Answered by Associate Professor Lum Chee Ho and Dr Ng Hoon Hong (Visual & Performing Arts Academic Group, NIE)
Q: How can teachers teach musical improvisation skills in secondary school, especially for special needs students?
This article (Ng, 2019) presents a three-pronged strategy for teaching collective improvisation in the general music classroom through structured surround soundscapes. This strategy consists of developing socio-interactive skills, shared understanding, and personal music vocabulary in collective improvisation. In the music classroom, these concepts should be consciously developed in tandem through hands-on means to foster effective and meaningful collective improvisation. The structured surround soundscape project presents one such way this may be enabled using the three-pronged strategy to nurture ensemble improvisers who can engage in fluent socio-musical conversations in real-world contexts.
I believe that students within our mainstream secondary schools who have particular disability needs will also find such strategies useful. It is a matter of the music teachers taking into consideration the particular needs and making adjustments accordingly or having more scaffolding steps to assist in making these activities accessible to the students.
Reference
Ng, H. H. (2019). Structured surround soundscapes: A three-pronged strategy for effective and meaningful collective improvisation. Music Educators Journal, 106(2), 51-57.
