Day three--Experiences

John Dewey said "we do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience". 

This is the bonus of being three days behind on my blog, time for reflection. :)  This day was probably the least inspiring, but left me with plenty to "play" with in my mind as I think about leading my students through their own musical experiences.

The morning lecture today was a continuation of the same topic from yesterday except by a different presenter--Evelyn Wohlfahrter.  She also has spent a considerable amount of time working with people with disabilities.  The main crux of her presentation was "when true inclusion is reached there will be no "inclusion"".  In between her personal experiences growing up with a neighbor with Down syndrome and now working with people of varying disabilities, she is left with the valid belief that we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses in our own body and in our own abilities.  There is no normal.  She actually created a music video with two of her adult students showing the 'beauty and uniqueness' of making music and movement with people with a "disability".  Her film was selected and won at a nearby music film festival in the Austria/Germany area earlier this year.  I should also mention that Evelyn is 38ish, what an honor so early in her career.

Sonja's class today was focused on taking a main idea from a folk dance (the folk dance she chose was "Sellengers Round") and then taking ideas from that dance to lead us into choreographing a creative movement piece.  Once again, I can't remember who the presenter was, but I was taught this same lesson idea at the professional development conference last fall.  I still really enjoyed watching her process the lesson knowing where she was going with it, and a refresher is always nice too!  I love this idea of taking a main idea from a folk dance and taking bits and pieces of that dance to form boundaries to allow for creative movement.  Very "orffy"!

Doris' class was focused on nature and taking qualities of nature to evoke a creative movement choreography.  We were asked to bring something from nature into the class (i.e. a rock, leaf, flower, etc).  By the end of the activity we were paired into groups of 5, and asked to group our individual nature items into one picture.  The "picture" became the framework for improvised choreography to explore the qualities of each object.

*you might wonder why so much of Orff is focused on movement.  The Orff approach is based on experience first learning, so learning by doing.  Young students tend to be more kinesthetic learners anyway, so after exploring ideas kinesthetically in their body they would be more successful at learning and transferring ideas to other musical experiences (i.e. singing, and playing instruments).  There were other classes I could have taken that were not so heavily focused on movement, but it's hard to pass an opportunity not to work with actual movement/dance instructors at the institute.

Can I be honest about my next class again?!  I'm quickly realizing who in the class has not had too many experiences with Orff-Schulwerk.  When Ari asked at the end of his lesson what were our thoughts of the activity, my mind went to the classroom and the practical use of the material.  However, majority of the people in the class were focused on them self and how it made them feel emotionally.  I feel like an 'Orff Snob' when I say that I'm not into as my new Australian friend Joyce would say "Kimbayaa conversation". Comments like "music is life", "the world is nothing without music", and "this experience was like esctacy" were phrases exchanged throughout the room.  Obviously I'm glad they were 'moved', but I guess I'm just not wired that way to have such emotional highs on something of that nature.  I really struggled the rest of the week not being judgmental, maybe it all goes back to the fact that I've been lucky enough to have more Orff-like musical experiences so its hard for me to relate to their emotional highs?  I don't know, but I guess we are all in different places and experience activities in different ways.

They gave us a free night on Wednesday, so we went to the city center for dinner.  We ate at a restaurant that night that had a nice size garden area in the back with picnic tables, and different businesses inside to buy food.  It was a nice, laid back, relaxing way to end such a Wednesday night.  Lots of laughs, lots of good stories, and lots of good food.

Perhaps this was my "esctacy experience"?!