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Voices
Across Time was
created to help teachers harness the power of song as primary source to
supplement any secondary American Social Studies, Language Arts, and Music
curriculum. The project has three components (use the buttons at the
top of this page to find out more about each): a Teacher’s Guide, the Summer Institute for Teachers, and Lesson Plans and other Teaching Resources. You may also contact us to
discuss any specialized requirements you may have; our contact information is
located on the About Us page. Also found at
this site is an index of Timely Tunes; songs appropriate to enhance
discussion of any major holiday or historical anniversary. OverviewSongs have a special power to express what words alone cannot:
hopes, fears, dreams, love, hate, anger, pride, aspirations, and
disappointments. Because songs span the breadth of human experience, they are
uniquely able Visual primary resources, like paintings and photographs, are
increasingly used as primary resources for teaching history, not just as illustrations.
But music seems to be more challenging for teachers: “I can’t
carry a tune in a bucket!” or “I can’t read music!”
or “Even if I had enough planning time, where do I begin to even look
for songs popular during the War of 1812?” Songs don’t stand
still for discussion like visual sources do — they exist in time, as
well as space. How can you do more than just play music in the background? Music is
omnipresent in modern life, especially in the most technologically advanced
societies; it is readily available everywhere we go and part of nearly all
that we do. Our tastes in music help to shape our personalities and determine
our social grouping and compatibility, especially among school-aged children
in America. Music is an accessible medium and considered highly desirable to
children. It has always been so, no less in the colonial era than in the
cyber age. Music is also a
potent bearer of cultural ideas, attitudes, and movements. Like works of
literature and art that carry indelible messages from the time and place of
their creation, musical compositions—and particularly those with
texts—are source documents loaded with historical meaning. In addition to
its appeal and its cultural messages, music is one of the eight
“learning styles” or modes of intelligence identified by
educators (and codified by Howard Gardner of Harvard University and others)
Studies have shown that music can also help engage students otherwise
disaffected by standard classroom techniques, and it helps improve
students’ overall learning and performance on tests. Within the past
two decades, social studies textbooks have augmented their narrative with
samples from literature (poems and short stories) and visual arts (paintings
and photographs). Some publishers have begun to provide sound recordings that
complement their textbooks. Yet none of the standard texts for teaching
American social studies, language arts, or even music systematically includes
music as a classroom tool for attracting, engaging, and teaching students
about the life, language, ideas, and history of their nation. Teacher’s GuideThe core of the program is the extensive Teacher's Guide,
organized for ease of coordination with national education standards. The Guide
includes 153 songs spanning 300 years of American history along with teaching
techniques and audio CDs to assist teachers in integrating songs into their
exiting curriculum. Created by a
team of teachers and scholars, it uses music as a tool to teach history and
social studies, and is aimed at middle- and high-school aged students.
Secondary-school teachers advised on the design of the materials to help them
teach more effectively (not to add more curricular material to what seems an
already overburdened agenda); the project staff drew on the work of
musicologists and performers who have documented and made available a vast
array of pieces, forms, and styles of music, along with their societal
functions and values, across the entire span of written history of life in
North America, and representing nearly all ethnic groups and economic levels
of society.
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Copyright
2012 Center for
American Music, University of Pittsburgh Library System |
