This project describes one music department’s experience with efforts to increase preservice music teachers’ access to and mastery of music technology skills. We believe that the limitations we face for budget, equipment, and time with students are common to many others. While our specific curriculum is designed to fit our institutional context, we hope that it provides a philosophical approach to technology skills training that can be adapted and implemented in a variety of situations. The curriculum that we are developing demonstrates that technology training can be incorporated without major curricular change. We anticipate that many of these ideas will sound familiar to you, precisely because they are: you are already using them or have presented them at conferences and in journals.

During the 1997-98 school year, our university prepared to change from a quarter system to semesters, necessitating revision of the entire music curriculum. This provided an opportunity to consider new approaches to address students’ need for experiences with technology. Our solution was limited by minimal financial resources for software and equipment, a legislative mandate that no undergraduate degree programs require more than 128 semester credits of course work, and increased state licensure requirements based on competencies similar to the National Standards for Arts Education. Under these circumstances we could not simply add a requirement for a separate technology course in a well-equipped computer lab. In the process of discussing the skills our students need and how most effectively to teach those skills, we discovered that several of us were already incorporating technology skills in our courses … albeit in a haphazard way. The purpose of this on-going project is to make the teaching of technology skills more sequential and intentional throughout our curriculum.

We believe that technology skills, like other musical skills, must be developed sequentially over time, providing sufficient, consistent, hands-on practice to allow students to develop both the skills and a comfort level conducive to their creative use. More important, we are philosophically committed to the idea that technology should not be taught as a separate course; instead, its use as a normal tool for learning should be modeled by faculty in a variety of courses. For example, although our graduates are not formally taught to use a CD player or an overhead projector for instruction, they learn implicitly that these are tools teachers use. We intend to model the use of computer technology as a similarly normal tool for music teaching and learning. It is our goal that the preservice teachers will not simply teach as they were taught in their pre-college years, but will experience a different model for teaching and learning using music technology in a normal and well-integrated way.

This approach relieves pressure to pack all conceivable technology training into a single course, and provides students with the time necessary to process and assimilate technological information. Perhaps most important, the technology activities that help students achieve college level competencies create an experiential process for simultaneously learning skills in technology, music theory, and music pedagogy. In addition, this integrated approach demonstrates to students the purpose and interconnectedness of seemingly disparate course work in music theory and music education.

This is an action research project involving faculty collaboration and technology integration in several core courses in the music teacher education program. Currently, the project involves various team-teaching combinations among two music theory faculty, Scott Miller and Melissa Krause, and two music education faculty, Marg Schmidt and Marcelyn Smale. During the 1997-98 school year, we experimented with changes in the Music Theory, Ear Training, and Introduction to Music Education courses. Scott developed and piloted a new segment for the first semester of Music Theory, "Introduction to Music Technology." The objectives for this component of the Theory course include developing basic skills with Macintosh operating systems; the internet and World Wide Web; MIDI theory, applications, networking, and sequencing; a music notation application; and some applications for computer-assisted instruction. To complement this component of the Theory course, Melissa and Marcelyn team-taught Ear Training twice a week for the entire year, including computer-assisted instruction, sightsinging, conducting, and movement & speech activities derived from Dalcroze, Orff, and Kodály principles. Marg and Marcelyn incorporated an email discussion group in the course "Introduction to Music Education." In the Elementary and Secondary Methods courses, they assigned students to use notation software (Finale) to create an arrangement for a small junior high vocal or instrumental ensemble and to use Web resources for information about job searches and materials for state and national K-12 music standards and assessments.

These instructional changes proved so successful that we are now incorporating more advanced skills into the other three semesters of Music Theory. We are also developing assessments that will allow us to evaluate both the students’ skills and the effectiveness of our instruction. These include formal performance-based assessments, questionnaires to assess students’ attitudes about their own learning, and informal observations of students’ work in other classes. We hope that, as our entering freshmen develop more technology competence, we can include more advanced skills in the Music Education courses as well, focusing less on learning the technology skills themselves and more on teaching methods and applications. Soon we hope to begin requiring all our students keep an electronic portfolio of their work in all their Music Theory and Ear Training and Music Education courses. Our long-range goal is to have all our students maintain an electronic portfolio, including audio and video recordings of their juries and recital performances, videos of their student teaching, and samples of their written work and other course assignments.

We are excited by what we are experiencing as outcomes of our work. While we lack quantitative evidence to support these observations, we find the anecdotal evidence encouraging. We do know that our attempts to integrate technology in the Music Theory and Ear Training curriculum have made for more efficient teaching and learning; we now cover in three semesters of Theory what used to take four, leaving the fourth semester course for application of basic theory skills to musical form and analysis. As this year’s students progress through the curriculum, we look forward to being able to assume that students in upper level courses have certain technological and musical skills in place and to building on those skills.

Learning theories suggest that we may be providing other benefits for our students: the repeated exposure to technology skills over time should result in better retention of those skills, better technology problem-solving skills, and a view of technology applications as familiar and normal instructional tools. In the "Introduction to Technology" segment of Music Theory I, Scott has observed that students spontaneously form cooperative learning groups. There appears to be no stigma attached to asking a friend for help understanding technology, although students seldom admit they need help understanding theory. We have been pleased to discover that, although the focus of this project is on technology skills in preservice music teacher education, a key by-product is more comprehensive music learning for all music majors and minors.

A primary benefit is that we as faculty members thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to exchange ideas with each other about course content, individual students, and teaching methods. The process has not been without discomfort: we each feel threatened by challenges to our traditional, familiar habits and teaching methods, and we have had to decide to leave some topics out of the curriculum that were our personal favorites. However, the synergy of our shared discussions and teaching has made us all better teachers. In addition, we are demonstrating that technology can be integrated into the curriculum beginning with a few interested faculty and a limited budget. We believe we can bring more faculty on board over time through our example, so that we all share in an organized, integrated curriculum and share responsibility for each student’s education.

As instructors, we must admit that students do not learn what we teach when we are ready for them to learn, but they learn at that mysterious moment when they are ready to learn. The repeated exposure to basic concepts throughout each student’s study at the University increases the likelihood that every student will have multiple opportunities to master essential content and skills. As we faculty become more aware of each others’ course content, we can make students more aware of relationships among their courses; e.g., the relevance of music theory concepts to their work as performers, conductors, and teachers. We cannot help but believe this will result in a more comprehensive, integrated educational experience for our students.

Our intention is to simultaneously prepare students to demonstrate technology skills, such as those outlined in the TI:ME Technology Areas of Competency, and to use technology to teach the MENC National Standards to their future students. Our challenge is to model a type of music teaching our students—and we ourselves—have not yet experienced, so that together we can begin to change the way school music is taught. We hope that, through their course work, our students will begin to become comfortable with areas of music teaching that are currently unfamiliar to them, such as teaching composition, improvisation, cultural understanding, and interdisciplinary connections. We hope that they will experience ways that technology can be used to involve those K-12 students who have chosen not to participate in performing groups in the process of music learning. Most of all, we hope that, having experienced a wider variety of "normal" music learning activities, they will feel compelled to teach their future students how to compose, improvise, analyze, evaluate, and make music relevant, normal, and essential to their own lives.