Reprise
"It seemed to me that almost anybody could collect a lot of nursery jingles and fast moving tunes, throw them together along with slide whistles and various noise makers and call that a cartoon score, but that didn't satisfy me and, I felt sure, wouldn't really satisfy the public." (Scott Bradley, quoted in Goldmark, 2005).
When I first tried using music in the classroom, I had reservations about a bunch of adults performing a sing-along. But experience has taught me that my students enjoy learning with music. It doesn't take much modeling to get most adults clapping and tapping, or at least humming along to the natural rhythms and melodies of language-music blends.
More importantly, I have found that my students acquire language patterns faster and more permanently from song lyrics, than from text and speech in any other form.
The fact that my biggest challenge has been finding appropriate - that is, targeted - music and activities, was what drove this project. It's still my biggest concern, even after all the work I've put into this project - more work than for any other composition I've written.
But I like to write, and this project has allowed me to apply my efforts to something I'm convinced is truly worthwhile.
As the project developed, I fell more and more in love with the concept of "mickey-mousing." I was absolutely delighted when I ran across Goldmark's (2005) Tunes for Toons, which gave a glimpse of the origins of the concept and its workings. I dropped everything to read it.
I gradually came to see clearly how mickey-mousing integrates not just music with language, but adds a more focused by-design slant to the established and highly useful practice of scaffolding, or supported learning. It also puts interdisciplinary thinking in a more concrete form. And as the citations in the text indicate, the real work, of designing and testing activities such as those integrating vocal and musical timbre, and imagining interdisciplinary study tools like academic notebooks, has already been done by others (though my research revealed to me that a huge amount remains to be done). In principle, mickey-mousing was already out there.
Supporting learners in their understanding and assimilation of new language and language patterns occupies much, if not most, of my classroom time. As it relates to music, my mickey-moused support of students has come either in the form of amplifying explanations, exhibiting patterns so they stand out, or finding songs, the singing of which will be especially beneficial to students because of their repeated target language and catchy tunes.
Yet I first heard the term "mickey-mousing" when working as an auto repairman decades ago, as a term with negative connotations. A "mickey-moused" job was one that might involve tenuously tying car parts together with duck tape and bailing wire, or throwing new parts at a problem instead of properly diagnosing it. One reason the term took on these connotations was that many purists and aesthetes in the cartoon industry thought the practice of mickey-mousing "telegraphed too much information;" real artists wouldn't do it (Goldmark, 2005).
In ESL, as in music instruction, a major obstacle to communication between student and teacher is the lack of a common language (Speh & Ahramjian, 2009). So as far as I'm concerned, mickey-mousing, or synchronized underscoring, almost cannot be overdone, only done badly. It's rarely a bad thing to telegraph more information to a language learner. The more information we telegraph, the more likely a student is to "get" it.
One time mickey-mousing can be overdone is when information cognitively overloads the student. But as I've discussed throughout my presentation, eliminating competing demands on attention, as well as avoiding conflicting neural processing, is an essential part of mickey-mousing in ESL. It fits naturally into the framework of underscoring language with music in a targeted way.
Mickey-mousing also facilitates designing curriculum for the other time teachers don't want to telegraph too much information: When trying to challenge learners, for example during an assessment. An understanding of mickey-mousing allows teachers to not just underscore, but to remove underscoring in a more informed and targeted way.
So I feel very proud of what I've accomplished in this project. I feel I've opened up new vistas in music-assisted learning, and perhaps even in supported learning or the interdisciplinary mindset in general.
Yet I remain extremely dissatisfied with my results.
The problem has been that the more I've worked on the approach, the more it has ballooned out of control. I keep seeing new applications and new areas for applications of mickey-mousing. I keep seeing that the examples I gave weren't the best possible, and didn't adequately convey the power of the approach.
I saw about midway through the project that I could have profitably gone through the hundreds of ideas in the most useful classroom resource I found during my research - Tim Murphey's (1992) Music and Song - activity by activity, variation by variation, and apply my approach to each idea, to discover alternate ways to view it from the perspective of mickey-mousing. Many times when I did this with an activity, as a bonus I was inspired to create new twists for my own classroom. But sharing all of these minor variations would have made this site impossible to digest in a reasonable amount of time, no matter how well they illustrated the fine-tuning of musical underscoring.
And Murphey was just one source of classroom ideas.
So instead of continuing to look for applications, I cherry-picked the ideas, mickey-mousing by either relying on the author's stated objectives for an activity, or by reframing the activity when it fit especially well into my narrative. Most of the time it was the latter; the way a given activity exemplified an idea of mine usually jumped right out at me. But I'm convinced that all of them fit my framework in one way or another, without any contrived shoehorning needed.
I also realize that virtually all the activities and songs in the literature fit many other language targets besides those I mention. The point is, mickey-mousing is very open-ended.
