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Title: Analysis of Purposes, Values and Ideas about how People Learn
Embedded in Arts based Education
Assignment Title: Analysis of Purposes, Values and Ideas about how People
Learn Embedded in Arts based Education
Course number: S300
Date of submission: 14 October 2015
Term, Year: Fall, 2015
Name: Peiwen Soh

In this essay, I will use the group learning exercise as a springboard

to discuss my purposes, values and ideas about how people learn both
from a perspective as a learner and teacher. I will first analysis my
experience planning and implementing a lesson as a teacher, then my
experience as a learner in Michaels lesson about poetry and finally
consider how these two experiences have challenged my ideas about how
I teach music and clarified what I think about learners.
At first, I planned a 45 minute lesson with two goals in mind. First
was to introduce the learners to a genre of music unique to Singapore,
xinyao, and second was express the ongoing conversation about our
identities musically. However, along the week, there was some tension in
the group due to differing communication styles and expectations, so I
decided to make more explicit a group building element in my lesson.
These goals are grounded by my belief that music making is accessible to
all and drives a natural impetus towards group bonding. As observed in
many cultures across the world, collaborative music making is an
incredible way of building social intimacy (Turino, 2008). It also allows for
a diverse range of ability within the group. Each learner, regardless of
prior musical training, can have an opportunity to participate meaningfully
by creating a part for themselves to play in the compositional process.
While conducting the lesson, I deliberately sought to minimise my control
by giving very open ended instructions because of my concern that too
much structure would minimise the learners agency and therefore
negatively affect their ability to be confident with their musical voices. In
this essay, I borrow Brennans definition of agency as the learners ability

to define and pursue learning goals and structure as manifested through

rules, roles and resources, both explicit and assumed (Brennan, 2013).
As I was conducting the lesson, I realised how the tension between
having a clear learning outcome (learners are aware of xinyao) and my
desire to relinquish control, resulted in my inability to follow the flow of
the learners thoughts. After priming them to be sensitive to their
emotional responses to the xinyao example I was going to play, I wanted
to lead the discussion through a thinking routine of hear-think-wonder to
talk about the genres historical background. However, because I was
worried about the potential rigidity of using this after the priming, I ended
up asking What does the music make you feel and what questions do you
have? While the learners responses were very rich and sensitive to how
the song relates to their personal experiences, it did not lead naturally
into a discussion of the background of the genre, a part of my lesson
objective. I then jumped in immediately when somebody asked a small
relevant question and talked about xinyaos background, resulting in a
disconnect between what the learners were mulling over at that moment
and the information I was trying to provide to fulfil my lesson objective.
Similarly, in the song writing session, when I first said Reflect on
our identities and use it to write a song together, some learners were
visibly uncomfortable and seemed very confused. When I gave some
perimeters, saying that The only limitation is that it has to be about us
and maybe we can start with writing the lyrics first, the tension
dissipated significantly and the learners started taking initiative to offer

the resonances they observed in our individual responses, written on the

whiteboard, to the initial prompt.
During the song writing process, I deliberately chose not to play the
guitar as I did not want the learners to feel that they had to follow my
musical lead. One learner however, picked it up and started picking a F
major chord fingerstyle, copying what was in the musical example we
listened to previously. From there, I improvised the first line of lyric and
slowly each person started taking turns make up the rest of the lines.
When we had finished setting the lyrics to music, the group tried to sing it
once through but realised that we had forgotten some parts of the melody.
At that moment, I decided to take control and brought them to where they
had forgotten the melody to practice those lines. I think that move
facilitated the music rehearsal experience and modelled what effective
music practice looks like to the learners. An interesting question that
arose for me was that if none of the learners had picked up the guitar,
would they have been less confident to sing without a supporting
harmonic instrument? Would my taking up musical leadership actually
facilitate the learners confidence in their musical expression?
With these questions hovering in my mind, we moved on to
Michaels lesson, where I learnt how he dealt with the issue of agency and
structure masterfully. He was confident in structuring our activities
through his direct instructions of the task expectation and willingness to
control the time we took on each activity. We spent about 20 minutes freewriting a poem around the theme of memory, using only sound and touch

