a little thinking I decided on music to focus on the C - communication. The task says to redo a previously done lesson plan with one of the six C’s as the main focus.

The class has, as a part of the curriculum, to learn how to play the guitar and we have been working on the song “Knocking on heaven’s door”. This is a fairly easy song to learn, and at the same time easy to sing along as you play the instrument. We had also successively added some other instruments like drums and bass as we had learned the song better. The students were eager to learn and impatient in the learning process, and we struggled/ practiced coordinating the rhythm and the shifting of chords. Since we only have music one hour a week there is always this feeling of lack of continuity.

With communication between the students being the main focus rather than mastering the individual’s competence aims / goals, I figured we could see further development and get a better end result by listening to each other and try to achieve a form of musical interaction, a common goal where communication is the tool to a product they have created. This does require that everyone is somewhat able to play / sing their part, but communication is imperative during the learning process, but also for the end result. Whether or not the students were able to reflect on the intent of communication varied from person to person.

However, having focus on communication in the learning process was definitely something that made them more aware of their role in the group.

Another aspect of communication in music is how it is presented to an audience. What do we want to say and how do we want to say it? The awareness of how we present our message/ product is also part of the learning process in communication. When we presentedour “product” we had two focuses, one how to communicate with each other to present unified and the other; how to present our “product”/ message to an audience. We succeeded to a certain degree.

To conclude I think having the 6 C’s as a core in teaching will give the opportunity to a wider knowledge / competence, but we need to spend more time and effort to train our brains to think in those manners. We have been stuck in ‘the old ways’ of checking off the competence aims as we have gone through them, without setting of time to reflect and discuss. To take in the 6 C’s we need to unlearn our old habits and start over with the 6 C’s as a foundation.