This presentation today is about relevant and participatory learning spaces.
So if you're an instructor and you would
like to think of your courses as providing relevance and a sense that your students
want to participate with the content, then perhaps this talk will be interesting to
you whether you teach music or another content area.
So my first question is what do you want to be when you grow up?
You might have already answered this question for yourself or you might still
be wrestling with it but think back to when you were around age nine.
If someone asked you then, what would you
say if asked what do you want to be when you grow up?
So here's me when I was age nine
and here is what I said when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.
So the reason to mention this is because of that folk wisdom that's circulating
today about young children, nine year olds let's say, who all say when they grow up
they want to be a YouTuber or they want to be some kind of content creator.
So we don't have really good data for this.
We do have the Harris poll from 2019 where
3000 children were surveyed and one third of them said I want to be a YouTuber or
some kind of content creator when I grow up.
We also have the first choice travel
company in 2017 who apparently did a study.
I cannot find the information about the
study or the exact data but this study is quoted and cited by so many newspaper
articles and blog posts and in some of them it says that 75% of the respondents
in the study want to be YouTubers when they grow up.
So this is relevant to this research study I'm presenting today because
at one point in the study I had to say to the students what if you were a YouTuber?
So this was a way for me to really present to them the idea of the relevance of what
I was asking them to do in the learning space and it was a way to call them to a
certain level of participation in the learning space.
So when YouTubers are asked, why are you a YouTuber?
They have some reasons and they don't say
because I want to play video games all day or because it's easy.
They actually say I want to communicate something valuable to an audience,
I want to exercise my creativity and my productivity, I want to build my self
confidence and I want to imagine new identities and statuses.
And so we also can imagine all the different technical and nontechnical
skills needed to engage in being a YouTuber.
So on the technical side there's understanding, research, search engine
optimization, video recording and production.
And on the non technical side, they need
to be able to engage with the community, they need to communicate, they need to
have a strong work ethic they need to be consistent.
So we can kind of imagine as instructors
that preparing someone to be a YouTuber requires a lot of skill development that
is transferable to many other careers or many other endeavors.
So these skills are transferable.
Now the mobile app in this study that I'm
going to be talking about was essentially a self contained social media feed.
Now, in this research study, there were
piano students taking lessons from a teacher.
And they had these one on one private lessons with the teacher.
And between each weekly lesson, they would practice the piano on their own, at home.
And they were meant to use this social media feed that was set up.
Just a private feed for the 18 children in the study.
They were meant to record a little section of their practice on the piano, share that
in the feed and then their peers could hear and comment and respond.
So the embedded ideology in this app, or at least the ideology that I wanted to be
embedded within the app was that music learning is inquiry.
Music learning is about connections and about discovery.
And I wanted the children to have a real sense of joy around the interactions that
they could have with one another around music learning.
So this is really in contrast to another type of mobile app.
I might have provided them with say for
example an app that would see how fast the students could name the notes on the staff
or an app that would listen to the children playing and as soon as a mistake
was made a buzzer would sound and points would be subtracted.
In this case I wanted the app to be a
joyful experience, a relational experience.
I wanted it to be a platform by which the
children could interact with one another and experience music together.
But the students did not do it.
They did not do this.
They started off hardly using the app at all.
And when they did use it, they used it in very limited ways.
So for example, when they first were given the app a couple of people posted full
songs that they had practiced like the year previous.
They already knew how to play these songs before they even got the app.
So it wasn't really posting anything that they were learning currently.
It was posting evidence of prior learning.
So essentially the app is not enough.
Just the mobile app given to learners is
not enough to facilitate deep, rich and meaningful learning.
What I hoped for was a sense of cultural expression developing in the app.
A sense that a lot of social practices and semiotic signs would be shared and this
app would become like a hub of cultural expression or cultural production.
And Gasambiti Fernandez says that cultural production is the way that humans
represent themselves, the way they perceive others and the way they think
about and experience the world through symbolic means.
So the symbols being shared and the
cultural practices surrounding what people were doing is not what I had imagined,
but why did I imagine that this was possible?
Well, the question now is what is the
social and cultural context of learners today in terms of music?
So this is the question what are our learners lives like?
And so therefore, how does that impact the learning spaces we set up for them?
So, in terms of production tools, assuming that our learners have access to reliable
device and good internet connection, they have access to tools that they can create
music with and that are easy to use, that are affordable.
And in terms of music itself, they have
unprecedented, all encompassing access to music.
