Students make beautiful music at Harrah: UW group makes most of week at elementary school

Patricia Campbell led her students out of their safe and sterile classroom, over the mountains and into the fire.

Campbell and 14 undergraduate students from her ethnomusicology in the schools class recently spent a week on the Yakama Indian Reservation, teaching Harrah Elementary School students about music from diverse cultures. After immersing themselves in the elementary students’ lives for several days - performing, instructing and finally producing a series of assemblies - the group celebrated its week’s work at a powwow, where the UW ensemble was invited to perform one last time.

“As we stood at the front of a newly constructed longhouse on the last night of our stay, we sang Simple Gifts and there was a clear sense among us that the learning we had gained was at least equal to the teaching we had given,” Campbell said, reflecting back on the project.

Students from Patricia Campbell’s ethnomusicology in the schools class lead second-graders from Harrah Elementary School in an assembly. The Harrah students sang a song entirely in Vietnamese.

It was the first project of its sort in the School of Music. And it went so well, Campbell thinks it could happen again. The enthusiasm goes both ways, with Harrah teachers, administration and students embracing the newfound passion for music.

Charlcia Fendell teaches fine arts - which include visual arts, language arts and the performing arts - at the school. She’s worked with UW student interns in the past and hoped that some from the School of Music could give a much-needed boost to her curriculum. The plan worked. She said the program’s success could be measured by her students’ positive reactions. One student’s progress in particular, she said, continues to make an impression on her.

“One boy, who I would call an at-risk student because he really has a hard time coping with the school system, was so involved,” Fendell said. “He was participating in all the extra practices and since the UW students have left, he’s been coming to my room every available minute. He’s really picking up on music. That experience opened a door for him that I hadn’t been able to open previously.”

But it wasn’t an isolated response. In fact, the artistic breakthroughs were so widespread that officials at the Harrah School have plans in the works to begin an after-school music program. Fendell said she expects as many as 100 students to participate in the program.

David White, a senior music major, was one of the UW students who participated in the project, which was sponsored by the Office of Minority Affairs.

“We’d been sitting in the classroom talking about teaching theory and finally we had a chance to get out there and teach,” White said recently. “We had this daunting task of trying to familiarize these little kids about music from different countries and cultures. It was a baptism by fire. And the kids were real responsive. It seemed like we really connected. They were giving us hugs all week long.”

Campbell said the project had two important components for her students.

“They were reckoning with a multitude of issues concerning new (to them) musical traditions they had to learn well enough to teach and then they were faced with designing approaches that were suitable to the musical instruction of this particular group of minority children.”

To prepare for the project, Campbell’s UW students wrote a profile of themselves identifying and describing their own musical culture. Then they spent six weeks tracking down recordings, songs, dances, stories and cultural information relating to the music of China, Ecuador, Ghana, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

“These student teachers were faced with teaching a musical culture removed from their own to a group of children who were anchored to cultural traditions that were again distinctive from those of the student teachers,” Campbell said.

At the culmination of their stay, the UW group staged an assembly during which groups of children performed for the entire school, staff, parents and community members.

“Second-graders performed a song, entirely in Vietnamese, which was so rare,” Campbell said. “First-graders performed a Chinese New Year lion dance to the sound of percussion instruments. At every level, there were various kinds of performances. It seemed like the children felt very good about it - lots of smiles, lots of excitement. It was a hard time getting them into a circle, but once they were there and organized, they sang their little hearts out.”

Campbell said she noted several breakthroughs on an individual and collective level during the week. Some of her undergraduate students, for example, were so inspired, they asked about student teaching in the school. Others, Campbell said, were reconsidering their career ambitions and thinking about musical education for elementary school children alongside or in lieu of high school bands, choirs and orchestras.

“It was a wonderful learning experience,” she said. “The growth of the students as communicators of music and teachers of music in one week’s time was notable. One could tell how a number of them came in not knowing how the children would respond. But by the final day they had developed some manner and style of communication that had them looking more like teachers than students.

“I think that so many times our courses in the training of teachers tend to be quite theoretical and while we may appear to be practical in comparison to some work being done on campus, we are still antiseptic and removed from reality until we have an experience like this.”

White said he and the rest of Campbell’s students agree.

“I probably can’t say enough good things about this kind of program. The experience was probably worth one whole quarter’s worth in a classroom. It was just incredible how much we learned in such a short time.”

And their students, the youngsters from Harrah Elementary, have developed a new love of music, according to Campbell.

“It really seemed to make them all aware of the fact that they - every single child - was capable of musical expression. They don’t always have that opportunity.” ¶

Steve Hill