To: Penny Gold
From: Laura Lane and the music department
Date: Feb. 28, 2009
Re: Answering your questions for the college assessment
1. Pathways to specific careers
As advisers, we discuss various fields with all of our music majors, exploring the options open to them after graduating from Knox. This includes graduate school as well as jobs that students can pursue directly upon graduation. We bring in guest artists every year, making sure that students can interact with these professional musicians in various ways: master classes, lunches, workshops and informal discussions. We currently bring jazz artists to campus at least twice a year. We bring professional singers and guest voice teachers once every year. Each voice instructor also holds their own “studio class” where we perform for each other and the students can practice diagnosing problems and making pedagogical suggestions. Some of us also connect current students with recent graduates in fields the students are interested in, encouraging email and phone interviews.
In the future, we plan to develop a brochure about careers in music, bring other professionals in music fields to campus for department colloquia, including a music therapist, and do more to connect current students with alumni in the field.
2. Impact of the new Knox
The Arts requirement has put more students in private lessons. We are in the process of eliminating the Arts credit for private lessons. Instead we will encourage students to take one of our 100-level courses for their Arts credit. The new Knox has probably encouraged students to double major. We have seen an explosion in the number of music minors. You ask about the impact of the information literacy competency: we do not feel we have the staffing or the equipment to offer courses on music technology at this time, although students are asking for them.
3. Teaching critical skills in the music department
The Music Department approaches pedagogy from a variety of perspectives. In addition to imparting a vast body of concepts, terminology, and knowledge (which the study of music requires), we strive to foster “critical thinking” in the broadest sense: such mental activities as analyzing, evaluating, creating, and applying (i.e., skills beyond memorizing or understanding).
We do so in the course of an engagement with both conventional scholarly/historical materials and strictly musical materials (in both written and aural form). Some of the more notable elements of this “critical thinking” pedagogy are described below.
Musical analysis
Virtually all our classes involve some amount of musical analysis--the precise description of musical form and musical detail through words and analytical symbols. This type of inquiry involves a great deal of abstraction and interpretation. The music theory curriculum (Music 240,
241, 242, and 343) is particularly devoted to this type of work, which is taught and modeled in class and assessed in weekly written assignments. Musical analysis, moreover, is conducted not only with respect to the written score but to the music as heard. The latter activity (which is emphasized especially in Mus 112, 343, 361, 363) represents a mental activity quite unlike any other that students would encounter beyond the Music Department; it is assessed through written assignments, listening exams, in-class discussion, and in-class transcription.

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Classroom discussion
In courses at every level (for instance, Mus 130, 254, 361, 343) classroom interactions--teaching through asking questions--comprise an essential aspect of our pedagogy, encouraging synthesis and application (see below). Classroom discussion, per se , is conducted rigorously and purposefully in our musicology and ethnomusicology offerings in particular, with the intent of teaching students how to speak precisely and persuasively and to listen with sensitivity and charity. These habits of discourse are assessed through written papers.
Engaging primary and secondary sources
Some of our classes (Mus 120, 130, 254, 361) emphasize a critical engagement with primary and secondary sources, which is assessed through classroom discussion and written papers. Such sources might include current journal articles or book chapters that analyze the music under consideration through a musicological lens. Students are asked not only to summarize arguments and claims made in these readings, but to critique the rationale, agenda, or bias behind these arguments and claims. They are asked, for example: What is left out? What assumptions are being made? What further examples or counter examples come to mind? These courses don't treat readings as storerooms of facts, but rather as opportunities to tease out significant and meaningful information by understanding the context and authorial bias as well as the “facts” presented.
Constructing (and evaluating) an argument
In our musicology courses, we ask students to take apart a reading--to identify the argument and the supporting ideas. In advanced theory (Mus 343) as well, we often talk as a class about the way evidence can be marshaled in support of a particular reading, when multiple readings of a piece exist. These skills are assessed through student papers.
A related activity--peer review--is practiced, both with respect to student writing and student composition; these reviews themselves are assessed by the professor.
Composition
In several courses the students compose original pieces that draw upon the musical vocabulary and techniques that they have learned. These activities represent the ultimate synthesis of analytical and aural skills. They are assessed on an almost weekly basis in through homework in
Mus 240, 241, and 242, but especially through final composition projects in Mus 240, 241, 242,
343, and 361 (calypso, minuet, nocturne, serial work, and contemporary composition, respectively).
Synthesis of knowledge
Several of us assess the application or synthesis of knowledge by modeling a particular analytical strategy (or some other method) and then asking the students to apply that strategy themselves to a similar piece, both in class and on assignments and exams (for instance through essay questions and aural score identification). Students are thus asked to apply critical skills to listening and analysis by responding to test questions which present new music (not studied in class). These test questions include questions aimed at eliciting critical responses. Students are asked to identify style, period, ethnic or national tradition (if applicable) and/or composer for a piece they have not seen or heard before.
Another strategy involves the use of response papers, which require the move from analysis
(taking apart) to synthesis (putting together): students connect their own musical analysis to material in the text book, or to their own personal experience as musicians or students of music history, in order to discern broader themes, similar concepts, and comparable or contrasting opinions. This approach motivates final projects, as well, which usually derive from issues raised

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