What is your IN-ovation?

[nafmeadmin]

Hi, everybody, this is Scot Burstein from Los Angeles and I was really curious about what kind of different (i.e. non-mainstream) courses you teach? In the past 12 years in High School I have taught a lot of traditional classes like Wind Ensemble, Marching Band, and AP Music Theory, but also have got to do diverse things like Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced Guitar, Rock Band, and a Mariachi Ensemble. I am curious to see what kind of other things are being offered, where, and for what grades. Thanks!

[nafmeadmin]

Hi Scot-

My load is mostly non-mainstream courses at the high school level. I teach Art, Music, and Culture (a collaborative arts course where students engage in a lot of music making, mostly based on the informal learning model), Beginning and Advanced Guitar, Piano Lab, and GarageBand (sound recording). I teach in a public high school outside of Philadelphia, PA. I’m also curious to know what others teach!

[nafmeadmin]

That sounds exciting, Sarah! I would love to hear more about those classes, especially the informal learning one. As for the guitar classes what do you teach? Is it popular, classical, or a mix? Do you use a text?

[nafmeadmin]

Art, Music and Culture is collaborative with the art department and is a requirement for all students. Our goal is that students can learn to appreciate the arts through art making and music making and the projects are largely student led. Students work in groups throughout the semester to create projects that explore the ideas of identity, expression, storytelling, impact, and reaction. Since the entire study body takes this course, we have a large variety of students from those that are highly involved in the arts to those who have never taken an arts course before and don’t plan on taking any! During the identity unit, I have students work in groups to make a song cover and to write their own song. Most of them are performing instruments for the first time and it’s amazing to see what they do! By the end of the semester, the students develop their own final projects using a medium explored in the course or something they’ve never done before (i.e. film-making, drama, live music performance, stop motion creation, painting, sculpting, etc…). A lot of the projects are also collaborative with a visual and aural component.

For guitar, I wrote the curriculum and it’s a combination of a lot of different resources. As popular music is constantly evolving, so is the course! I used to teach with a mostly equal emphasis on classical and popular but found that most of the students who take that class only want to learn popular styles. Now, we only spend two weeks working on notational reading and classical styles.

Thanks for the questions! I am also interested in finding others who teach alternative courses.

[Author]

Posts