MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

As training programs embrace music-in-education constructs, curriculum practices, and assessments, documentation will become more central to the study, analysis, and dissemination of music-in-education practices for reasons we’ve noticed over the past FIPSE grants including:

1. Music-in-education practices are still considered innovations and need to be recorded
2. Sharing is necessary so others needn’t reinvent similar practices
3. Critical analysis for self-growth (artist-teacher-scholar) requires a common platform where to store evidence and artifacts
4. Eventual design of a certificate program will demand high standards, practical only though a careful review of documented practices and artifacts

The MIENC Online Digital Portfolio System is an Internet-based technology designed for the creation, display, and storage of user-designed “mini websites” that function as school and student portfolios.

Overview

At a 2004 Chorus America meeting to discuss arts integration, John Ceschini met Larry Scripp, the director of the Music-in-Education National Consortium’s Learning Laboratory School Network, and discussed Kensington-Parkwood (KP) teachers’ interest in learning more about music and music integration. The research-based nature of the Consortium appealed to many at the school as a way of studying and documenting the impact of the arts integration program. In addition, the focus on music learning was important to increasing teachers’ comfort levels with music in the classroom.

Overview

When the Music Center/Morrison Elementary School partnership first began their work under the guidance of the Music-in-Education National Consortium’s Learning Laboratory School Network, the initial interest was to investigate connections between music and literacy. But an understanding of even the semantics of the inquiry would need to evolve. What began as an investigation of “music and literacy” shifted to “connections between music literacy and language literacy” and ultimately arrived at the more clearly expressed intention: How can teaching be structured to reveal explicit connections between the two different disciplines of music and language arts, wherein literacy in one discipline leverages literacy in the other, and vice versa?

View the Morrison Elementary School’s 2005-2006 Digital Portfolio