So today our students do not have to wait for hours listening to the radio, hoping
that their favorite song is going to come on.
And in terms of participation, our
learners today expect to do stuff with music.
So even the apps where they are listening
to music, within those apps have features that allow them to share what they're
listening to, to other platforms and to other peers.
Also, those music listening sites allow
people to collaborate with anyone from around the world and curate playlists of
music that they like and that they want to listen together at the same time.
And in terms of musical creation and
production, people are doing things like creating remix and mashup and tutorials,
and people are creating parodies and satire and they're commenting on music,
they're discussing music, they are doing stuff with music.
So in terms of this study then, it was an instrumental qualitative case study, bound
by the 20 week period of the study and bound by the one mobile app that the 18
children, ages ten to 15, used for that time period.
The goals of this research study were to examine the musical artifacts that
students created and shared and also to examine the conversations that were had.
These were had in interviews and in the focus group discussion sessions.
So the data in this research study is everything the students posted in the app
and what they said about why they posted those things.
And then themes were noticed and described.
So the findings of this study were in two phases.
In phase one, it was discovered that the students were really using the app in
limited ways because they had two particular mindsets limiting mindsets.
These were the mindset of individualism
and the mindset of performance orientation.
So in terms of individualism, this came out when I asked the students, well, why
didn't you post anything in the app this past week?
And they didn't say something like, well, I didn't have time or I didn't want to.
Instead they said, why would I?
So they really had this sense that their independent practice at home between their
lessons, when they're practicing, that is an individual activity.
It always had been.
And they just assumed it always would be.
They did not have a sense that there would be any reason why this could be a basis
for interaction or why it could be some kind of community experience.
And related to that was their performance mindset.
So they had in their mind that,
well, if any of you play the piano, you know, it sometimes takes weeks or months
to get a piano piece sounding good, where you really want to share it with someone,
where you might be allowed to perform at the final recital at the end of the year.
And so the students
felt really like if they didn't have anything that was at that high performance
level, that they had nothing to share within the app.
So when this study started, the app usage was a certain way, it was limited.
Then I introduced Pedagogical strategies.
I figured as a pedagogue I was going to have to come in and do this, but I really
wanted to see first what would happen if I just left it wide open and said to the
students, use this app to share your learning.
But once I did introduce four pedagogical
strategies in response to their limiting mindsets, the app usage changed.
So this is my opportunity to describe to
you the four pedagogical strategies I introduced and how they impacted the way
that the students use the app for learning.
So first of all, the mindset of individualism.
During one of the focus group sessions, I introduced small group goal setting.
So you think your piano practice is only of concern to you.
Get in a group of three to four people and
talk together about what you're going to be practicing this week and what you as a
group decide you're going to post in the app.
So one group decided, we're going to post our scales.
Every time we practice our piano scales,
we're going to post those for others to hear.
Another group decided, well, when we get a new song this week, we're going to post a
section of that song so everyone knows all the new things we're working on this week.
And then the content creator identity building.
So this was a case where at the focus group session, I had a conversation with
the students about what is a content creator, what do they do?
Let's list all the different things we can think of that a content creator does.
And then we talked about content consumers.
Who are they, what do they do?
And we wrote a list of the role of a content consumer.
And as we looked at both of those columns, I was able to invite the students
and say, if learning is going to happen in this app, we need both.
We need content creators and content consumers.
Will you take on the role of content creator and will you share in the app?
Will you share your learning?
In terms of the performance mindset?
I introduced this idea of process over product so again.
In one of the focus group sessions, we
talked a lot about all the learning that goes into a piano piece.
So starting off with choosing the piece you're going to play
and then sight reading it for the first time and then figuring out where the tough
spots are and practicing those more than the easier parts.
Finding technical exercises that will help you master the technical challenges of
that piece, adding dynamics and articulation and all the things that you
do in the weeks and the months leading up to when it might be performance ready.
This is rich learning, everything that happens.
So why would we not share some of the process of our learning with one another
instead of just waiting until we have a final product?
So that was a conversation that invited
students to share more of their learning and scaffold instruction.
This was important because the children in this study and also probably you and I,
we're not used to opening a social media feed and hearing someone post some music
that actually doesn't sound that great, that sounds terrible.
So we talked as a group, okay, what's going to happen when we open the app and
we click on someone's post and it does not sound good yet?
How will we respond?
So we brainstormed a list of musical vocabulary that we could use to really
engage our musical thinking about what is happening in this recording.
