Teaching Portfolio
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TEACHING PORTFOLIO Dr. Nishlyn Ramanna Music Department, Rhodes University BackGround I began teaching in higher education 22 years ago, shortly after graduating with a BMus (cum laude) in jazz studies from the former University of Natal. Between 1994 and 1999 I taught an average of ten periods a week as a graduate assistant and/or part-time junior lecturer at the former universities of Natal and Durban- Westville. Courses and modules taught included jazz piano, general aural perception, jazz composition, and jazz topics in music theory and history. Since July 1999 I have taught an average of fifteen undergraduate periods a week as a lecturer in jazz studies at Rhodes, Wits, UKZN and Rhodes again. This has included undergraduate courses and modules in jazz piano, jazz ensembles, aural perception, jazz composition and jazz topics in music theory and history. I also supervised performance and composition work at honours level as well as extended essays addressing topics in popular music, film music, western art music, and jazz. Former masters supervisees have been awarded MMus degrees in jazz composition, jazz performance/composition and jazz performance/research. My current postgraduate cohort comprises two honours, four masters and two PhD students. In summary I do two main kinds of undergraduate teaching: In my jazz history courses I aim to develop students’ propositional knowledge about jazz. Students learn how to appraise and critically engage with scholarly writings about jazz, so that they can in turn write about jazz in ways that evince appropriate levels of academic literacy. In my jazz theory and piano lessons I aim to equip students with the procedural knowledge to compose and/or perform the music. Students learn how to conceive musical ideas in the jazz language and – in piano lessons – execute them in real time so that they can express themselves as fluent jazz improvisers. TeachinG philosophy As a jazz musician/educator, I see myself as a guide to the discourse world of jazz. I hope to equip students who specialize in jazz studies with the relevant skills and knowledge to participate in the jazz discourse community as artists and/or scholars. (Like most jazz educators) I believe that we learn by doing, and that learning happens best when we tackle interesting problems that feel solvable and useful beyond the learning situation. In my teaching I strive: To foster artistic and academic independence by helping students develop the self-knowledge to self-direct their learninG: Research in neuroscience reveals that music making is a whole-brain activity involving the integration of aural, motor, visual, analytic, and emotional aptitudes1. Few if any of us possess all of these aptitudes in equal abundance. Beethoven is celebrated not least because he was able to compose monumental music while battling hearing loss and eventual deafness in the last two decades of his life. Professional musicians routinely acknowledge the unevenness of their abilities in everyday talk with one another: I have perfect pitch; I struggle with transposition at sight; memorization does not come easily to me, and so on. In other words, professional musicians typically bring high levels of self-knowledge to bear on their practice of their craft. In piano lessons and supervision sessions I encourage students to acknowledge and reflect on pertinent likes and dislikes that they bring to their learning. I steer them towards repertoire and research topics that capitalize on their strengths. At the same I encourage them not to shy away from their weaknesses as players or researchers but to use areas of strength to improve areas of weakness, and to work on “practicing away” their weaknesses. I am particularly open about my perceived shortcomings as a player and researcher, and, to date, the ways in which I have learned to work with or minimize these shortcomings. 1 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0JKCYZ8hng To help students navigate and find their voice as artists and scholars within the ever-expanding and increasingly complex knowledge world of jazz: The term jazz describes a vast sonic universe where “anything from uninhibited primal screams to the most artful scored compositions can be worked in alongside each other” (Ewens, 1991: 30). The jazz pianist is particularly spoilt for choice because of the seven-octave range, polyphonic capability and general versatility of the piano. Likewise, jazz research – and music research more generally – has in recent decades evolved into a multidisciplinary field informed by thinking in literary studies, anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, education, history, cultural studies, media studies and so on. In any particular instance however, a jazz musician or scholar has to commit to just one aesthetic or intellectual option that they can explore and develop. This decision-making process can be overwhelming and paralyzing. Consequently I strive to equip students with the relevant content knowledge about jazz and