Problem-Based Learning in the College Music Classroom

Natalie R Sarrazin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138578173
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351265225
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Problem-Based Learning in the College Music Classroom explores the core tenets of Problem-Based Learning (PBL). PBL is an effective, student-centered approach in which students learn higher-order thinking skills and integrative strategies by solving real-world challenges - not often employed in music classrooms. Yet such courses are uniquely situated to advance this innovative pedagogical approach. This volume sheds light on PBL best practices in survey- and topic-based music courses while integrating general education content, discussing implementation, materials, methods, and challenges, and encouraging readers to think creatively to develop flexible solutions for large-scale issues.

Bookended by introductory and concluding chapters that delve into the history, theory, application, and assessment of PBL, the text collects classroom-tested case studies from eleven contributing authors in:

• Music History and Appreciation
• Ethnomusicology
• Music and Movement
• Music Theory and Education

Problem-Based Learning in the College Music Classroom paves the way for pedagogical discovery in this unexplored area, encouraging teachers and graduate students to move curricula goals forward - and ultimately to move students toward innovation and engagement.

Part I

Music History and Appreciation

3

Open Classrooms, Problem-Based Learning, and Adjunct Instructors

John Thomerson

John Thomerson equates Problem-Based Learning with the open classroom philosophy of music educator Randall Allsup and situates his PBL application within that larger framework. From there, John examines challenges in implementation in terms of shifting classroom roles and asynchronicity in his Music Appreciation course. He then rethinks his PBL as a pedagogy of searching for answers rather than achieving them, something which could achieve more than educated students, but curious lifelong learners.

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Framing the PBL

In this chapter, I suggest that Problem-Based Learning (PBL) offers one method for opening our classrooms and our teaching. I argue that PBL aligns with Randall Allsup’s philosophy of open classrooms, and I present and critique a model PBL activity I deployed to open my teaching. I focus on the particular challenges adjunct instructors face when implementing this approach. Contingent faculty face unique difficulties to leading pedagogical reforms, and targeting this audience, the dominant force in college and university teaching, spotlights the potential benefits and systemic barriers to implementing open, PBL-influenced music classrooms. I conclude by suggesting ways the core ideas of open instruction and PBL can apply to other instructional settings.

Randall Allsup’s Remixing the Classroom makes a passionate argument for “opening” our music instruction to address the challenges facing contemporary American education, including both structural elements (globalization, the nature of late capitalism, and the effects of privilege and systemic inequality) and institutional ones (shrinking arts and humanities budgets in K-12 and higher education as well as the demands of the Global Educational Reform Movement, which attempts to create cost-effective, hierarchical, measurement-driven schools by focusing on assessment, efficiency, standardization, productivity, and meritocracy). Allsup also articulates a number of discipline-specific issues including the tension inherent in teaching a fixed and largely cultivated repertoire to students whose musical backgrounds and interests often favor vernacular music and our dominant philosophical paradigm and a Master-apprentice teaching model propagated through a culture of praxial instruction. To confront these overlapping challenges, Allsup argues that we must find “alternative ways to address university music-teacher education and the practice of teaching music” (Allsup, xi).

PBL offers instructors one way to open our practice, focusing less on teaching a tradition (any tradition) and more on creating encounters that maximize the possibilities inherent in a “teacher’s unrepeatable moment in time” and place with her students. Allsup emphasizes the unknowable, the unfinished, and the unpredictable, encouraging us to listen to new frequencies, particularly from voices customarily dispossessed from the conventional methods and topics of music education. Listening to such voices requires openness as an orientation toward human relationships, which manifests in our teaching through increasing flexibility, a shift in focus to exploration and human growth, and concern with “events and relationships” that manifest as “irreducible, locally governed, and unfinished,” as well as often without a “general consensus about what is good and what is bad” (Allsup, ix–xii). PBL’s focus on open-ended, real-world problems provides students with a space for exploring those relationships.

