My three-year old son has an interesting bed-time ritual. He pretends that a discarded power-bar is his guitar and he is a rock star. Two cushions are put up against the head-board as pretend speakers, the bed is his stage and then the show begins with him strumming the pretend guitar. After a ten minute gig, he hits the sack. As an infant, for the full first year of his life, he would not sleep without soft, music in the background.
I firmly believe that we are all born musical (by musical, I mean interested in music-listening or playing). It is a physiological pre-disposition. But in the early years, sometimes our upbringing and influences, deliberate or otherwise, take music out of our life, our being. Some of us are fortunate to reunite with it in our later years while some learn to live without music, treating it as any other sound!
Science has convincingly proved the value of music in brain development. Students who are musically engaged in school or at home, have superior spatial reasoning and better able to work mazes, draw geometric figures and copy patterns of two-colour blocks. Also the limbic area is a key area activated to music creating a feeling of relaxation and well being. It is no coincidence that musical notes are sequential and necessitate an understanding of measurement, proportion, and pattern perception.
Music is a language in itself, a form of communication. It speaks about feelings and desires, beauty and courage, suppression and discrimination, joy and love. It is one of the most popular and potent forms of expression. That perhaps explains the strong correlation between early language skills and music.
It is not surprising then, many parents buy music for their infants and toddlers. Sometimes, even earlier, buying and playing it to the unborn child. But what happens when the child enters the formal school system. Why in the hierarchy of subjects, the 3Rs take precedence over something that comes so naturally to children. Music and dance relegated to a weekly lesson, if at all. The message being, music is something that you do once in a while, there are other more important things for you to do and learn on a more regular basis!
Why is it that the first casualty of any budget cut in the school, district or board is the arts programme? Why does the school not think of making little cuts across the spectrum or think of ways of cutting the cost of all programmes without impoverishing children’s learning experience? Why is it that in some countries/states/schools, there is no music after the primary years? We are talking of an age-group that is the target for all musical products from i-pods to CDs. Yet we choose to ignore a natural inclination and pre-disposition while framing our curriculum and designing our teaching-learning!
As curriculum developers and decision-makers, are we plain dumb, that we fail to take cognisance of proven research, or is just a case of misplaced and skewed priorities, having sold education to the market forces?
The Web 2.0 is a powerful teaching resource as it encompasses the playful, expressive, reflective and exploratory aspects of knowledge building. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for internet applications which support internet-based interaction between and within groups (social networking, wikis, folksonomies, virtual societies, blogging, multiplayer online gaming and ‘mash-ups’). These applications are built around the collaborative creation, acquisition and sharing of content amongst a communities of users. The educational benefits of Web 2.0 are derived from the readability / writeability of the web, where users can easily generate their own content as well as consume content produced by others.
When directed at learning, Web 2.0 impacts on four principal dimensions of learner experience. Two are broadly social in nature (collaboration and publication) and two are more cognitive (literacy and inquiry).
Collaboration: Web 2.0 offers educators a set of tools to support forms of learning that are highly collaborative and more oriented to the building of classroom communities. It allows learners to collaborate and coordinate actions and activities to construct common and shared learning and to source information and expertise from external sources.
Publication: The read-write character of Web 2.0 supports the creation of original material for publication in various formats (oral, written, audio, video) which would otherwise be difficult and expensive to achieve in a conventional classroom setting. The relatively unbounded space and global viewership offers a strong feeling of doing authentic research and contributes to the authors sense of self worth.
Literacy: Learning in conventional classrooms is primarily in written and spoken forms. Digital media stretches the conventional orientation of literacy by offering new forms of representation and expression. In a recent major review of England’s primary school curriculum, the conventional definition of ‘literacy’ has been stretched to include ‘digital literacy’.
Inquiry:Web 2.0 technologies offer new ways for learners to search and source information. It has created new structures for organising, cataloguing and sourcing data, all of which has the potential to empower students as independent learners. It puts potential seekers of information in direct contact with experts and provides an environment for geographically distributed users to take part in structured exchange for mutual benefit.
Web 2.0 offers learners a more participatory experience of learning in which individuals have increased opportunities to interact with other learners and providers of information. As learners become more and more engaged with digital technologies, gain fluency in their application, and with the job market assigning increased weightage to candidates with digital competencies, teaching practices and curriculum must address the challenge of developing these attributes.
Children, right from infants, need to explore and play with different materials in a safe environment. These could be seemingly safe materials like stuffed toys or seemingly unsafe ones like soft moulding wires. In today’s borderless world of contamination and cross-contamination, no material is completely “safe”. Yet adults, who are entrusted with the supervision and safety of infants, work with the illusion that restricting their childs interaction to just a few supposedly safe materials, makes them safe. It is easier for us to manage the environment so that our lapses and neglects do not jeopardise their safety. In our enthusiasm to make the environment safe, we forget that the elimination of certain materials from children’s environment makes learning very one dimensional and caters to development of some senses more than others.
In North America, the safety of kids sometimes borders on paranoia. The litigation culture prevalent there makes them rely so much on one kind of research that supports stringent control over materials, conveniently ignoring the other body of research which supports the contrary. In Canada, my infant son was not allowed to play with little cars by his daycare provider as there was the risk that the wheels might come off and may be swallowed by him or other infants around him. Whereas in Reggio, I witnessed the spectacular engagement of an infant with a metal object, something that would have horrified my son’s Canadian caregiver. The learning and the communication of the learning that emerged from such interaction was a visual delight for me as a mother and an educationist.
This is not to say that infants should be allowed to interact with sharp knifes and rat poison! But we need to broaden our choice of materials for kids, especially the very young ones, to interact with and learn from. Our fears as parents and care providers should not interfere with their sensorial development. Every material that has any educational value has its potential strengths and risks. It is more about vigilant supervision and common sense than about a false culture of safe, sterile environment. Somehow, the preschools in North America seem colourful but dull to the senses after Reggio where aesthetic repackaging and layouts of discards like orange peels gave them a new identity and potential purpose as a multi-sensorial, learning material.