The broad areas of application, as opposed to the specific applications, appear limited only by the number of parallels scientists find between language and music - or between language and visuals, between language and the body .... For example, Aniruddh Patel's (2008) 513-page masterpiece Music, Language, and the Brain bursts at the seams with music-language connections, each of which holds pedagogical promise. And Patel barely touches on the cultural similarities between language and music - as I barely touched on them in this project.
For example, culturally, music and language are both individual, yet collective. Thus I could have looked at more parallels between the way individual listeners respond to music and language than just emotionally. Or I could have taken the opposite tack, and created a separate chapter on how parallels between the social dynamics of music and those of the language-culture amalgam might be used to improve the social dynamics of the classroom.
Specifically: How can the collaborative selection of music by teachers and students be grounded in parallels between musical and ethnic culture(s)? This question appears to me pregnant with the potential to enhance music-assisted learning, by giving more direction and autonomy to adult learners, while simultaneously building a sense of classroom community - but where would I find the time for the research? What if I couldn't see any way to intelligently apply the parallels to the classroom - or if I did see applications, What if they were already well known? In the end, I used the excuse that I'm not the most social person. The social-dynamics alley wasn't mine.
As the project went on, I could just picture readers giving up in frustration at all the scrolling and clicking needed to read and hear what I have to say. Yet at the same time, each of the chapters and potential chapters was rapidly blooming into a black hole of fascination, whose gravitational forces sucked at my time and attention.
As in the Sorcerer's Apprentice video with which I introduced this project, the more I attacked the marching brooms which my plans had brought to life, the more they multiplied. Each one carried only a single bucket of water, but they added up to an ocean that threatened to drown me.
So eventually I just gave up the extremely grandiose idea of treating ESL mickey-mousing definitively. I am putting something out there, and that's enough. If teachers and/or researchers make some use of it, I will be very satisfied. It doesn't have to be the Great American Novel.
What exists of the theory already lacks sufficient detail. At least for the time being, I'm going to put off forays into extending the framework to new music-to-language-learning parallels. On the whole, it has been the attention-to-detail aspect, not the more general syntheses and discovery of principles, that has intimidated and occupied me the most anyway, even before beginning this project.
As Murphey (1992) pointed out, there is no "standard" music to use in language learning. But if I've accomplished nothing else, I've shown that some music and ways of using it are demonstrably more suited to certain language and learning goals than are others.
After graduation, if the interest is there, I'll add a page to this site with a catalog of specific music and music activities which suit specific language or goals especially well. I've already created a forum page, which I hope readers will use to put resources of this kind out there for all (yes, this means that I'm hoping others will do my job for me!)
So ... this chapter of my story ends like Mickey's in the Sorcerer's Apprentice; after his adventure, Mickey is forced to return to doing the sorcerer's grunt work. And it is to the details of mickey-mousing I return ... until, like Mickey, I get myself into some other dangerous adventure, by casting my own spells on the workings of some theory ... spells whose power I was never trained to fully control.
More importantly, I have found that my students acquire language patterns faster and more permanently from song lyrics, than from text and speech in any other form.
The fact that my biggest challenge has been finding appropriate - that is, targeted - music and activities, was what drove this project. It's still my biggest concern, even after all the work I've put into this project - more work than for any other composition I've written.
But I like to write, and this project has allowed me to apply my efforts to something I'm convinced is truly worthwhile.
As the project developed, I fell more and more in love with the concept of "mickey-mousing." I was absolutely delighted when I ran across Goldmark's (2005) Tunes for Toons, which gave a glimpse of the origins of the concept and its workings. I dropped everything to read it.
I gradually came to see clearly how mickey-mousing integrates not just music with language, but adds a more focused by-design slant to the established and highly useful practice of scaffolding, or supported learning. It also puts interdisciplinary thinking in a more concrete form. And as the citations in the text indicate, the real work, of designing and testing activities such as those integrating vocal and musical timbre, and imagining interdisciplinary study tools like academic notebooks, has already been done by others (though my research revealed to me that a huge amount remains to be done). In principle, mickey-mousing was already out there.
Supporting learners in their understanding and assimilation of new language and language patterns occupies much, if not most, of my classroom time. As it relates to music, my mickey-moused support of students has come either in the form of amplifying explanations, exhibiting patterns so they stand out, or finding songs, the singing of which will be especially beneficial to students because of their repeated target language and catchy tunes.
Yet I first heard the term "mickey-mousing" when working as an auto repairman decades ago, as a term with negative connotations. A "mickey-moused" job was one that might involve tenuously tying car parts together with duck tape and bailing wire, or throwing new parts at a problem instead of properly diagnosing it. One reason the term took on these connotations was that many purists and aesthetes in the cartoon industry thought the practice of mickey-mousing "telegraphed too much information;" real artists wouldn't do it (Goldmark, 2005).
In ESL, as in music instruction, a major obstacle to communication between student and teacher is the lack of a common language (Speh & Ahramjian, 2009). So as far as I'm concerned, mickey-mousing, or synchronized underscoring, almost cannot be overdone, only done badly. It's rarely a bad thing to telegraph more information to a language learner. The more information we telegraph, the more likely a student is to "get" it.
