Shared notes on this session
Music performance is taught according to a pedagogical model that leans strongly on the tradition of apprenticeship and its attendant submission to authority. This influences interactions in the musicology classroom: students are rarely encouraged to think of themselves as having a valuable contribution to offer concerning the way they are taught. In contrast to this received pedagogical stance, genre theory (Bakhtin, Bawarshi) emphasizes the need for students to learn disciplinary discursive practices but to recognize these practices not as natural and given, but as constructed and contested. Critical and open pedagogies (Freire, Jhangiani) also emphasize student agency in the learning process. In DU’s graduate music bibliography course, these approaches help students to see themselves as information producers as well as information consumers. Students are given explicit pedagogical agency at two distinct points in the course sequence. At the end of the first quarter of the two-quarter course, Students prepare the final project, an annotated bibliography, not as a “disposable assignment” (Jhangiani), but as an opportunity to construct meaning to be shared with future students in CC-licensed online documents. In the second quarter of this course, after students have written and submitted an essay, peer tutors and faculty from the Writing Center visit the class to engage students in a structured reflection on disciplinary discursive practices in music, and the issues they have encountered in learning about them. This leads to the collaborative creation of a disciplinary guide, also posted online. With the help of Writing Center faculty and peer tutors, future generations of students collaboratively engage and refine this guide in a variety of ways. The writing guide, and the process used to create it, benefit not only the students in the course but also Writing Center peer tutors from other fields, who learn more about disciplinary genre expectations and apply this learning in their work with future students. The students and the tutors develop their disciplinary genre knowledge together.
