Nancy Shankman: Curriculum Development (3 min)
What we did was we decided that if we just came up with another document that teachers would just say “ugh another one” and stick it up on a shelf somewhere because we know how busy music teachers are so we decided to frame this document around the repertoire. In other words, everybody deals with repertoire. So we based it upon the national standards and the state standards and we used five strands: music making or arts making; literacy in music; making connections, which is a crucial one; community and cultural resources; careers in music. The idea of this document is [that] whenever you’re teaching a piece of music to just thread it through those five strands at some point throughout the three months that you’re working on a piece of music. You’re going to make connections, you’re going to teach literacy, you’re going to teach them how to read music, you’re going to talk about dynamics, you’re going to… I always give the example if you’re doing a “Halleluiah Chorus” with your students there must be, in December, a hundred performances of the “Halleluiah Chorus” in New York City. If you don’t take your students to hear a concert, yours really lacks because you’re not framing that piece of music in the context in which it was written. And if you don’t talk about the composer and you’re teaching the “1812 Overture” and you don’t talk about what was going on in 1812 and why the composer wrote this, the performance is going to suffer. The idea of doing this framing, one of the students I taught said, “It’s like taking a naked song or piece of music and dressing it, and wrapping it up.” For example, I did some workshops, my husband did them also in Monterrey, NYU centers to Monterrey, Mexico to teach music teachers, and I taught “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” They sang it, some of them were very good musicians, with no soul. I said, what’s going on, then I realized that no one there knows what a spiritual is. They never sang a spiritual; they don’t have a frame of reference for that. So I took some real quality time to talk about it and to talk about why the slaves looked forward to the afterlife because it had to be better than what they were doing. Well, the end result being that when they sang it again, it was a different piece of music. That’s the object of this document. What we did was we created benchmarks at the end of grades 2, 5, 8, and 12 in each one of these strands. So for example, in “making music,” by the end of grade 12 for a student who studies choral music these are the things she should be able to do: breathing techniques, tone quality, pitch recognition, literacy, and all these things. So we have benchmarks throughout for each strand of what students should be able to know and do by the end of the 12th grade because this is a K-12 document.