Repositioning the Elements of Music: A Student Framework Worth Listening to
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this presentation we trouble the persistence in North American music education of the elements as the unit of analysis. Teaching the elements of music remains a Canadian curriculum mainstay, an anachronistic, simplistic requirement that, we contend, engenders pedagogies that are less than relevant and inspiring and can even be oppressive Presented as a body of knowledge belonging to academic musicians, these verbal/ analytical elements elicit pedagogies focussed on identification skills, definitions and closed-ended questions and dictate singular ways of listening and expressing. We describe how, under the pressures of standards and accountability, music teachers resort to academicking their music classrooms, confining musical understanding, thinking and expression solely to the realm of verbal language, disregarding the holistic, body/mind/spirit experience of musicking.\nWe use our experiences of the ways high school students respond to music in listening contexts to inform our understandings of what a meaningful, relevant music education might look like. Students love to talk about music as well as to create and perform it, but in different ways than an emphasis on the elements might dictate. We share what we learned from our students: they already possess a framework for talking about music, a framework worth listening to.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".