Music - Imagination: A Fantastic Match for the Construction of Knowledge in the Classroom
Mónica García Pelayo, Mexico
Mónica García Pelayo holds a bachelor's degree in Communication Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, and has completed her master's studies in the Social Psychology of Groups and Institutions there. She is a tenured professor at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional in Mexico City. Her area of interest is imagination and education.
Menu
Introduction
Background
Examples
A Fundamental Form of Communication
Intensifier across the Curriculum
Conclusions: Significant learning
References
This paper is a reflection on the need for recognition of the transcendence imagination has in building new knowledge, particularly when twined with music.
The central role imagination plays in human beings must always be kept at the forefront, above all in the educational process.
Imagination is an essential characteristic of humankind, the faculty from which we have gained the power to transform our world, creating endless institutions, objects, and everything else embraced by the concept "culture."
Imagination is the capacity to create, represent, articulate, transform. It has the peculiarity of being indeterminate, that is, it does not fit into an established, precise form. It is inexhaustible and spontaneous. It is the manifestation of that seed of freedom we humans have harvested in such diverse forms: symbolism, representation, articulation, creation, transformation, and so forth.
It is the faculty that must be utilized deliberately for knowledge to be constructed. Yet the classroom usually directs itself exclusively toward the rational, working with logic and the conceptual while excluding emotion and feeling.
Music is a language that permits an intensification of feelings and emotions, evoking memories and experiences, a step indispensable to building new understanding. It is unconscionable to continue to use rational learning, exclusively centered on obtaining supposedly "objective" results that exclude the learners themselves from imagining, an act that involves affect and emotion. Imagination is irreplaceable in making knowledge enjoyable and spicy which, enriched and advanced through playful, suitable music, transforms the learning process into an unforgettable, pleasant experience.
Of teachers in service and in training I regularly ask this: Does the possibility even exist to construct meaning in the absence of emotion and feeling? Can a piece of knowledge really be conquered without incorporating some type of affect and emotion? Myself, I start from the premise that sustains that learning, or the construction of knowledge, requires the deliberate inclusion of imagination accompanied by the incorporation of feeling and emotion, in addition to the logical-rational thought, as indispensable conditions for an active learner in the meaningful connection of previous with new knowledge.
This premise therefore proposes linking music to language as an educational strategy to foster the use of imagination in the classroom. While it may be true that imagination does not require the presence of music in its deployment or presence, it is true that music is a sound expression that enables the intensification of feelings and emotions which hearers recreate internally upon use of the imaginatory faculty.
As Lévi-Strauss pointed out in 1970, "music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable." The change the music produces in hearers, which inspires them to produce a series of singular representations, is inexpressible in words. The emotional impact music generates in the hearer may be perceived externally in modifications to the heartbeat, manifestations of hot chills, reflexes in involuntary pupillary dilations, and other external symptoms. A subject is able to relate feelings to another who may gain a general comprehension of those feelings, yet the specific, concrete experience is impossible to transmit precisely because it is subjective.
An Example from Teaching Language Arts
For example, the teaching of adjectives has been problematic. Using music has been an effective, ideal medium to work with imagination. Experiences in which the activity consists of the teacher presenting the students with fragments of different styles of music, so that the students generate a series of representations based on the listening and chooses and adjective to characterize each type of music. Students classify music as "horrifying", "dynamic", "sad", "happy", and so forth. They thus create their own representations of the adjective's meaning, using their imaginative ability, which has been nurtured by employing music.
What happens in this means of constructing learning is that the student transforms the content upon generation of a personal representation, feeling the music and combining a logical-rational knowledge with their imaginatory faculty in which their lives, experiences, and subjective representations will leave a deep mark, a creation of specific meanings indispensable to the construction of knowledge.
Music's unique strength to generate in the listener a specific sensation or mood intensification is utilized in the educational experience to generate an active process of knowledge construction by deliberately incorporating the person's representations and life experience to create a meaning that meshes rational and affective. Therefore, music's impact is significant, so that learners may become a truly active subject in the construction of knowledge. This necessarily implies that the learner incorporate not only knowledge from the logical-rational domain, but also the deliberate application of the ability to imagine to generate a personal representation derived from listening to a type of music that the individual student has to characterize through choice of adjective.
Knowledge derived solely from rational exercise is "pseudo-knowledge" that has not transcended. Procedures that leave aside the affective realm with its consequent imaginative capacity and the creation of personal representations will be easily forgotten. It has not holistically brought the learner into that double incorporation of logical-rational and imaginative-affective.
The paring of imagination and music allows for exploration of one's own emotions, memories, and feelings for the construction of learning. Students can use music, freely and spontaneously, to deploy their imagination and create meanings that include affect and emotions, where previous knowledge interacts with the new adding those representations coloured with affect.
Playful use of music in the educational process favours engagement of imagination and allows the student to enjoy the process of constructing knowledge, easing student reflection and recognition of the importance the faculty to imagine has in the construction of knowledge and transformation of the world. Explicit employment of imagination, accompanied by pertinent use of music, can instil a love of knowledge because it transforms it from boring, monotonous, and confusing, into something derived from one's own activity and from knowing oneself.
