DML Download #3: Kids Have Lots of Interests -- So What?
When educators open themselves up to the general interests in popular culture of their students, they're opening the door to having their own vulnerabilities exposed. That's because popular culture is one of the few things in the classroom that educators can't predict or control (at least not to the level of some educators' liking). And that's because popular culture is a set of practices for use, not just interest. Of course students need to be "interested" in something to devote large amounts of time and dedication to it, but they don't need to be that interested in it to use it.
I'll draw from my own history. I derived great use from Warren G and Nate Dogg's "Regulate" when I was in 4th grade. It was in a personal canon of texts that taught me something about being a man, being angry, being vengeful, being cool. And Warren G did not precede my need to learn about these things (nor can I comfortably say that it didn't shape my sense of what my "needs" were at the time) -- Warren G, Metallica, the Offspring, and Snoop Dogg all occupied a similar sphere in my brain, which jumped between scenarios that mixed chivalry and romance with revenge and aggression.
I don't think that any of these pieces of music caused the aggression, nor do I think (in my case) they particularly amplified it. I could view my passions through rose-colored glasses and claim that this music inspired me to make my first ever media production -- a home video of me lip-synching to "Seek and Destroy" by Metallica in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, holding the only gun toy (a "laser gun" with multiple sound effects) my parents allowed me to own. Or I could be pessimistic and imagine what "better things" I could have done with my time.
Realistically, the hindsight answer seems more complicated: those experiences were part of an accumulation of experiences that had an ambiguous effect on my sense of identity. Who's to say that the sports video games I played didn't have a greater effect, despite my almost literal zero interest in televised sports? Or the Math Blasting, despite my low interest in math? Or Ninja Turtles, despite my low interest in martial arts or herpetology? Or using early DOS-based commands, despite it never providing a "gateway" to programming (nor did my high school research project, which was a computer program I developed with my dad, a computer programmer!)? Or playing cartoon theme songs on the piano?
After the fact, it feels like Warren G was particularly important. He's part of a general narrative of how my interests have been directed in my personal and professional sphere (for more on "Regulate," I wrote a comment here about its effect on me). But that's because hindsight's 20/20. What's more important, thinking back to the time I actually had interests in sports games, DOS, Ninja Turtles, etc., is what the actual learning process might have been. What did I learn when I was "interested" in something (or not interested in it), and what difference did it actually make? I say this knowing my own somewhat exceptional status through education, and I take up autobiography here to say that this stuff is pretty complicated even for seemingly obvious academic "success stories."
Making music has a connection to popular culture (what it is I "wanted" to play) and academic culture (classical training I received in piano). But it might be interesting to explore what impact my own interests in pop culture actually had on a specific learning process of playing piano and creating music. If the claim in Connected Learning is that we need to balance peer learning, interests, and academics, piano maps on in ways that reveal strengths and weaknesses of the model.
Here, generally speaking, I'll call the learning process "creating music." Important to note here that that doesn't have to be the process. The process could also be "reading music," "playing memorized songs on the piano," or even "improvising based on an idea," all of which are learned skills in piano practice. But to stick to the Connected Learning model, I'll assume that actual production of new music is important.
I still create music -- I've been writing songs for a children's cartoon project for four years. I rarely play classical piano anymore (my "playing memorized songs on the piano" skills have been dormant) but I do still more or less remember many of my favorite songs. Here are the steps I had to go through to learn how to play music with any meaningful competence (let's say between 5,000 and 8,000 hours of practice).
So what happened in my life that helped me actually learn to make music?
(1) Opportunity to play the piano. This is the first and in some ways most important factor, as I could have as easily been presented with a guitar, drums, or any other musical instrument. But my family happened to have an upright piano in the family room, so when my mind became curious about music at around age 3, there was something there for me to play.
This is one of the many strengths of finding in- and out-of-school places to put stuff (like computers, production equipment, and cool tools), especially for young people who don't otherwise have access to the stuff. It creates opportunities to try something at all. To paraphrase one of my favorite Onion articles, if you don't ever pick up a violin, you'll never know if you could have been a virtuoso.
(2) Continued opportunities to play the piano. If I had musical inclinations, I might have serendipitously found a piano -- at church, at the mall, in school -- that I could putter around on. Probably not at age 3, but maybe by age 5 or 6. Having a piano at home gave me two years on some of the competition, who may not have a piano at home (as I imagine is common in a post-Tin Pan Alley America).