the foundational procedural knowledge to play jazz or produce academic writing about it, so that they can – with increasing independence and confidence – make informed and rewarding aesthetic and intellectual choices that suit their personal needs, interests, and aptitudes. To make learning empowering: Research in neuroscience shows that productive learning can only take place in situations where the learner feels emotionally secure and physically safe.2 Learning challenges pitched at too high a level are anxiety provoking and counterproductive; learning tasks that lack novelty or challenge are also counterproductive because they incite apathy (Ellis 2014: 52-54). Additionally, research shows that learning is deepest when it is meaningful to the learner (Tomlinson and Sousa, 2010). (For me) learning that is empowering is not injurious or overwhelming, but engaging and rewarding both in the short term and the long term. It accommodates students’ particular interests, sits at an appropriate challenge level, involves learning goals that are achievable in one or two practice or study sessions, and facilitates and motivates further learning. In my teaching I try to create empowering learning opportunities by showing students how to break complex problems – like learning to write an essay or improvise on a tune – into simpler problems that can be solved with relative ease and efficiency. At first year level I equip students with the foundational 2 According to Tomlinson and Sousa, “A positive learning environment increases endorphins in the bloodstream which generates a positive feeling and stimulates the brain’s frontal lobe to support memory of the learning objective and of the positive situation” (2010). By contrast, “A negative learning environment leads to increased cortisol in the bloodstream which raises the learner’s anxiety level, shuts down processing of what it perceives to be low-priority information (the lesson content), and focuses the brain on what it perceives to be high-priority information (the situation causing the stress) so that the stressful situation is remembered rather than the lesson content” (Ibid). knowhow to play relatively simple pieces, source reference materials, or write a basic technical description of a piece of music. In subsequent years I build on this knowledge by having students play more challenging repertoire or engage with more complex academic writing tasks like comparing the aesthetic and socio- historical characteristics of different jazz styles, or writing critically about issues in jazz historiography. Wherever possible, I try to leave space for content differentiation (Tomlinson, 2010) in the curriculum so that diverse student interests can be accommodated. Wherever possible students are given opportunities to perform or write about music and musicians they particularly like. What I teach & how I teach it I teach the following practical, music theory, and music history courses and modules: 1) Instrumental music studies (IMS) 1, 2 & 3: Jazz piano 2) Music history 1: Introduction to music studies 3) Music history 1: “Defining” jazz 4) Music theory 2: Jazz theory 5) Music history 2: Early jazz, Swing & Bebop 6) Music history & theory 3: Aesthetics, history and critical reception of post bebop jazz 7) Music history 3: Music research methods 8) Music history 3: South African jazz scholarship 9) Postgraduate supervision of jazz performance, jazz composition, and research 1. Jazz piano By the end of first year one of the things an NQF level 5, IMS 1 jazz piano student should be able to do is improvise swing-style melodic lines over basic harmonic progressions and accompany these with syncopated chord accompaniment patterns and/or walking bass lines as in the examples below. To accomplish this, the student has to develop and integrate the musical- theoretical, aural, and technical pianistic knowledge to be able to spontaneously imagine music that makes aural sense and execute it in real time at the instrument. At a musical theoretical level, the student has to know the notes of the key she is playing in, the notes that constitute each of the underlying chords and how to construct melodic patterns out of a combination of chord notes as well as diatonic and chromatic non-chord notes. At a bodily level, the student needs to have a reliable time sense, and the technique to locate automatically the chord and melodic notes that she needs at any instant, and play them with the right feeling. Aurally, the student needs to be able to hear the underlying chord progression in her head and pre-hear the notes she plays in her head before executing them on the instrument. More specifically, to improvise a passage like the second example with confident ease and appropriate feel, a student has to instantaneously know – intellectually, aurally, and physically – that3: 1) She is playing in the key of C major. 2) There are four beats to the bar. 3) Her articulation of the pulse should feel infectious and make a listener want to tap his feet. 4) She should imagine the sound of a double bass as she plays the left hand notes.