Nancy Shankman: Education at NYU (3min)
What I like about the music education program at NYU is that it has the best of both worlds. Students here are required to take the same musical track as the performance majors. Therefore they study theory, they study music history, they study sight singing, they take private lessons and they perform in ensembles. That is crucial to both performers and people who are going to be educators. Then they also learn a tremendous amount about the theory of educators throughout many centuries. They deal with Howard Gardener and the theory of multiple intelligences, which is something that I feel very strongly about: that children don’t all learn in the same way. You have to find ways to address children who have different learning styles. So the children get the best of both.
I teach the hands on practical courses. For example, I created a course called “Creative Performance Opportunities in Music Education.” The premise of the course is that when a teacher goes into a school for the first time, the principal may say “Okay, it’s September, by December I need a performance. These are the students you have and you have to just create it.” The students in my class become the teachers. They become the actors, directors, musicians, producers, and set designers. They create a piece; whether it’s a musical review, or a group of ensemble pieces, or whatever, they create it. I am always very mindful of the fact that they need to sprinkle their text with diverse music. When I teach student teachers in a seminar, I always talk about the diversity of the population of students in New York City. NYU, very honestly, is not that diverse of a population. So it’s important that these students understand. When they go out and student teach, they see it every day in the schools that they’re student teaching in. I think that makes teaching so much more exciting.