John Kratus at MMEA
February 3rd, 2009 by vincebates
John Kratus was a guest at our Missouri Music Educators Association annual conference. He gave outstanding presentations on Music Education at the Tipping Point (like his MEJ article) and on teaching song-writing classes. I agree (and have written about it before in this blog) that music education in the U.S. needs to adapt to the musical interests and practices of everyday people outside of schools. MENC and public music education, however, are changing so s l o w l y . But, still, some change is apparent, for example, in the proliferation of guitar instruction in public schools.
The second topic, song-writing, is a great idea on many levels. I’ll just mention one: In his presentation, Dr. Kratus discussed the use of rhyme and alliteration in a song by Eminem. I can envision this type of lyric analysis (although not Eminem)–by itself or as a prompt for song-writing–being an effective form of music and language arts integration in middle school.
Anyway, it was another great MMEA conference with some outstanding presenters. In addition to John Kratus, we also had Phyllis Wiekert and John Feierabend. And, I distinctly heard John Feierabend use the word “musicing”. . . Pretty cool!
