Fostering Virtual Musicianship in the Musical Classroom: Teach Your Students How to Create Like Their Favourite YouTube Stars: Featuring Christopher Cayari
On Saturday, I had the chance to attend a workshop at the Don Wright Faculty of Music that featured Christopher Cayari; a professor at Purdue University who studies and educates students in the department of Music Education. Throughout the workshop, we learned various ways on how to engage a classroom of students through electronic resources, such as iPads and Chromebooks. The apps within the tablets we used engaged each of us to explore our creative side in a musical way. We also learned about the projects he has done in the past with his own students with these resources and studied the outcome of their projects and assignments.
Cayari mentioned that one of his research studies was focused on how making music videos foster a classroom community and foster music creation. He also mentioned that the way he got into his research was watching various ukulele videos on YouTube, becoming influenced through his own professor. We began to see how these YouTube videos allowed the ones being recorded to express themselves freely and musically in their own interpretations. One of Cayari’s projects that he assigned students was to create a music video. Without a clear and concise guideline to follow, Cayari seems to have an informal-type of teaching within his assignments. I find this to be interesting, considering that most teachers would give each student specific guidelines to follow. As we saw each student’s project, I felt that there was a certain uniqueness between everyone’s assignment, and that each student offered something different musically. I feel that by doing this, Cayari has developed a classroom that is supportive of each other’s ideas and creativity.
We spent most of the workshop exploring the different applications on the iPads. I felt that I was able to express my creative ideas to my group members through the various music applications, and each of us were supportive of each other’s thoughts. With Cayari facilitating the different projects in the workshop, I felt that we had a fun time listening to each other’s own music ideas and versions of different songs. Considering that these music programs were foreign to me, I enjoyed getting the chance to experiment with each application and the features they had.
In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed Cayari’s workshop and how it taught us the different methods of creating and sharing music through videos and music software. I felt that it gave me a sense of creativity and exploration into what I wanted to know about creating music. After attending this workshop, I gained a better sense of how to come across teaching this type of creation in the classroom, and I feel that I can utilize the things I have learned to teach a music class someday.