Courses in Development
MUS 1600 Human Dimensions of Music (Short Fiction version)
I was assigned to teach MUS 1600 in Summer 2023, but since I had reworked my curriculum for this course into the Freshman seminar DIS 1000 Music, Resilience, and Life Skills, I felt it would be better to develop a fresh approach. About the same time I got an email advertisement from a publishing company offering to create custom textbooks, and I had the idea to organize the course around short stories and novel chapters that I had enjoyed. While the anthology ultimately didn’t work out, I collected the literature in a PDF collection and prototyped the design in Summer 2024.
I used a modified close-reading approach and supplemented the fiction pieces with Elferen’s “Virtual Worlds” article, and the introduction to Turino’s Music as Social Life. There was an assignment due every day, with summative projects on Fridays. In spite of the inclusion of creative musical projects (generally on Tuesdays and Thursdays), I soon found the work unnecessarily writing-heavy, as though I were teaching an English class. Also, the “Musical Life Histories” I had scheduled for Mondays would have been a better fit for the Friday writing projects.
Listening to the final presentations, there seemed to be several expectations that I had not made clear. While several of the students did well, I especially appreciated the essays that defined he course themes in their own words (or at least, words other than mine), I would have liked to see more synthesis and more original ideas. I can address this by tightening up the prompt, providing a rubric, and (now that I know what I want) by tweaking the pedagogy and the supporting assignments.
As the students shared their observations, I found myself wondering if it would be worthwhile to explore why people write short fiction: what are their expectations on us as the readers? I would probably do well to provide some models of the kind of questions I expect students to bring from their reading—maybe not as comprehensive a plan as Van Doren and Adler, but enough to provide material for a substantive reading reflection and class discussion. It might even be interesting to group students into panels and have small discussions with them in front of the class. This wouldn’t work for everyone though (my UDL thinking is starting to take hold!). I’m also could have wrung more meaning from the ersatz “conflict” week by supplementing the fiction pieces with a chapter from Liliana Mason’s Uncivil Agreement and even explore conflict resolution in Davis McRaney’s How Minds Change… perhaps. It’s a pretty deep rabbit hole, but it might have made “A Mother” more fun… (oh, and next time don’t end on the ugliest story in the collection!).
So, for the next iteration, I’d like to build up the creative projects while reducing the writing projects and focusing them on synthesis and original ideas. To do this, I’ll need to spend more class time modelling and supporting question formulation. It’s always nice when I can do less and accomplish more!
…and of course, I’ll need clear goals and flexible means.
Soundscape for “The Music of Erich Zann” (1)
Soundscape for “The Music of Erich Zann (2)
Literature
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Ch. 1)
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (excerpt from Ch. 23)
I ended up supplemented this with the Woody Guthrie’s introduction to Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People.Laura Ingalls wilder, "Singing School" and "Barnum Walks" from These Happy Golden Years
Damon Runyon, "The Lily of St. Pierre"
Chaim Potok, "Moon" from Zebra and Other Stories
Willa Cather, "A Wagner Matinee" from The Troll Garden
Langston Hughes, "The Blues I'm Playing" from The Ways of White Folks
"James Joyce, “A Mother" from Dubliners