Perhaps digital media itself is to the "digital media and learning" process as electric keyboards were to the piano-learning process. Casio and other keyboards made basic access far more tenable for just about anyone with a passing interest in piano. The same isn't true for other instruments -- but then one thing that makes drums a bit easier is the way that you can learn the basics of rhythm with household objects, even your own body, without an expensive drum set. I'd guess that learning on an actual piano is much different from learning on a keyboard for various reasons having to do with muscle memory, but maybe not. Maybe the same is true of programming -- Scratch is the electric keyboard to real programming language's piano? Maybe, maybe not -- if my goal was to make pop music I conceivably could have done much better for myself with an electric keyboard. (In reality I had both and made both "piano music" and "keyboard music," read: pop.)
(3) Supportive networks. If my parents didn't recognize my "ear" and talent for picking out simple tunes, or hadn't thought to connect that to the more rigorous process of learning how to play a piano, it would have been that much more difficult for me to explore my emerging interest in (what was then) melody. I tie my interest directly to Winnie the Pooh, the theme song of which was so catchy I had to figure it out for myself. (In an environment where I was not plopped down in front of a television to memorize jingles and theme songs, I may not have had the inclination to try out a melody on a piano.)
This is an implicit promise of Connected Learning, which treats most teachers as "facilitators" of some kind. Teachers are "adults" indistinguishable from parents, members of the community, informal mentors, and other guides. Of course facilitators, regardless of their credentials, are important to the process. Some pianists learn first from copying children that are older than they are.
(4) Good teachers. I began learning piano formally at age 4 with a family friend who ran her own local bakery. She taught piano "on the side" from her regular work, as do many piano teachers, and was able to give me a language to accompany my ear. As I learned more, my parents knew that I needed more advanced teachers as well. I found Mrs. Parsons, a piano teacher who used games and imagination as both frameworks for learning concepts and, when necessary, external motivation (we played a "soccer game" on paper, somewhat badge-like, where every time I played something correctly I moved toward the goal). Most of these lessons were about listening, which far (far) out-paced my ability to read music. I was only semi-literate in music-reading (and remain so to this day) but I can listen and mimic quite easily.
I continued piano with Dr. Wolfe-Ralph, who served as my teacher for about ten years until I gave up formal classical training. Dr. Wolfe-Ralph was concurrently getting her doctorate in music performance as I began taking lessons from her. By the time I left, she was a preeminent teacher in the area, which didn't lack for good classical piano teachers (I lived near Washington, D.C. and surrounding wealthy suburbs).
This is where the promise of Connected Learning falls short in my estimation. I had developed, probably by age 9, lots of expertise in listening -- in observing popular culture and figuring out how to translate it in a rudimentary way to music practice. But it would have been impossible for me to understand the basic mechanics and opportunities to improve in piano without a good teacher -- not just a good teacher, an expert. Whether this had to be a traditional expert (a teacher) or a more informal one (an idol or a mentor) isn't clear. Maybe just listening over and over again to favorite pianists would provide me sufficient context for understanding the possibilities of piano. Many musicians listen to recordings of their favorite artists obsessively -- Steve Martin famously taught himself banjo by copying licks played at half-speed on his record player.
To me, those are the four most crucial components of my learning to play the piano. I needed the initial opportunity to play, the support of both people and more opportunities to continue to play, and expert teachers to look up to and learn from.
Where do my interests come in? Well, I mentioned Winnie the Pooh before. Likewise, part of my abiding interest in piano came from popular songs and themes to television shows I liked. Being able to play the X-Men cartoon theme, or a Disney song, was important to something like my "real-world" interests, the ones that I could most easily translate to friends (to show off, usually).
But early in the process, piano also became its own interest. I was acutely aware of a unique (not popular) culture around classical piano -- manifested in competitions, recitals, and a whole world of professional classical recordings and concerts I never bothered to wrap my head around. Piano was a separate world. Pop offered an opportunity to bring it out of its "separate world." But let me be clear on this point: the "pop world" of piano-playing had very little to do with my success as a pianist. The "informal learning" and "peer teaching" I did -- teaching other kids how to play "Heart and Soul" or a particular theme song -- was in a whole different universe from what I'd learned through classical training. I had built whole new areas of knowledge, around chords, instrumentation, the construction of music in writing and production, that may have been impossible with only those informal contexts.
And it's important to remember that what most captivated peers (when they claimed to be interested in what I played) was not just the party tricks I drew from popular culture -- it was the promise of the classical realm, a kind of expertise that they really couldn't hope to achieve without a whole other trajectory of learning. And that trajectory, for better or worse, meant lots of practice and really good teachers.
The nature of technology matters here -- Steve Martin would likely continue to be mystified with a CD of his favorite banjo players, since he'd never be able to slow it down to note-by-note. When children learn to program videogames, they might have insight into how some simply-programmed Flash games work that could never be fully transferred to complicated 3-D narrative or first-person games. But the nature of teachers matters, too. Steve Martin needed good banjo players to learn from (and who knows if he actually had banjo lessons -- I've never checked), and students need good teachers and mentors to help them through the programming process.
