The show must go on

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything – said Plato sometime around 400BC. Meanwhile back in New Zealand, schools are fighting to hold on to arts programmes as the zeitgeist lauds maths and literacy over “non-essentials”.

Scratch a principal or teacher of a certain age and you’ll find a guitar player (or a keyboard tinkler, a ukelule strummer). At one time teachers’ colleges encouraged their students to be creative and well-rounded, to take an interest in life and explore its possibilities – to be role models for their students-to-be in stretching boundaries. In short, you were meant to learn to play an instrument.
Today, the reality is one-year pressure-cooker training courses, student loans and a Ministry of Education that no longer employs music advisors or funds professional development in the arts.
Yet teachers know that the arts work for learning – and music can still be heard in schools all around the country.  In Auckland, Northcross Intermediate teacher Mark Jensen is well-known as an inspirational drama teacher.
“Music is a key component.  Music boosts a performance of course – and it develops the kids’ motor skills, and their language skills and memory skills.
“Music is a primal thing that reaches inside us and plays with our emotions. As they rehearse and perform, there are obviously aesthetic qualities, but I believe that the music also stimulates a deeper consciousness that makes us who we are.”

Boosts learning
A wealth of research shows how music and the arts can boost learning. The US researcher Dr Martin Gardiner, for example, found that children aged 5-7 who had been lagging behind at school had caught up with their peers in reading and were ahead in maths after seven months of music lessons. The children’s classroom attitudes and behaviour improved too.
At Northcross, drama is seen as a method for learning across the curriculum. Mark’s performing arts extension group, Stuff n Nonsense, uses drama to explore different perspectives and ideas through dramatic forms and devices.
He works intensively with his group of 35 students throughout term one. They meet before school, lunchtimes, after school and during their holidays. Last year’s Stuff ‘n Nonsense group performed for students at their own and another local intermediate, at an evening show for previous members of the group, on a road trip to the Waikato where they performed for four intermediates, the Sheila Wynn College Shakespeare Competition and the Stage challenge J-Rock event.
“Having performance goals is a major factor in getting the best out of the students. Developing their abilities through the drama elements of role, focus, tension, action, time and space provides us with a powerful form to work in. Various drama conventions assist us in improvising and actively exploring a text and its meanings.”

The Spider and the Fly
The group’s Shakespeare work was an example of how the trust generated within the group can provide a wonderful springboard for improvisation and spontaneity.
“They learn their lines, using a lot of shared roles. We do not attempt to decipher the text; instead we enjoy the sounds of the words and explore the feel of a passage. That’s when we physicalise and bring to life the characters. “As we rehearse the movements, the lines begin to take on a new life for us and soon we are asking for meaning and responding to the narrative.
“Because the students know we have performance as a goal, they naturally use appropriate technique and begin to work with greater sophistication.”
Another project was working with the old poem, “The Spider and the Fly”. “We decided that the poem was a metaphor for something else and decided to use a haunting Puccini piece ‘Humming Bird Chorus’ to enhance the performance. It was a risk, but it worked.”
Mark believes that taking risks is vital to the creative process. Placing students in an environment and in situations where there will be a risk is a good thing.
“They need to fire each other up and fuel each other. It can’t happen sitting at a desk. These students want to be inspired, to be ambitious and attain goals. Energised relationships are engaging and facilitate personal growth; it makes sense that these are the people you will trust in rehearsal and performance as well as in life.
“The students move on to college with a desire to have fun and learn with like-minded people who also energize and inspire.”
Mark has taught at intermediate schools for 24 years – the last ten as a drama specialist. He is a recipient of a MultiServe national Education Award for services to the arts.

- Jane Blaikie

Resources
Visit the research pages of the Music Council of Australia’s site http://www.musicplayforlife.org, for a great downloads on the benefits of music in schools.
Music Education New Zealand, in conjunction with TRCC, is holding a conference in Auckland in April 2011, Cultural Chords, which is “for teachers, by teachers” and will include a focus on engaging with the New Zealand Curriculum. (www.menza.org.nz).
Copies of a Ministry of Education resource of Hirini Melbourne songs are available to borrow from Sounz (the Centre for New Zealand Music) - http://sounz.org.nz/resources/show/260.
Sounz also has downloadable song sheets and MP3s of backing tracks for teachers of young children to work with The Very Important Godwit by Jenny and Laughton Patrick -  http://sounz.org.nz/resources/show/718