The transcendence or relevance of this personal process of perception and interpretation of music and sound in general harkens back to the first form of interaction a newborn has with the world, the act of communication with its mother or maternal figure via sound and touch. This is how these two means of communication are the earliest forms through which a baby establishes symbolic interchanges which permit it to socialize and constitute itself as a social being. From this we may conclude that the child's link, as is the learning adult's, is with sound, a strong tie of representation of symbolic meanings pregnant with affect. This universe of unexplored representations and feelings can be tapped to enrich the creation of significance. Intentional, planned, playful use of music allows tapping of this human faculty to generate a series of subjective representations and associations in the construction of knowledge.
Usually music is only brought into school for artistic or recreational activities, as if daily learning could not be enriched by including music as a catalyst for the imagination in the construction of knowledge.
As Langer so fittingly said in 1967, music puts a person in contact not only with emotions already lived, but can also provoke "emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before."
Storr pointed up another particularity of music, the incomparable context it sets for mnemonics, aiding us to link language to content, for instance in recalling the words of songs with much greater precision than is possible in prose.
Music offers a playful strategy for educational activities, a platform for the design of dynamic series of materials that, due to its unique treatment of rhythm and rhyme, favour memorization processes. An example of this is when we take the melody of a well-known song as the basis for the creation of an original song on any topic. Experiences with this technique have been quite effective in Mathematics, where children, organized into groups to enrich and complement their creative faculty, are given the task of imagining and creating an original song based on a popular song of their own choosing, with the objective of learning the eights table (or another difficult number).
Likewise, the pairing of imagination to music has been fundamental in Geography, with activities that consist of making a song on a given topic. For instance, children use their imaginatory faculty to invent a song about the rivers in the Western Hemisphere and, in the process of research required for their song to match rhythm and rhyme, transform the students themselves; they are transformed through including the contents actively, because they used their imagination to create a playful-educational material in which they use the properties of sound to accentuate feelings and emotion, simultaneous with improving memorization. The key role imagination plays is evidenced when students invent a material that expresses their being, one that concretizes or personalizes the imagination.
Another experience derived from the imagination-music pair was the task of typifying a house and telling an original story about it. College students video recorded a house with an architecture quite distinct from those in our latitude, one that is pitched in two opposing angles, the kind that is so classical to horror movies that connote a certain mystery. While images of houses were the common element the various working groups worked on, the way each used different types of music and certain sound effects was the deciding factor in creating distinct stories. One of the teams made a nostalgic house filled with memories. Another created a happy one, very dynamic, charged with optimism. An eerie atmosphere filled a third, evil house permeated with an intense sense of being followed and in danger. The great diversity in the depictions and narratives concerning a single object was impressed the whole class because they were able to appreciate the creative ability of affect in building understanding, brought out through imagination and different types of music.
Imagination and its consequent creative activity are not reserved to artists and geniuses. They are characteristics or elements common to all humans, elements to be explicitly exploited in class to convert the learning process into a playful process of knowledge acquisition and comprehension of the world, a process that implicitly acknowledges the potential imagination has for every individual.
The preceding presentation argues that knowledge is not neutral, the product of mechanical processes that capture facts about the world. Rather, to profoundly, wholly, truly comprehend significantly, incorporation of the imagination is indispensable and its consequent affect into the learning process. Thanks to our imagination, we human beings are in constant construction of meaning. Most of the time we are not aware of its importance, but deliberate use of our innate imaginatory faculty is requisite to constructing meaningful learning, and appropriate use of music can foster deployment of this powerful ability.
Conventional wisdom say that music sooths the savage beast, yet Storr and other music specialists indicate how it likewise is capable of producing its opposite: stimulating and intensifying feelings. Further, because its sound is not constituted on words, its evocative and imaginative power is unlimited.
Considering music's potential as intensifier of emotion, augmenter of passion, and inspirer of imagination, I hold that education's first priority is to move beyond relegating music exclusively to artistic and recreational activities. We must re-found our principles on the premise that, beyond any individual student's or teacher's musical talents, all human beings are capable of enjoying music and of creating, upon contact with it and aid from imagination, numerous representations, sensations, and situations.
Alvin (1967) explained that psychological responses to a musical experience depend on the hearer's or executer's capacity to communicate or identify with it, (which does not necessarily depend on its quality or excellence of execution). Fantasy, associations, or self-expression found in music come from within, from what a person carries. Thus music provides a way to explore, discover, and increase representations, memories, and feelings that are unique, singular, and of enormous potential significance.
Finally, the vigorous defence of student's rights is undeniable in the process of building knowledge, where their imagination is an essential element that may be stimulated through the deliberate use of music. Music is a potential teaching resource that can be a protagonist in the transformation of education into a pleasant, playful learning process.
Alvin, Juliette. (1997) Musicoterapia, Barcelona: Paidós.
Langer, Susanne. Sentimiento y Forma. (1967) Una teoría del arte desarrollada a partir de una Nueva clave de la filosofía, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1996) Mitológicas, Vol. I, Lo crudo y lo cocido, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Storr, Anthony. (2002) La música y la mente: El fenómeno auditivo y el porqué de las pasiones. Barcelona: Paidós.
Please check the Teaching through Art and Music course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the CLIL - Teaching Other Subject Through English course at Pilgrims website.
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