And then how can we create a comment that would be really helpful to that person?
That gives us an opportunity for musical
thinking and expression and it gives them an opportunity for musical thinking and
musical reflection that they can implement with their learning going forward.
So the affordances of a mobile app do not exist only within the app itself, but
within the social practices that are enacted around it.
So what the teacher does and what the students do.
So I'm making the case that the app itself, a mobile app, the actual technical
affordances that are embedded in it, those are the affordances of the app.
But if a pedagogue or a learning space develops some social and cultural
practices that are intricately connected with that app, then that app also takes on
those social and cultural practices as part of its affordances.
And expecting learners to engage in
meaningful learning that is enduring, that is stimulating, and that is risk taking
requires a teacher or a more knowledgeable other.
So after these pedagogical strategies were
introduced to the students in the study, they became content creators.
They took up the invitation, their creativity increased.
So whereas previously they just posted
like a full song that they had already learned last year, now they started to
post like little bits of songs that they were working on.
They posted things and said, can you name this tune?
They posted and said, can you recognize what instrument this sounds like?
Because they would take play on their
keyboard and change the instrument to something else besides piano.
And they created these invitational posts.
They created posts that showed they were
only partway down the road to a performance ready piece.
They took responsibility for their learning and they engaged in important
musical thinking, and ultimately they participated.
So the app began to be used for interaction and sharing.
Now, you can imagine that as the researcher in this study, what I
might have done is something like said to all the people in the research study,
okay, students, everybody has to post once this week, and
everybody has to respond once to someone else's post.
And this is kind of like a common requirement in online courses,
but this is a case usually where the instructor has some kind of leverage, like
marks they can hand out for this behavior being enacted.
So in this case, as a researcher, I did not have any leverage like that.
And also I didn't want to set up requirements for the students.
Instead, I wanted to invite them into learning.
I wanted to set up a space, a learning
space, where the students wanted to participate, where they felt they had
something valuable to contribute, and where whenever they felt inspired, they
would go ahead and participate based on their own choice and based on their own
identity and based on their own desire to do cultural production.
So here's an example of post that was
created by Archer where she said, how I get scales up to speed.
So this was a tutorial that she posted and
a couple of students comments that I'm going to try this.
Thank you so much.
This is an example of a creative post.
And here's an example of a post by a person who recorded himself playing the
same song twice, and he intentionally made an error the second time, and he invites
his listeners to see if they can hear the mistake the second time.
So as I play this for you now, I'll invite you to see if you can hear the mistake the
second time, but also think about the rich musical thinking and reflection that was
involved in the idea to create this post and then actually creating it.
And also the invitation to musical
thinking that this person prompted when they posted this.
In the environment, you
in terms of relevance, educators who take
on some responsibility for the content that their students are learning to be
relevant can potentially really help their students toward critically reflecting on
the social and cultural context that they are currently in.
And if an instructor is helping learners develop skills that are applicable to the
life of a content creator, perhaps one day some of the students will take that on,
even as a career, but it will still be helpful to everyone, to anyone who posts
on social media and interacts with content.
And in terms of participation, the mobile
app in this study became a useful tool not just for engaging learners, and getting
them to participate, but actually shifting their concept of what their own musical
identity and what musical participation could look like.
So a mobile app in itself is not powerful for learning, I will say.
But when the students in this study
realized that the sharing that this app could facilitate could be a different kind
of sharing than they were used to so moving from this performance oriented kind
of sharing to the participatory or the progress focus sharing, then the mobile
app was a powerful platform for them to do this.
And this is an inclusive approach because if it's only the person
who has the very best performance, who at the end earns the right to perform in that
concert in front of the group at the end of the year, then that's very limiting.
But if anyone who's learning, who's
working on something, who has something in progress is able to share it, then this
participatory environment is much more inclusive.
It allows everyone in the group to
be involved in social and cultural expressions, not just some people.
So the limits of this study are the small sample size of the student group.
In terms of future research, I'm thinking about not just how does a mobile app
facilitate a learning space that feels relevant for the participants
and invites participation, but also how a participatory
music learning space can actually promote learners well being.
So in contrast to the very high stakes
competitive, performance based music type of learning,
a type of music engagement and participation and relational interaction
with music is an opportunity to lower stress and to avoid invoking anxiety and
pressure and stress and stress on students, allowing music to actually
enable a positive sense of well being and enjoyment.
So here are my references.
This QR code leads to my slide deck and I appreciate you listening today.