July 6th, 2021.
Education, arts and music
MUSIC CLUB
by Ana Colacino
Do you like music? It is hard to know someone who doesn’t… and what if you would be able to join music, English, and education all at once? Well, that is the objective of the extension project Music Club, coordinated by professor Raquel Silvano.
To know a little bit more about this amazing proposition, the newsletter team talked with professor Raquel and some participants of the project.
So, first of all, what is the “Music Club”? It is an extension project whose objective is to help students to develop their skills in English through music. Among the activities, the participants have to create lesson plans, participate in discussions, and interact with the students that are the target public. Also, they are responsible for selecting songs for these classes that will call the attention of the students. These students were, in the beginning, only from middle and high school, but nowadays even college students can participate in the extension encounters. In the words of the participant Vitor Montanini, that agreed to talk with us, “Our only requirement is to love music as much as we do.”
Secondly, how this project can add to the teacher’s carrier of the participants? According to them, being close to the class context and participating in this dynamic of discussions and classes provides a lot of new experiences. Teaching is something you can only learn by practice, and in this project, the student-teachers can practice with the reflection upon their own classes and activities. By working with music and education in this project, they can not only learn more about teaching, but improve their language skills as well.
Lastly, how the project is happening since we are in the middle of a pandemic? Well, just like the other classes, the project encounters take place via google meet. According to Ricardo Apolinário, other friend of us friend who is also a participant, it is not too far from what they were doing in the past years before Covid-19. But the extension part was the one that suffered more adaptations in this period. Now they meet the students through the internet to develop the activities.
To sum everything up, we ask the participants the following question: “What interested you most in participating in the project?”, and their answers were worth sharing:
Vitor said “Music! Just like the students, this is the element that unites us. We all have the same interest in music and we found in music an opportunity to feed students' interest in English.”
And Ricardo: “I've been on the project since 2019, I like the experience of being in the classroom in a different context from formal education, and I'm learning a lot about education both in discussions and in the classroom. Students teach me a lot.”
So, are you curious to discover more about the project? Well, this is not the end, we will have some more news about it in August!
To be continued…