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Claudia Edwards
Professor Stark
ENC 2135
October 31, 2016
Multimodal Project Proposal
In urban communities stricken by generational poverty, drugs and crime, it is difficult to
see hope for social change. The many issues involved represent an unbroken cycle: children are
raised in communities with few opportunities for cultivating excellence in their education, and
consequently their own children suffer the same fate. However, recent studies have shown that
the incorporation of music programs into the lives of children in impoverished communities has
produced significant musical- and non-musical benefits. Increased social skills such as
leadership, citizenship, collaboration and confidence social skills, responsibility, collaboration,
competence and cognitive/emotional development are only a few of these effects. As a Music
Education major, I want to present a potent argument on why music is crucial to developing
these qualities in children living in impoverished communities.
The projected audience of my argument will be musicians currently involved in the
traditional path of music educators: teaching elementary, middle school and high school music
programs. Through this project, I want to convince this community that music educators have the
power to participate in bringing children out of the cycle of poverty by teaching them life skills
through music.
For this project, I want to build an informational website (using Wix) persuading my
audience of the importance of extending their talents to impoverished communities. This website
will contain graphics, written text, a video/picture collage and links to other websites that support

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the mission of my project. The major difficulties I will have with this proposed project include
establishing my ethos as a composer, creating a video and ensuring that the website is accessible
to my implied audience.
As a composer, I bring a decent amount of credibility through my status as a Music
Education student at FSU, studying with some of the greatest music educators in the nation;
however, for the implied audience, I will need to demonstrate my credibility beyond this end. I
will have to draw in credible outside sources in order to support my argument, including possibly
the witnesses of other music educators. To create the video for this project, I plan to consult
others (classmates, family members, etc.) on the best way to present my video. To ensure that the
website is viewed by my implied audience, I will need to promote it through social media and by
directly contacting music educators; by asking others to spread the word about my project, I can
extend my work to wider audiences and spread my message.
To research this project, I plan to spend time consulting scholarly papers through the FSU
Library databases, conducting my own research through organizations such as El Sistema and
possibly conducting interviews with members of the FSU College of Music faculty. This will
account roughly for the two days of my process. Once the information is compiled, I will begin
constructing a prototype of my project.
Building a website will take me a significant amount of time to create, so I will have to
plan my work carefully. The homepage of the site will include a brief, thought-provoking
introduction answering the following questions: What is the issue Im dealing with? Who are the
people involved? What am I proposing as a solution?
The second tab will include a video/picture collage with music and text; this will be a
pathos-centric section. I will provide an accompanying explanation of the video and possibly a

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witness or an interview to supplement the images. Music educators are already integrally
involved in the education of children; I will be presenting a unique form of music education, a
form that may lead teachers to very undesirable locations in order to bring music to wider
audiences and students. Therefore, it is pertinent that I draw a link between children, music and
quality of life in order to successfully draw my audience into he argument emotionally.
My third tab will focus on the logos of the project, including a summary of studies and
previously conducted experiments. This will be the platform for my research findings. Music
educators are constantly witness to how music can change individual lives; I want to show them
how music can change entire communities by working from the individual to the family, from
the family to the neighborhood, and from the neighborhood to the larger community. Many
studies have been conducted in impoverished/low socioeconomic areas to yield results
supporting my argument, which I will use these sources to support my work.
The fourth tab of my project will present information and plans for how this issue can be
approached and how music educators can take action today. Many programs worldwidesuch as
El Sistema and Sistema Globalhave already been established to tackle music education in
some of the most impoverished nations; others have been established on a more local basis by
individual music teachers seeking to improve one community at a time. This tab will contain
links to such organizations, accompanied by descriptions of their missions.
The research and construction of this project will be hefty; however, with proper
planning, I should be able to tackle it effectively. It will take roughly a week to compose the
prototype of my website, and another two weeks to expand and complete the project. By setting
aside 45 minutes to an hour at the beginning of each day to research and work through each tab

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of the website, I should be able to complete the prototype in less than a week and the remaining
work over the following two weeks.