descriptors. Then we played a wordsmith game, where we brainstormed

words to describe music and weather, and tried to incorporate them in our
poem. I enjoyed this very much because it made me feel like a poet in the
way I was starting to use words in ways I hadnt before. He also made this
learning outcome explicit in his instructions. We then spent the rest of the
time freewriting 64 words in prose about home, then writing them on
poster paper, cutting up them up and using all the words we had as a
group to create a collective poem. Being a learner in that setting, I did not
feel like my agency was compromised because the themes he had chosen
were themes that resonated with me. He also explicitly told us to not care
about our assumptions about poetry writing, I felt free to write my first
poem in any way. The wordsmith game could have felt stifling, having to
use certain words in my poem. However, because he primed it with saying
that is how poets think, it made me see it as a creative challenge rather
than restriction. Furthermore, because no one read that poem eventually,
I was free to take risks emotionally, expressing my innermost feelings, and
technically, combining words in ways that might not work.
Behind his execution of the lesson seemed to be the belief that
everyone can write a poem, and writing is a form of exploring our inner
lives. This was especially clear to me when we wrote the collective poem,
giving new meaning to words we had created previously. The words from
our free writing prose were colour coded and as a group, we stuck them
on another piece of poster paper in. In the debrief, Michael explained the
rationale behind colour coding the words- so that opportunities for
conversations might arise and people can share their lived experiences

through it. For me, by making this process of writing a collective poem so
visual and tactile, it was made more accessible. Writing that poem felt like
a game, where the goal was to use these limited words in the most
creative and meaningful way possible. There was an atmosphere of
welcomed expectation that we were all able to write creatively.
What struck me across my experiences as a teacher and learner was
how similar our attempts to model our craft was. As a teacher, I modelled
rehearsal strategies, by only practicing the parts that we were not familiar
with, rather than the too common instinct to start from beginning of the
piece. I made that explicit by pointing the lyrics and saying we should go
from where we are not as familiar. Michael modelled the craft of poetry in
the wordsmith game by getting us to use words in uncommon contexts.
Across all the other learning experiences, there was the same teacherlearner modelling. Laurel modelled the guided drawing as she too was
drawing with us and Miriam modelled candle making by making it along
with us. While I had known intrinsically this is something I do, I never
thought to articulate this as a value I hold as a teacher. Reflecting on my
past experience as a classroom teacher, there have been many occasions
where I missed opportunities to model the craft of music making because I
thought it would be irrelevant to the lesson outcome. If I truly hold the
belief that music making is accessible for all, then modelling how to make
music efficiently is crucial to my students success in learning.
Another question that was answered through reflecting on my
experiences as a teacher and learner was the relationship between

agency and structure. I previously assumed that any form of very specific
instructions that only allows one kind of output would be too rigid and
therefore impinge on the learners agency. However, in being the learner,
sometimes I responded to specific instructions better and did not feel that
my agency was curtailed because within those tasks was enough space
for me to express what I cared about. In fact, when the instructions were
specific, I was more likely to feel a sense of satisfaction. While this is
representative of my learning style, I think the take away, especially from
Michaels lesson, was how to craft instructions such that the learner feels
valued and free to work within these perimeters. For learners like me,
structure can be useful in terms of goal setting. However, the key
difference is to prime the instructions with qualifiers. For example, instead
of saying you have to use the guitar in your song, I could say you can
choose to use the guitar in your song if you want.
However, following the learners agenda can also be very effective,
especially when I want to make them feel in control of their learning. In
my lesson, we played musical games as warm ups to composing. I initially
planned for two, but it seemed like the learners were still not relaxed
enough to start composing. Together, we made up rules for a third game
together and played it for a few rounds. After the lesson, one learner
commented how doing that disarmed her fears about music making
because these games felt so silly and accessible. I think making up the
third game together made her feel in control of her own music making and
therefore engage at her own pace. Likewise, in the group composing,
while she did not suggest a specific tune, she was willing to engage and

sing along. If I had structured the session such that everyone has to
contribute one line of melody, it might have felt too imposing and unsafe
for her.
Through this group teaching exercise, I was able to notice salient
values that I had not articulated before. It has also challenged my
assumptions of what a learner centred lesson looks like, reminding me of
the importance of reading and discerning what works best for our
learners, and treading the balance between agency and structure through
the masterful use of instructions and careful planning of tasks.

References
Brennan, K. (2013). Best of both worlds: Issues of structure and agency in
computational
creation, in and out of schools (Doctoral Dissertation).
Turino, T. (2008). Music as social life: The politics of participation. Chicago:
University of
Chicago Press.