This past week, I started a long-term teaching position for Music and IAPS (Introduction to Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology). Admittedly, I do not have a Humanities background and it has been a challenging week to pick up where the last teacher left off. At first, I kept thinking that Music and Humanities could not be more different from each other. By the end of the week, I started to realize that I had been looking at the situation the wrong way. The two subjects have more in common than I realized, nor did I have to be limited to the approaches that the previous teacher chose to take.
Through the reflections from my first week in this position, I have been considering the relationship between Music and non-Music subjects. One of my goals as an Arts educator is to encourage others to find effective strategies to implement Music (and The Arts) into their instructional approaches. Studying music can enhance memory, affect cognitive development, improve reading skills, assist with phonological processing and encourage the usage of critical thinking skills (Sala and Gobet, 2020, p.2). These are applicable skills that are beneficial to a child’s development and are transferable to all subjects and everyday life.
As mentioned in my introductory post, I have always been interested in researching the connections between Music and Literacy. Therefore, my inquiry question is:
How does Music education promote critical thinking and the development of problem-solving skills in Literacy?
References
Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7s8wr
Kingston, April 2021
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