Multiple perspectives

“It is a Wednesday evening and our entire seventh grade (year six) teaching staff has been sitting around a table for four hours, deliberating what it is we wish students to understand about revolutions. Are the richest explorations to be found in questions of why people revolt? Or perhaps it is a personal matter about how we each change our minds? We argue passionately. … We push, listen, refuse to budge, and finally agree. In the end, we decide for these next three months we will ground our curriculum in the question of how big changes are made, and in particular how and why ideas spread. … We will address it in a myriad of ways, from an exploration of the role of print media leading up to the American Revolutionary War to the role of blues songs in developing radical consciousness in black Americans – but we will all anchor to it, class by class, month by month. This whole-school commitment to a comprehensive kind of interdisciplinarity, where all courses in each grade bind themselves to a very limited number of guiding questions at any given time, often surprises visitors to our school…”¹

So begins a description by Eric Shieh of a cross-curricular project in a New York secondary school. The school is one of a group called Expeditionary Learning Schools² which seek to offer a more integrated, relevant and practical context for learning. Cross-curricular approaches are not new, but our National Curriculum in England has tended to compartmentalise teaching and learning into separate subjects, to a greater extent than is the case in many other countries. Subject Associations, including the National Association of Music Educators (NAME), have collaborated on a number of projects, such as the Primary Subjects folders³, which explored common themes across all the National Curriculum  subjects. NAME has also produced a bulletin, ‘Music across the Curriculum’⁴, which looks at the benefits of cross-curricular learning and outlines some models for including music as part of an overall strategy. The bulletin quotes Jonathan Barnes⁵: “Our experience of the world is cross-curricular. Everything which surrounds us in the physical world can be seen and understood from multiple perspectives.”

^{As a music educator, the commitment to big ideas excites.}

For the New York school described above, the starting point for all education lies in a “commitment to what we call big ideas” – further described as “a commitment to schooling as something anchored to the world and to our lives, athwart an educational landscape that seems to have forgotten both”. Big ideas, says Shieh, demand that students participate in interdisciplinary study, and there are benefits for teachers too: “As a music educator, the commitment to big ideas excites. It activates my personal commitments as an educator and human being, and allows me to realize my craft in a way that is not reduced to the narrow teaching of performance skill.”

The main justification, however, must be in the way in which such approaches can engage all students effectively. Shieh describes the “palpable excitement from students who are eager for what promises to be an epic project” with the result that “by the end of the three months, seventh-grade students… have run their own media campaign to advocate for alternative engine designs for New York City taxis, and… have done this in partnership with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission.” In conclusion, Shieh suggests that “The push to the interdisciplinary is the push to teach the world first, and then to ask music’s place second. It is to recover the responsibility of education to educate for citizenship … and trust that there is a place for music”.

In this country, it is not uncommon to find examples of practice where links are created between arts subjects, or between music and one other non-arts curriculum subject. The project above exemplifies something that is perhaps a little harder to achieve – how educational strategies and curriculum models can identify, recognize and validate the fundamental contribution of music (and the arts) to our lives.

Chris Harrison is Managing Editor of NAME Publications