It is worth addressing a potential objection to my use of “PBL” throughout this chapter: some authors, including John Savery, argue that PBL “must be the pedagogical base in the curriculum and not part of a didactic curriculum” (Savery, 14). This presents a problem for music educators because no existing studies – including Hon-Lun Yang’s article in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy or those in this volume, which constitute the first substantial application of PBL to collegiate music instruction – apply PBL to an entire curriculum. Given the dearth of research on this modality and music studies, I argue that implementing a PBL-influenced approach in a variety of collegiate music courses is a necessary starting point for ascertaining the strengths and weaknesses of this approach in our discipline and gathering the data necessary for supporting curricular reform.

Background and Course Information

I implemented PBL during the spring of 2016 in Music History in Western Civilization II, the second portion of a required two-semester sequence for sophomore music majors. Scheduling issues and enrollment vagaries resulted in two uneven sections of 27 and 63 students, the majority of whom were music education majors. I divided the students in groups based on instrument type or voice part, which necessitated combining students from multiple sections into one section because several instrumentalists in the smaller class lacked partners.

My motivation to investigate and implement PBL grew out of a desire to implement an experiential learning strategy and through frustration stemming from my experiences as an adjunct. Like many contingent faculty, the majority of my teaching involves lower-level “service courses” intended for students who are interested in the subject insofar as they are less interested in the other courses that fulfill the same graduation requirement. Because much of the current rhetoric around college education in the United States focuses on its practical, tangible, market-oriented outcome, engaging these students – even in classes intended for majors – can be a challenge, and many students in music history survey courses consider the subject of little relevance to their performing, learning, and teaching.

I was also drawn to both Allsup’s work and PBL because of their basis in learner-centered teaching. Maryellen Weimer’s Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice describes a reformulation away from traditional instructor-centered pedagogy that involves several foundational shifts in classroom power, the role of teachers and of students, the function of content, and in the process and purpose of evaluation. For Allsup, the traditional structures of the classroom are upended when teachers cast off the Master’s mantel and make a “concerted and conscious” effort to share “power and control” (Allsup, 12). PBL instruction likewise necessitates a shift in power away from a conventional (and authoritarian) “sage on the stage” style of professor-centric teaching and towards increased agency and responsibility for students. One of PBL’s chief elements requires instructors to abandon their customary role as lecturers. Instead, they create or select “ill-structured problems” (Savery, 12). These “messy, real-world problems” are “complex,” lack “a single correct answer,” and involve integrating knowledge from different domains (Hmelo-Silver, 235; Savery, 12; Torp and Sage, 15).

I hoped that opening my teaching practice through PBL’s open-ended questioning would engage students in the act of music history, with musicology as a verb. I wanted my students to develop the higher-order thinking skills required to fulfill our course’s objective to “describe the challenges and opportunities involved in writing music history,” and I presented them with a question that would demonstrate a practical application of the term’s content: How would you teach the history of your instrument or voice type? As Hon-Lun Yang’s research found, designing an appropriate question is challenging. These problems must be “engaging and motivating,” be anchored in the “real world,” have multiple potential solutions, provide “stimulus for collaborative enquiry, and contribute toward learning outcomes.” She admits that even with her own work, “there is no doubt that the chosen problems need to be revisited and refined if PBL is to be continued,” a conclusion I extend to my work (Yang, 330).

Implementing the PBL

Answering this question involves a shift in power and classroom roles. During PBL, instructors function as tutors guiding (but not micromanaging) the learning process and encouraging self-reflection and metacognition. In their role as tutors, faculty “support the process” and “expect learners to make their thinking clear,” without providing “information related to the problem,” a research task that remains the learners’ responsibility (Savery, 12–14, 16). As Savery’s description suggests, student roles also shift during this process as students increase their personal responsibility for their learning, a noteworthy departure from Paulo Freire’s “banking theory” of education, a mental model that many student share. A key component of this shift involves students’ awareness of their existing knowledge. Students have both the agency and responsibility to fill in gaps in their understanding through self-directed research, the point of which “is for individuals to collect information that will inform the group’s decision-making process in relation to the problem” (Savery, 13–14). Through their work with an in-class background knowledge prompt, my students recalled and organized their existing knowledge on the subject. During class, students completed a think-pair-share with five questions: “What do you know that you could use to solve this problem?”; “What do you need to know that you could use to solve this problem?”; “Where could you learn this?”; “How could you organize this information?”; and “What are potential ways of presenting this information?” While they had a general sense of the history of their applied instrument or voice type, each student articulated a need for further research regarding specific details as well as a method for organizing this information.

