Secondary School: Double Acts – Music with history and English

In 2007 Talking Birds in conjunction with Creative Partnerships ran a project for year 7 students and their teachers at a secondary school in Coventry to develop creative teaching approaches by bringing in artists to collaborate with teachers. I worked with a history teacher and an English teacher and their students.

The challenge was that the work should take place in the classroom with two different year 7 classes, where the teacher usually taught, and it should use highly-portable materials due to the nomadic life-style of children and teachers i.e. having to swap classrooms. This meant we would need to think about using easily transportable resources which were quick to get out and tidy up.

I worked separately with each teacher and the project allowed some planning and documentation time which enabled us (the teacher and I) to properly discuss approaches, organisation and logistics. This meant that we could truly collaborate during the sessions with me taking the lead sometimes and the teacher taking the lead at others, or both of us supporting the students during an activity.

At the time this was an unusual challenge for secondary school teachers and at first it may’ve been difficult for them to see how they would benefit so it was important that it was a true collaboration rather than an artist ‘coming in and telling them what to do’.

The English teacher’s year 7 classes were studying the books ‘Skellig’ and ‘Northern Lights’ and, the links between English and music being more apparent, it was relatively easy for us to think of ways to encourage the students to talk and write about these two books. The teacher used role-play and imagery in her usual classes and had a good rapport with her students.

It was less easy to make connections for the history teacher whose students were looking at life in medieval times and their teacher was finding it difficult to see links between music and teaching her subject.

With the English group we offered some 35mm glass slides with small, flat materials to make images inspired by either ‘Skellig’ or Northern Lights’. The glass slides, which are usually used for slides to go in an old-fashioned slide projector, could be pulled apart and then the small materials could be trapped between the two surfaces and placed back together. I also had several slide viewers so that people could see their images close-up. Many students were quite interested in these materials and made some slides straight away, others found it more difficult to accept the new materials and spent some time observing and challenging the activity but after a while with some encouragement these people rather half-heartedly put together random materials in a slide and were then amazed to see what it looked like through the viewer.

In another session they were able to see their photographed slides on a data projector and were asked to create a spoken phrase to go with it. After this I offered them some small musical instruments and sounds to experiment with so that they could add one or two sounds to their image and phrase. We then went around the classroom and recorded the students saying their phrase and playing their sound.

This I then made into a film which was played to them at another session:

The teacher said that some students were more engaged by using these materials than using pen and paper or talking. Some students who were not very verbally-confident seemed to be more involved through this approach, and some children who were normally confident with straight forward reading and writing were less confident to use a creative approach.She said that even though she uses quite a creative approach already, she could incorporate even more creative approaches using more visual and auditory materials.

Because it was challenging for the history teacher to visualise how this was going to work, I suggested doing a song-writing, music-making session with the students to start with. This worked well as people were used to writing and answering questions and being fairly quiet during their history lessons, but also making a song wasn’t totally alien to them or their teacher. Students were very enthusiastic about exploring the musical instruments, and we soon came up with a song about medieval times. People offered words and rhymes as well as rhythms and musical ideas. The teacher noticed how students were able to remember the words they were singing about history and there were some students who were unable to concentrate during normal lessons yet were engaged in this activity which was also offering them a different way of accessing about history. Students themselves showed they could remember historical facts about the period more readily by singing about them than by writing about them.

Because the glass slides idea had worked so well with the English group, the history teacher wanted to try it having seen the results (teachers were able to visit each other’s sessions sometimes). The flat materials offered to the students were more ‘medieval’ e.g. the history teacher who was very enthusiastic about the idea, brought dirt and brown materials. Students then created their own slides in groups relating to months of the medieval year. This proved very successful because people needed to distill the activities a typical medieval person would be doing during that month so there was a lot of discussion and collaboration in order to do this and then choose the right materials for the slides. The group were then offered a variety of instruments to choose from to ‘play’ that slide which I recorded and photographed.

Again, I made this into a film and showed it to them:

The history teacher said that the students were more engaged and able to understand and remember things they had learnt, and she said she would be using some more creative approaches in future especially using visual materials.

The project was a success because the teachers were able to have time to plan this work with me and together. Part of the project was to free up time for teachers to talk over what was happening with me and each other and to document the process. There was also follow-up and ongoing support during the project with the other artists and teachers who were working together at the same time in the school. The project started and ended with all practitioners involved getting together. This would not have happened without this kind of support.