Resource Type: 
Course syllabus
Instructor: 
Claudia Calì
Title: 
Assistant Professor of Music Education
Department: 
Aaron Copland School of Music
Course: Place, Space, and Landscape: Discovering Queens through Community Music and Performing
Arts

Description

Place, Space, and Landscape: Discovering Queens through Community Music and Performing Arts is a graduate-level course designed to explore how music, dance, and theater can engage, reflect, and transform local communities through a critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003) and service-learning experiences (Mitchell, 2008).
Intended for graduate students in music, visual, and performing arts, this interdisciplinary course blends theory and practice to help students: (1) gain awareness of the spatial dimensions of their artistic experience; (2) build meaningful connections and relationships of care with local communities; and (3) engage with the concept of reinhabitation (Gruenewald, 2003), situating learning within specific socio-cultural, political, and geographical contexts in the borough of Queens.

The goal is to facilitate a multidisciplinary constructivist learning experience through which their collective artistic use of each place—through art-making activities, the development of relationships with community members through the arts—turns their experience of each place into a meaningful lived musical space.

During the first part of the semester, students will spend time in communities in different neighborhood of Queens (e.g. Pomonok center)— observing, listening, learning about the unique stories and cultural layers that shape each place, and developing culturally responsive artistic activities to be shared with the community members.

In the second half of the semester, students will be asked to reflect and make sense of their collaborative artistic experience through creative writing assignments and narrative accounts, transforming their experience of each a musical space into a musical landscape.