From their work with this prompt, students developed plans for investigating what they did not know and more importantly, understood that the problem involved answering two different yet related questions: “What do we teach?” and “How do we teach it?” Despite beginning their work in class, some students did not realize the work they did with this prompt offered a foundation for beginning their research. As one of my music education colleagues recommended, it proved important that I remind students they had started the project already in class and reassure them that their discomfort was a natural part of the learning process. During the subsequent class meeting, I provided a skeletal framework for their work over the next three weeks: “explore pre-existing knowledge, identify areas where more information is needed, critically research this information and integrate it into existing knowledge, build on this information to identify different ways of solving this problem, and agree on and deliver one solution.”

Another challenge that arose from creating groups of students in different sections was that their work was done asynchronously out of class. Not only were students responsible for finding answers to their questions (rather than relying on the instructor to tell them information), they also had to share and synthesize those answers with their group members. Savery considers such collaboration an “essential” component of PBL work. Team members obtain solutions by balancing individual contributions within a collective vision, sharing what they “learned and how that information might impact” their development of solutions to the problem (Savery, 13–14). This collaboration proved hard to spark; several students wanted or needed a response from group members in another section but were reluctant to assume responsibility for communicating with them. Many students hoped leadership would materialize in their groups but were unwilling or unable to accept such a role themselves. I believe this passivity highlights the importance of a curricular approach to PBL: students would be familiar with the expectations of such work if it was used as the basis for their instruction. As facilitator one of my key tasks was communicating the importance of collaboration, and I found that asking in-class self-reflection questions encouraged students to conceive of themselves as contributors to their group. We spent a portion of one class meeting metacognating on the collaborative process, with students reflecting on the biggest contribution they could make to their group’s progress this week, what they needed from their group members, and (most importantly) what actions they would take based on this self-reflection.

Shifts in power structures and classroom roles necessitate similar changes in the use of content and the purposes of learning as well as the way teachers assess this learning. Allsup’s focus on openness and what he calls “third meanings” suggests that the purpose of learning is not a tangible product or definitively assessable student outcome (“play a C major scale at 120 beats per minute” or “explain the importance of the Heiligenstadt Testament”) but rather the process of searching itself. He argues we should not conceive of music instruction as the transmission of a set of closed techniques and forms to students but rather as a space “in which people can connect with others across difference and ability in an ongoing and unfinished way.” Content in such instances consists not of a technique or set repertory to be mastered but the ideas that can create these spaces (Allsup, 106). Similarly, the content in PBL is not merely the objective data and subjective interpretations that constitute a discipline’s knowledge but the ways of conceiving of problems, conducting research, and approaching solutions that typify disciplinary thinking. The purpose of PBL is not only to help students learn more about a particular subject but also to understand the topic’s complexities. To answer their question, my students deepened their historical knowledge and faced problems that musicologists encounter, including evaluating and synthesizing information from a variety of primary and secondary sources, resolving any contradictions their research uncovered, and tailoring research findings for specific audiences. They also began to recognize that history is not a closed book, that historians disagree on or remain uncertain of answers to sometimes even basic questions, and that the choices historians make can have a significant effect on how individuals are remembered (or forgotten). While these concepts often provide a subtext to conventional instructor-centered lectures, opening a classroom through PBL makes these issues explicit topics of study.

Assessment

During our final class meeting, my students evaluated their contributions and those of their group members to their final projects and responded to other prompts designed to encourage metacognition. They also synthesized their new understanding of musicology through a closing analysis that included a presentation of their group’s solution and several writing assignments. Savery considers the reflective components of these self and peer assessments some of the most important elements of PBL (Savery, 14). These prompts built on work we had done each week during our process, when students answered questions that related their projects to course content. These questions were factual (connecting specific information to broader themes) as well as interpretive (dealing with issues of representation and value judgement in historical narratives). During our final session, my stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Music History and Appreciation
• Part II Ethnomusicology
• Part III Music and Movement
• Part IV Music Theory and Education
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index