SRU music students broaden their horizons
SLIPPERY ROCK — A little time away from Slippery Rock University and Pennsylvania in general gave a group of music education majors from the school a chance to broaden their perspectives last month.
The group of four students and two professors from SRU spent more than two weeks in Santa Fe, N.M., where they rubbed elbows with teachers and artists, and got to flex their musical muscles in classrooms where Spanish is sometimes spoken just as often as English.
The field learning trip is the brainchild of SRU music education professor Kathleen Melago, who along with her husband visited Santa Fe in 2014 and left believing that the city's melting pot of cultures could act as an exciting test for her students.
“It just feels really different,” Melago said. “It gives you the chance not just to practice your skills, but to think, 'Do I still want to be a teacher?'”
The group spent a total of 16 days in Santa Fe, and got to teach in the city's Indian school system, as well as experience what it's like being a teacher in elementary and high school classrooms in public schools, where language can be an ever-present barrier. The group also got to do some sightseeing, and attended the New Mexico Music Educators Association Conference.
If Melago wanted the students to ask themselves whether they still wanted to teach, the answer was a resounding “yes” from the group, all of whom said they enjoyed being outside their comfort zones during the trip.
“I don't know what I was expecting, but just seeing this melding of people from different cultures was a very interesting thing,” said Sean Mitchell, a music education major from Waterford, Pa.
“And it turned out that (cultural differences) didn't get in the way of my teaching the way I thought it would.”
Mitchell and his classmates — SRU juniors Josh Bonnici of Grove City, Katie Steele of Cranberry Township and Gideon Zoeller of New Wilmington — all said they were looking to be challenged in one way or another.
For Steele, who taught lessons in the city's K-8 classrooms, the experience of teaching in a city that rivals New York and Paris as a cultural hub was invaluable. Steele liked the variety she got to experience as lessons shifted between the grade levels throughout the day.
“It was very unique. It lets you see how people are experiencing music in different areas,” Steele said. “It's important to see how different people experience it and how you can incorporate that into your teaching.”
Bonnici, who along with Mitchell taught in Santa Fe's high school music classes, said he was most impressed with the level of institutional support for music education in Santa Fe public schools. Bonnici saw it expressed by students enthusiastic to be in music class, he said.
“There's a lot of community support and a lot of student interest as well,” Bonnici said. “And there seems to be a lot of support for music education. Going in and seeing a lot of excited students who wanted to be there was really cool.”
Zoeller, who was most impressed by the geography and the quality of Santa Fe's art and music communities, said he wasn't surprised by the culture shock. He helped teach clarinet lessons, and ended up having to do more demonstrations than talking sometimes, to get through to kids whose first language was Spanish, not English.
“I was expecting it to be a really different culture than we have here,” said Zoeller, who called the experience “a really fulfilling trip.”
For Melago and Jonathan Helmick, SRU's director of bands, the trip was a chance to forge a stronger bond with the college students themselves — something Helmick called a hallmark of the SRU experience that will have a lasting impact on the group's career as music teachers.
“We got closer as a group, and I think that will probably influence their teaching more than anything else coming out of this trip,” Helmick said. “The need to connect with students. To establish connection and relationships so really meaningful learning can take place.”