One time mickey-mousing can be overdone is when information cognitively overloads the student. But as I've discussed throughout my presentation, eliminating competing demands on attention, as well as avoiding conflicting neural processing, is an essential part of mickey-mousing in ESL. It fits naturally into the framework of underscoring language with music in a targeted way.
Mickey-mousing also facilitates designing curriculum for the other time teachers don't want to telegraph too much information: When trying to challenge learners, for example during an assessment. An understanding of mickey-mousing allows teachers to not just underscore, but to remove underscoring in a more informed and targeted way.
So I feel very proud of what I've accomplished in this project. I feel I've opened up new vistas in music-assisted learning, and perhaps even in supported learning or the interdisciplinary mindset in general.
Yet I remain extremely dissatisfied with my results.
The problem has been that the more I've worked on the approach, the more it has ballooned out of control. I keep seeing new applications and new areas for applications of mickey-mousing. I keep seeing that the examples I gave weren't the best possible, and didn't adequately convey the power of the approach.
I saw about midway through the project that I could have profitably gone through the hundreds of ideas in the most useful classroom resource I found during my research - Tim Murphey's (1992) Music and Song - activity by activity, variation by variation, and apply my approach to each idea, to discover alternate ways to view it from the perspective of mickey-mousing. Many times when I did this with an activity, as a bonus I was inspired to create new twists for my own classroom. But sharing all of these minor variations would have made this site impossible to digest in a reasonable amount of time, no matter how well they illustrated the fine-tuning of musical underscoring.
And Murphey was just one source of classroom ideas.
So instead of continuing to look for applications, I cherry-picked the ideas, mickey-mousing by either relying on the author's stated objectives for an activity, or by reframing the activity when it fit especially well into my narrative. Most of the time it was the latter; the way a given activity exemplified an idea of mine usually jumped right out at me. But I'm convinced that all of them fit my framework in one way or another, without any contrived shoehorning needed.
I also realize that virtually all the activities and songs in the literature fit many other language targets besides those I mention. The point is, mickey-mousing is very open-ended.
The broad areas of application, as opposed to the specific applications, appear limited only by the number of parallels scientists find between language and music - or between language and visuals, between language and the body .... For example, Aniruddh Patel's (2008) 513-page masterpiece Music, Language, and the Brain bursts at the seams with music-language connections, each of which holds pedagogical promise. And Patel barely touches on the cultural similarities between language and music - as I barely touched on them in this project.
For example, culturally, music and language are both individual, yet collective. Thus I could have looked at more parallels between the way individual listeners respond to music and language than just emotionally. Or I could have taken the opposite tack, and created a separate chapter on how parallels between the social dynamics of music and those of the language-culture amalgam might be used to improve the social dynamics of the classroom.
Specifically: How can the collaborative selection of music by teachers and students be grounded in parallels between musical and ethnic culture(s)? This question appears to me pregnant with the potential to enhance music-assisted learning, by giving more direction and autonomy to adult learners, while simultaneously building a sense of classroom community - but where would I find the time for the research? What if I couldn't see any way to intelligently apply the parallels to the classroom - or if I did see applications, What if they were already well known? In the end, I used the excuse that I'm not the most social person. The social-dynamics alley wasn't mine.
As the project went on, I could just picture readers giving up in frustration at all the scrolling and clicking needed to read and hear what I have to say. Yet at the same time, each of the chapters and potential chapters was rapidly blooming into a black hole of fascination, whose gravitational forces sucked at my time and attention.
As in the Sorcerer's Apprentice video with which I introduced this project, the more I attacked the marching brooms which my plans had brought to life, the more they multiplied. Each one carried only a single bucket of water, but they added up to an ocean that threatened to drown me.
So eventually I just gave up the extremely grandiose idea of treating ESL mickey-mousing definitively. I am putting something out there, and that's enough. If teachers and/or researchers make some use of it, I will be very satisfied. It doesn't have to be the Great American Novel.
What exists of the theory already lacks sufficient detail. At least for the time being, I'm going to put off forays into extending the framework to new music-to-language-learning parallels. On the whole, it has been the attention-to-detail aspect, not the more general syntheses and discovery of principles, that has intimidated and occupied me the most anyway, even before beginning this project.
As Murphey (1992) pointed out, there is no "standard" music to use in language learning. But if I've accomplished nothing else, I've shown that some music and ways of using it are demonstrably more suited to certain language and learning goals than are others.
After graduation, if the interest is there, I'll add a page to this site with a catalog of specific music and music activities which suit specific language or goals especially well. I've already created a forum page, which I hope readers will use to put resources of this kind out there for all (yes, this means that I'm hoping others will do my job for me!)
So ... this chapter of my story ends like Mickey's in the Sorcerer's Apprentice; after his adventure, Mickey is forced to return to doing the sorcerer's grunt work. And it is to the details of mickey-mousing I return ... until, like Mickey, I get myself into some other dangerous adventure, by casting my own spells on the workings of some theory ... spells whose power I was never trained to fully control.