Workshops
Listening to Learn, Learning to Listen: Contemporary Native American Music in the K–8 Classroom
Workshop Presentation Kay L. Edwards
Arts Education curricula should include active classroom experiences that foster the development of concepts, skills, and cultural understanding of indigenous peoples in an interdisciplinary manner. In the United States, teaching about Native American cultures and valued traditional customs through their music is not generally emphasized in K–8 classrooms. There is no national curriculum that addresses Native American cultures. Most children (and adults) know little about the indigenous peoples of North America. This workshop will involve the participants actively in guided listening, singing, dancing, and playing instruments through model lesson plans that incorporate authentic contemporary Native American social music and meet national standards in Music and Social Studies for grades K-8. This session engages the participants in sample classroom strategies that are practical, authentic, respectful, and appropriate. Session participants (and their K-8 students) can experience a different way of knowing, develop multimodal literacies, and increase their cultural awareness and valuing. Aspects of pedagogies and issues related to culturally responsive education (CRE) and social justice are explored with respect to K-8 students' perceptions and opinions about Native Americans – including preconceptions and stereotypes. In this workshop session, I will share original sample lesson plans from my instructional model for teaching K-8 children about Native American cultural values expressed through contemporary musical styles that include Native rock, jazz, classical, hip-hop, rap, "new age," and country/folk. In addition to the activities described above, effective assessment techniques will be shared in the session that can provide educators with a way to document evidence of individual student growth with regard to cultural understanding, valuing, and sensitivity.
Find Your Voice : Choral Singing with Community Groups
Workshop Presentation Jacqui McKoy-Lewens
This practice workshop turns a group of strangers into an instant choir, by facilitating the discovery of their unique ‘collective voice’, drawing on the basic concepts of additive harmony and the historical vocal layering of spirituals and African-American folk song. This workshop also then goes on to explore the resultant psychological, physiological and social benefits that are expressed by community members once a choir has been formed and as they continue to sing/perform in the public realm. After over 20 years of creatively working with children and adults in the UK, psychological work with patients in forensic settings from deprived rural and inner-city communities, engaging these individuals and families in the aural tradition of vocalizing and singing, this work has developed into more formalized choral structures and compositions. Presently the work remains focused around enabling individuals and communities to "find their voice" – and especially exploring the initial psychological barriers to choral engagement such as for those who maintain that they "cannot sing," "have no sense of rhythm" of "cannot read music!" In essence, this is singing to facilitate community empowerment and requires no prior musical knowledge or vocal experience for engagement - thus building the group dynamic from the ground up, using basic, shared building blocks of vocal sound and movement to encourage lasting group cohesion.
