Teaching Philosophy

When my students are engaged in learning activities, drawing on a curiosity that has cultural and personal value in their lives, I feel more successful as an educator facilitating an environment where the teacher and student co-construct meaning and knowledge in the learning space attentive to students’ unique needs. In addition, I am reflexive on how my classroom pedagogy problematizes notions of music teaching and learning within a diverse population of learners and my student’s positionality in their learning so that critical reflection is an active and continual process throughout the process. In order to meet my students at their cultural and lived experiences, this pedagogy requires an approach to teaching and learning that functions as a bridge to the diversity of cultural experiences within the classroom, allowing the teacher and student to co-construct a learning space that is attentive to their unique needs. Every student is recognized as having a specific perspective and is given the opportunity to express this in the classroom.

The format of the courses I facilitate encourages students to engage reflexively, creatively, and critically to consider relationships among music technologies, practice, and the types of impact they might make in their own communities, as well as on the overarching fields of music learning and teaching. While the title of the course (Music Technology for Music Educators) is broad, I have chosen to focus learning objectives that leverage technologies such as digital audio workstations, software applications that use digital visualizations of sound to compose, record, edit, and arrange, as well as sample and remix existing musical material to create original music by the students. Students create a digital portfolio of their original work to publish, share, and document their learning experiences from the activities. As a result, students develop and apply creative ways of engaging with existing, emerging, and future technologies and gain experiences facilitating project-based work including aspects of creating, performing, responding, and connecting. As a learning community we discover how we might engage in a learner-centered pedagogy so that we may provide and create the capacity for future students to be engaged in valuable and authentic learning experiences in music using technology.