New Courses Help Kids Tune In To Language

Source:  www.thestar.com - Classical Music Critic

(August 30, 2008) Like the arresting mix of music, movement and imagery during the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics, the Royal Conservatory of Music is trying to help us tell our stories in new ways.

As you read this, administrators, teachers, and whoever else can help, are spending their long weekend moving the school to its shiny new home on Bloor St. W., beside the ROM crystal.

Along with the crates and boxes, the organization is also unpacking a new roster of courses that take the 122-year-old organization well beyond its roots in music lessons.

The package is based on the Royal Conservatory's 14-year-old program called Learning Through the Arts. This is backed by the latest scientific research on how music and other arts-related activities help children not only learn, but also lead emotionally and intellectually healthier lives.

On the afternoon of Sept. 14, the Conservatory is throwing open the doors to the Telus Centre to give the general public a taste of its classes, which begin officially on Sept. 20.

For the first time, the Royal Conservatory's course calendar is not printed, but available online, at rcmusic.ca. The website lays out three streams of instruction: for children, adults and the professional development of artists and teachers.

Prominent is Learning Through the Arts, which has gone from being a program the Conservatory runs with individual schools and school boards to an after-school extra.

Angela Elster, the Conservatory's vice-president, academic, explains how some of the classes are bundled into two categories: Smart Start, geared toward toddlers and preschoolers; and Head Start, which delivers arts-based math and language classes to children of primary-school age.

Elster, with the help of Queen's University-based chief researcher Ann Patteson, has fashioned a curriculum that uses arts techniques such as movement and music to reinforce basic language and math skills. "We now have the scientific research to prove what we've always known intuitively as educators, and that is a real win-win," Elster says.

Besides using choreography to teach addition or geometry, Patteson says teachers are "noticing things about students that they didn't know before," such as a previously reticent student suddenly beginning to articulate a lesson.

There are benefits in classrooms where children from many ethnic backgrounds come together.

"We're finding that, when we use the arts in multicultural classrooms, there is a greater degree of collegiality among the students because there is another way of understanding one another," says Patteson. "In England, where our program works in inner-city London, we're finding what teachers really value is how the students are learning to communicate with each other and really value one another."

Patteson relates how one student-teacher remarked to her that "I love to work this way because I get to work with people I would never otherwise work with, and I've begun to understand them better."

Elster and Patteson relate how they've adapted Learning Through the Arts to courses in English as a second language. Their approach, they say, "helps mix kids in and enlivens language" with music and arts. It allows a broader mix of children, who would otherwise often find themselves among a particular ethnic group in their ESL work. "The pride they feel in their artwork somehow spills over in taking risks in talking about it," Patteson says.

Elster describes a chamber ensemble's visit to a Grade 2 class in the Jane and Finch area, where most of the kids "spoke very little English." They then encouraged the children to express what they heard with colour, then with drawing and, finally, with words. One little girl piped up with "I hear longing."

"The teacher and I both looked at each other and thought, 'Wow, where did that come from?'

"When we learn that way, it is embedded deeply, not only in our brain, but in our heart and soul."