Discuss

My first impressions of this book are that it is Peter Block with bigger words and more Deweyey. Woodford’s ideas are almost identical to Block’s. They share the concept of people bringing their gifts to community, or so says Dewey. Some of the ideas Woodford brings to the table though are quite thought provoking. “No one had a monopoly on truth or value.” Woodford is talking about the ideal democracy where that statement is true. It is an interesting statement as well. No one having a democracy on those things means that the opinion people have on what is truth and what should be valued is shared. I’d like to take this moment to talk about a band called Girl Talk. Girl Talk is not like other bands though where they write original music. The experience of Girl Talk is a collaboration of tons of genre’s of popular music mixed together in an extremely complex and talented way. Girl Talk in my opinion is a very high level of DJ for this reason. There is a reason that I’m talking about Girl Talk in regards to Woodford’s book. On page 4 and 5, and after skimming through some of the later chapters, without even reading it I noticed something: a whole lot of numbers, one at the end of almost every paragraph. And in the section labeled Notes, each of the numbers just refers to a citation. This collection of citations gives me the impression that this book is a just a huge collaboration of popular music education thinkers. They’ve been gathered together in a particular way that connects them and turns them into a different way of thinking about these old ideas. This is almost exactly what Girl Talk does.
In the article I read this week, Reconnecting Music Education with Society
Thomas A. Regelski, Editor, the second paragraph opens with a very heavy statement: What students ultimately can do or actually do with their learning later in life is most often not a question teachers or curriculum designers ask. I’ve actually been thinking of this a lot lately in terms of our current education. And what exactly are we learning? What I’ve gathered from these books is that education works best as a conversation where the environment allows for positive change. But what does this mean for this statement Regelski makes? What can we do, actually do, with what we’re learning in classes today? It is interesting that the CP classes we take today don’t really feel like they take place in a CP style. The conversation is usually between a small group of people in the class. It’s an example of how CP depends not only on the teacher, but the students as well. There is a huge responsibly placed on the student to be a part of the conversations that take place in a democratic classroom. The traditions of classrooms we are used to are echoing in our learning now. We wait until the teacher asks a direct question, raise our hand, and give a direct answer. And none of these skills or methods has a thing to do with music. Haltmeier once said the most rewarding experiences of college for him were discussions he had about music education with his peers outside of class. Why not bring that into the classroom? I have discussions like these often and they really get me thinking. What about a classroom makes it so difficult to have discussions? Just a thought.