comprehensive musicianship through performance Soul-Knowing
Affective Outcomes and CMP Margaret Jenks, CMP Committee Member
No sooner do I type “Body, Mi-” into Google search and hundreds of day spas, books, holistic healers and promises of enlightenment pop up. “Body, Mind and Soul” is clearly an important distinction in our culture. In fact, attempts to divide humans into separate dimensions – dif- ferent ways of experiencing the world, separate kinds of knowing – date back to the earliest written philosophy. There is not one simple way of “knowing.”
The human experience is deeper and vastly more complex than can be explained when humans are thought of only as one- dimensional processors. This is important to remember in an age when standardized testing has arguably had a disproportionate influence in emphasizing only knowing that which can be easily measured.
Of course, it is not only music educators that find the current testing environment
suffocating; teachers of every subject feel the conflict between best practices (and common sense in the classroom) and the political reality of high stakes testing and funding. However, it is in music education where there is an opportunity for a visible and public demonstration of what learning beyond test numbers can look like. Now more than ever music educators must take on the responsibility of educating the body, mind and soul of our students.
First let’s clarify what we mean by “body, mind and soul.” It’s not hard to make a distinction between what students can demonstrate or do (“body-knowing”) and what they understand cognitively (“mind- knowing”) but what is teaching to the “soul” and how do we know whether or not we are doing it?
The word soul has all kinds of spiritual and religious connotations, but a more secular
definition might be “a person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity.”
Our sense of self, how we interact with others and the world, how we analyze and respond to our emotions, and how we grow in understanding of justice and morality – these are all part of “soul-knowing.” If we want a society that is better able to rea- son, show compassion, understand ideas from various perspectives and engage in respectful dialogue that isn’t just raw emotional responses, we certainly need to value this kind of soul knowing in our educational system.
That doesn’t mean that we need some kind of new test – there are other ways to value and uphold something without testing it. But we do need to consider our commit- ment to it and how intentional we are in addressing it. If we think that teaching to the “whole student” (including their soul)
58
September 2013
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72