Writing about Music in Large Music Appreciation Classrooms Using Active Learning, Discipline-Specific Skills, and Peer Review

  • Jennifer L. Hund Purdue University
Keywords: pedagogy, music appreciation, general studies, large classroom teaching, writing

Abstract

In today’s world of growing class size, increasing number of credit hours taught, and rising call for more on-line course offerings, instructors must develop creative solutions to common pedagogical issues. Unfortunately, writing assignments are often the first mode of assessment relinquished when one feels pressed for time to prepare, to teach, and to evaluate students. Not all college-level writing needs to be in the form of a research paper. Students are served equally well by learning how to think in new disciplinary contexts while using basic, universal writing skills of proper grammar, spelling, and organization in short assignments. This paper describes an active learning experience of general disciplinary skills and presents a model of how to write about music that concludes with an essay submission and peer review. My suggestions combine research on active learning strategies, the pedagogical method proposed by instructors in Decoding the Disciplines: Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking, and Calibrated Peer ReviewTM, a web-based peer review program.

Author Biography

Jennifer L. Hund, Purdue University

Jennifer L. Hund, Assistant Professor of Music at Purdue University, earned her BM in Piano Performance and Pedagogy at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, her MM in Musicology from Florida State University, and her PhD in Musicology at Indiana University-Bloomington, with her dissertation “The Proposta e Risposta Madrigal, Dialogue, Cultural Discourse, and the Issue of Imitatio” (2007). She has presented her research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, Renaissance Society of America, and College Music Society, and is actively creating educational materials for teaching music to the general student. Her most recent publication is Study Guide for A Concise History of Western Music, co-authored with J. Peter Burkholder (W. W. Norton, 2010). 

Published
2011-12-26
Section
Reports and Practices