Peerless teachers vs. Teacherless peers
I'm not sure what role social media and peer sharing really plays here. Children learn in proximity to their peers, yes, but education theory pioneer Vygotsky, who coined the "zone of proximal development" (in which there is a range of learning potential for a given group of students to learn in tandem with their peers, according to a particular cultural etc. context) never claimed that students only learn from one another. In fact he was quite specific -- he claimed that students learn better together in atmospheres with higher expectations than the students could naturally choose for themselves. That is, the "zone of proximal development" doesn't just tell us that "kids learn from each other," but that they learn from each other in an environment where all children are asked to reach beyond their current abilities. And they're not "asked" by just anyone -- they're asked by an authority of some kind.
I had a few peer experiences in piano. I went to summer music camps and participated in duets and quartets and recitals with other students. Other pianists connect to community interests in church or elsewhere. And certainly that sense of an audience, and of a social world, was important to developing skill. But that's a very small piece of the story.
More important, I think, for the person who plays piano in church (say) is not the interest that person has in either piano or church, but the opportunities to play repeatedly, to learn to read music, through practice, much of which can be mind-numbingly dull. My music teacher suggested early in my learning that I start playing hymns for a church somewhere, because it would force me to regularly practice sight-reading in a context that had a social purpose beyond whatever interest I had in sight-reading (which was none). In fact, my teacher was telling me, specifically, to give up any thought that interest was necessarily going to help me learn to sight-read -- her reasoning was that I didn't seem to have any interest in sight-reading, so I needed instead an environment where my interest was compulsory.
That's the thing about learning -- sometimes learning is self-directed and based on our interests, and sometimes it's not. Nothing could get me to learn to sight read when I was a kid. The only thing that came close was popular culture -- wanting to learn to read music to play songs from things like jazz fake books and arrangements of popular songs. But those were fleeting interests. What was more effective (far, far more effective!) was being told, explicitly, that I had to learn a piece by March because I would be expected to perform it. I could have no interest in the song whatsoever -- indeed, I've played many songs that I've come to loathe! -- and still learn to read and play the damn thing.
And we can't forget that sometimes kids have to "learn the damn thing." Maybe Mavis Beacon made my typing easier, or maybe there was something about being able to practice piano from age 4 that was related to my manual dexterity (probably), or maybe just having a keyboard in the house and using it for whatever reason was sufficient. But I also had to learn the damn thing. I was lucky that my goofing around practice at typing put me well ahead of my peers in typing at an early age, but I also recognize that my experience, at the time, was not the norm.
I have a great general interest in popular culture media, and I do want to apply it to a social world. I make mash-ups, I write songs, I do lots of social stuff based on my interests. But it's also good that I had to learn all of the academic classical stuff that came along with learning piano -- it improved my ability to write and read music, and to understand how music worked. Which interests were actually important, and how do those interests actually apply to an audience, even if it's a participatory audience of peers? Did I need popular culture interests to play piano, or did the traditional opportunities for learning offer the structure I needed? Would I have been better off if I had religious parents who insisted I play hymns at church?
We can't really know these things until we can do the post-mortem on the learning process -- that means we need benchmarks for competence, rubrics to measure competence, and an honest understanding of the value of what is learned. Those aren't goals that peers of students can necessarily set on their own, because they haven't yet experienced the world in which their interests might actually matter. They have much to learn from one another, but you can't set standards higher than your existing understanding of the world.
One problem teachers have is with connecting to kids' understanding of the world, as when a reference to pop culture perplexes a teacher in the middle of a lesson. But one problem students (and sometimes teachers, too) have is negotiating between their initial understanding and another's new understanding, and knowing when both are compatible (honoring multiple interpretations or ways of doing something) or knowing when one understanding has to make way for a different one. (In my piano experience, the way I self-taught pieces with improper finger movement made it literally impossible for me to play harder pieces. I had to learn the "right way" if I wanted to do harder work.) But those different frameworks have to come from somewhere (usually they have to come from teachers) and they also have to motivate students to change what they already think and believe -- and that may involve changing interests, too. Part of the learning process means being willing to give up notions that are incompatible with new knowledge, and knowing how to defend your existing knowledge against new ideas when they are compatible but are being discouraged. (I was "wrong" to play piano a certain self-taught way, but I wouldn't necessarily be "wrong" in thinking a Bach piece was boring, say, or that I could play it twice the suggested speed, a la Glenn Gould.)
