Integrating Music With Core Subjects Summary

I read and reviewed “Integrating Music with Core Subjects” by: Jeffrey Aaron. This is applicable to me because as an elementary education major I can incorporate music in the classroom and use it to help my students learn, study, and understand concepts they are learning in all kinds of different subjects. Summarizing the article in a short statement would sound something like this: integrating music in the classroom with different approaches will lead to success for your students in school work and real life. The different styles of including music in the classroom will yield different responses. One of the styles he included was the “PROPEL Approach”. It’s a pseudo-acronym for Piaget’s key words: “PRO” for production, “PE” for perception,

Musical callbacks and using music to create a mood in your classroom are still the only reasons I can think of (while being devil’s advocate) that music would be important to, for example, a science teacher. As a future educator and as a student who appreciates music as an art form but also as a facilitator, I can see that music generally helps increase test scores, retention rates, and other easily trackable successes in a student’s career. But this article generally skips right over HOW to include it and barely touches on WHY to include music in your classroom. In addition, the pseudo-acronym “PROPEL” doesn’t make sense; it should be “PROPER”. Now, I know that Aaron himself didn't come up with that philosophy and that it is based as far back as Piaget's findings, but as a music educator he should notice the flaws in the name of the philosophy he is advocating for and just mention

However, both are for music teachers. This is a problem for students in this course, or others like it, that aren’t teaching music in their classrooms. On the bright side, it is beneficial to include parents in lessons and homework. I approved of his examples of questions he provided for the parents to ask. One example, that sparked in my brain, for how to use music in the classroom with kids, is to make a history project where they look at what songs were popular right after major historical events like 9/11, MLK's assassination, or the fall of the Berlin wall and analyze what is important in culture after a major historical event. That is one positive way to include musical history in the classroom. Parents could also help by explaining what they listened to or what inspired them after certain times in their lives, followed by a cooperative project with kids and parents or guardians to try and include family members on an