[MUSIC] I wonder what Sugata Mitra's amazing approach to education would look like if we applied it to music education. Could children teach themselves music just with a connection to the Internet? There are millions of music tutorial videos on YouTube right now, so why not? Do we even need music teachers in the 21st century? In module two, I introduce the research of Lucy Green. Her study of how popular musicians learn was applied as a pedagogy described as informal learning. And then applied through a movement, first in the UK and now in other countries, backed up by a series of case studies, and it was called Musical Futures. Informal learning and Musical Futures are based on some simple key principles which were established in Green's earliest work, Children Learning Music in Friendship Groups. Learning the music they want to learn and learning it by listening and copying rather than reading notation. Here in Australia there have been some very successful pilot projects of this new music pedagogy. So I headed down to Melbourne to meet Steve Sajkowsky, a teacher who has been implementing it in schools with a wide range of age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds. I've been working for Musical Futures on and off for about five years now with Ken Owen, and I've worked at numerous schools across Victoria, mostly around Melbourne. But most recently I've worked at Doveton College out in Dandenong which is in the southeast of Melbourne, and then Footscray West Primary School which is just west of the cbd. In Doveton it's been mostly teenagers, year sevens, eights, and nines. And Footscray West Primary School has been anywhere from grade one to grade six. And so I've been really trialing Musical Future's new ideas in the past year with just play, which is geared for really beginning scaffolding for non-musicians. And, then doing some of the more advanced stuff with some of the teenagers at Doveton using Garage Band, iPads. You know they can record a whole musical idea with tracks on the iPad and then bring it into their studio, and then multi-track it in Logic and things like that. [MUSIC] It started with the teenagers there, what kind of music do you guys listen to? What kind of song do you want to play? And what kind of instruments do you want to play? With the primary kids, it's that at Footscray they've never had a classroom music program, so they walked in and I'm like, okay, grab a guitar there's 30 guitars. We're going to start playing a song. And right away they didn't know what to do, they were so excited. And so it's just great to see the look on their faces. I remember after our first jam, you know the first week school, as soon as were done playing, one kid goes, that was awesome. [LAUGH] It's just pure joy, so it was really fun. And the thing with primary school kids is they usually have no fear, so it's okay if one kid isn't very good and their friend is, the other friend's going to show them what to do. So you've got 30 kids in there, the pressure is kind of off the teacher a bit. It's the experimentation. There's tons of rooms for experimentation. And so, I think building confidence with the instruments is a big thing with them first, but also a safe environment. It's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to try a new instrument every week. All these different things, and once that confidence is up, then you can get a bit more serious. Okay, we're going to be doing this song as a class. You're on that instrument, you're going to be singing. And they get really excited, and that's where the work starts. So, once it's a safe environment for them, it just kind of takes care of itself. Most of the teenagers now, the're listening to top 40 stuff, and most of the songs are not rocket science. And so we took that, and was like okay, well, if the teenagers are doing these kind of songs, can we bring that particular flavor to the younger kids? And so, it might not be Wiz Khalifa or Katy Perry, but it would be something equally as recognizable and simpler. Some kids don't even know what rhythm is, they don't even know what pulse is, some of them don't know that counting to four over and over and over is part of being a musician. So, those are the kind of things you gotta build up. The kids respond to it because [SOUND] it's so instantaneous. When they've got a book in front of them or they don't necessarily know how to read treble clef and all that stuff, right away you're alienating a lot of the kids. But everyone in that classroom can hear or see, and so you pick and choose which one works better for them. With the older kids it's a lot more individual because they're at such varying skill levels. A lot of the islander kids, they've had musical backgrounds at home but they can't read or look at music. And then you've got some kids that have taken classical lessons but they can't develop their ear. And so you've gotta find a bit of a blend or a happy medium. Part of the struggle with the older kids, it's not behavior, its apathy, it's being lazy. Trying to get something that they can hook on to, that's the challenge of being a teacher. It's not telling them what to do, it's finding what they want to do. Usually in class we've got some iPads with maybe some tablature and things like that, but as soon as they go home they look up the stuff online. They look at YouTube. They look at tutorials on how to play certain songs, and then it comes into transposition. And that's always a great way because they're like, I learned this song back home, and here it is. How come it doesn't sound right? They're like well, it's actually been transposed to make it easier to play. And it just opens up a whole new avenue. And then instead of forcing music theory down their throats, all of a sudden they want to know why it's not sounding proper. And then you can talk about transposition and one four fives and all of that stuff. Some of our kids upload their songs to their own YouTube channels. I've got grade threes that film stuff and then put it online, that's fascinating. I have trouble still doing that. But with the older kids, especially at Doveton, Peter Wardrobe and Malcolm have made it a point that once they've done a composition unit, then they throw it up on the Doveton Live YouTube channel. If you haven't seen the channel it's amazing, especially what Gene does as well with the filming. And so a lot of the composition songs are on there. [MUSIC] And it's just great to see them. And you can tell they view it because the views keep going up and up and up. [MUSIC]
