MODAL Research

Our director, Susan O'Neill will be presenting the keynote at the upcoming "Progressive Methods in Popular Music Education" conference!

Progressive Methods in Popular Music Education - Don Wright Faculty of Music - Western University This new symposium will provide a forum for Canadian and international teachers, musicians and scholars to gather in a process of knowledge exchange and discussion, leading to identification of future research areas and practice development around the use of popular music and associated pedagogies i...

Some of you may be interested in this short sound-text explaining some of the main ideas of edusemiotics, in less than 3 minutes:

philosoblaster 1: edusemiotics and arts ed This short sound-text was recorded by the philosophaster team for the SSHRC storyteller's contest.  It explains some of the central notions of the emerging edusemiotic research program  before going on to touch on the relevance of these ideas to arts education.

Interview with edusemiotics founder Inna Semetsky:

Semiotics and/as education: an interview with Inna Semetsky What does Tarot, educational philosophy, semiotics, and Jungian approaches to the unconscious have to do with one another? The answer is Inna Semetsky.

https://t.co/IeQcFy21OC

Transforming the Landscape of Teacher Education in Music Peter Webster, scholar in residence in the department of Music Teaching and Learning, reflects on the school’s bold plan to transform music education.

Policy starts with people, not top-down mandates, and people are diverse and changing. Here is a nice expression from Andrew Stables on the need to transcend right wing left wing pulls when designing and thinking about educational policy:

"If we can put aside for a moment what is 'conscious', we can see that all action is a form of interpretation: we re-interpret and re-present a little bit of the world each moment we are alive. It follows that no political or leader can absolutely determine how anyone, or any group, will respond to any policy at any time.

This implies a general policy move towards diversification. However, such a move has more to it than is commonly acknowledged. It is certainly not, for example, simply a matter of replacing right wing politics with left wing politics, of substituting socialism for global capitalism, for it can be argued that there is both a dominant Left and a dominant Right standardizing view in countries such as the UK and the US. In education and related areas, the Right may focus attention on standards, excellence and accountability, the Left on equality, fairness and social justice. In promoting any of these things, it is easy to fall prey to two fallacious assumptions, from a semiotic perspective, the first being that social leaders can bring about what they would like to see, in the form they would like to see it, and the second that social progress is quantifiable. A semiotic perspective runs counter to both these assumptions. Politicians, teachers and others are not able to make whole populations either meet or even aspire to the same standards; there is no argument so to do that will be evenly and uniformly accepted over time, however much a tyrannical regime might appear to be able to effect short-term changes.

Notions of excellence and accountability are, therefore, subject to individual and group variation and cannot be imposed from above. Similarly, equality is not measurable and so, in many forms or senses, is not achievable either. terms such as 'standards' and 'equality' can have considerable explanatory power, but this is always context-dependent"
-'Semiosis and the Myth of Learning'

A conversation about the close (historical) relation between liberal education and semiotics. Multimodal learning is discussed.

An Interview with Alin Olteanu: Education, Signs, and the History of Ideas Alin Olteanu is a scholar who takes 'learning' very seriously. We got to talking to Alin about many things, including: the shared history of semiotics and liberal education; Christian and Islamic philosophy; intercultural translation; the close affinity between biology and learning; and how our soci

"When you think about the purposes of education, there are three," Horne says. "We're preparing kids for jobs. We're preparing them to be citizens. And we're teaching them to be human beings who can enjoy the deeper forms of beauty. The third is as important as the other two."

Why Arts Education Is Crucial, and Who's Doing It Best Art and music are key to student development.

Early silent film, Greta Garbo’s face, children's face paint, selfie culture... an excellent multimodal reflection of our changing relation to the face (part of the 'Tiny Modern Myths' series):

faces Face paint beautifies by treating the face as a blank canvas—and turns all faces blank, or through it, all faces are blank. Unlike other types of makeup such as one finds in the drugstore beauty section, face paint does not mean to enhance any particular aspect of the face—the art is itself th

From 1897, still worth a read.

John Dewey My Pedagogic Creed I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, an...

Arts Education for the Development of the Whole Child (an excellent lit review):

Elementary Teachers' Federation Of Ontario Many teachers feel that the Arts are taking a back seat in elementary classrooms, despite the fact that various research studies point to the strong relationships between learning and the Arts. The Arts provide opportunities to develop creativity and imagination, and to experience joy, beauty, and w...

https://www.theartofed.com/2017/07/21/surprising-reason-play-ultimate-teaching-tool/

Music as a Teaching Tool Incorporating music into almost any class can be a great way to teach content—and it doesn’t take special training or expensive resources.