I think that this was my favourite guest lecture from this class. Ruth Wright is a very well spoken and easy going woman. She really knows how to keep the attention of a room and how to plan out her time. I also think that this was my favourite guest lecture because I always find it interesting to see how other countries are going about education, or just how other countries organize themselves in general. I admire the initiative Ruth has for piloting a program herself in a country that she wasn't born in.
I especially agreed with the six defining factors of the Musical Futures; entitlement, relevance, empowerment, personalization, aural and sustainability. These are things that I think should be included in all education programs, not just music education. In fact, I feel like these things people should experience on a daily level with the things they are passionate about. Like Ruth said, it's hard to say definitive answers so early in the Canadian version of the program. However, the findings from the UK version, which is now in more than 2000 schools, reports that is doing wonders. I mean, doesn't every teacher want to see lower levels of absenteeism, increased confidence in students and increased engagement. My favourite part of the entire presentation was the part Ruth talked about our right to be musical as being a basic human right. She referenced that "music is encoded in the human genome". That our bodies where capable of creating music to each other before they were capable to speaking to each other. From this point on music has constantly changed. I think its a given that what music we integrate into learning should change as well. I always thought cirriculums that did this were so progressive. Once Ruth mentioned that although we had brought in new versions of music we kept the same pedagogical approaches my eyes were opened, that's why the band arrangement of pop songs, or analysing a rock song never brought in new music students. I think the education systems ability to add in newer music shows that we don't see children as musical blank pages. We know that they have favourite musical genres and we try to appeal to that. I really enjoyed the time we had to try out what Ruth was talking about. When we split up into groups and had free reign about how we learned the instruments. I think it probably wet down a little differently than it would in an actual Musical Futures classroom because most of us already know how to play guitar, drums or bass. My group decided to do a rendition of I Want To Hold Your Hand by The Beatles completely done on xylophones. It may be biased to say but I think that our was the best. Usually I don't enjoy doing spontaneous group activities but, I don't know, I really enjoyed it this time.
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