Blogging in music teaching: Engaged learning beyond classroom and disciplinary boundaries

Abstract

The potential for blogging to engage and hence motivate students in their learning is increasingly being recognized by educators worldwide. At the school level, as a form of online publishing, blogging naturally lends itself well to the teaching of subjects such as languages. In this paper, I shall propose to appropriate it for music teaching. It is true that in music, performing and composing activities are inherently engaging for the students; the same may be argued for music listening. However, if we wish to move beyond the basic level of listening for pleasure to the more enriched level of informed attentive listening, it is often a challenge to sustain students’ interests in the knowledge needed to inform their listening and to engage them in close listening. Capitalizing on the reflective and interactive nature of blogging and based on two previous pilot projects on blogging in music teaching, I shall suggest some ways of using blogging to create an online learning community embarked on various individual and group tasks—at times interdisciplinary in nature—to enhance their music listening experience. Two pedagogical maxims are identified and discussed.