Multiple modalities come up for me in my life all the time. I am an auditory person. I am extremely good at remembering what I hear. Many times, when I encounter visual information that I need to remember, I say the information out loud. When I was a student in high school and college (when I took tests that required a great deal of memorization; I can say happily that grad school didn’t involve that sort of exam), I would read what I had to learn out loud AND I would write notes about it. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was engaging visual, audio, and kinesthetic modalities in my studying.
What I wonder about today is how music teacher education could benefit from a multiple modalities approach, but thinking of multiple modalities more broadly and differently. So in the case of music teacher education, multiple modalities could be:
visual
auditory
kinesthetic
and could be broadened to include multiple forms of learning interactions, like
reading about something
discussing it
observing it in action in a classroom
working hands-on with one or more students
reflecting on observations and field experiences
Specifically, I have been thinking quite a bit lately about how music teacher educators could do a better job at preparing our students to teach special needs students in K-12 settings. Generally speaking, music teachers do not feel well prepared to work with students with special needs. Perhaps taking a multimodal approach (in this broader sense) would be helpful.
At Boston Conservatory, we are working on ways to diversify our approach to preparing pre-service music teachers to work with special needs students. Besides regular coursework and the more typical teaching approaches, we include fieldwork components that involve observation and some hands-on work with real students. Our partnerships with the Kids Are People School (a private school in Boston with a high special needs population) and the Autism Higher Education Foundation (which has resulted in The Boston Conservatory Program for Students on the Autism Spectrum, where several Music Education students teach private instrument lessons to students with an ASD diagnosis) make it possible for many of our students to gain extended direct experience working with children with special needs.
I wonder if other areas of music teacher education would benefit from a multimodal approach (conceived broadly). It seems to me that they would. More ways to make the material and experiences meaningful can only benefit music teacher education. While the student teaching experience makes tremendous contributions in this regard, it is a capstone experience. These sorts of multimodal approaches should be interwoven throughout the music teacher preparation program.
