Collegiate Connections

Elon University, Elon, North Carolina; Advisor: Gerald Knight

Music in the Village is a component of Elon University’s service learning program “It Takes a Village Project”—intensive literacy development offered to disadvantaged local children and parents.

Music courses are offered in the program because many skills required to understand and learn music also play a role in reading comprehension. Elon’s NAfME Collegiate chapter embraced the project, which now has eighty children and their families participating in music literacy and choir. The curriculum includes classes in group piano, guitar, percussion, choir, and music technology. The children and their parents are exposed to multicultural music and are taught using the specific elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and style already familiar to them. Music reading, writing standard notation, aural skills, and inner hearing are all taught. The chapter strives to build success for the students so that they can gain confidence and begin to transfer concepts about discipline, critical thinking, and expression to other contexts and subjects, especially reading, as well as learning music for its own sake and pleasure.

In 2013, the Music in the Village Choir performed with the Elon University Chorale in its annual fall concert. Including local students in these activities has helped tear down the barriers that exist between the university and the community, and it is helping many of the community’s students become aware of the possibility of attending college. Most students will not select music as a major, but the Elon NAfME Collegiate chapter hopes that, for these students, the experience will be the foundation of a lifelong involvement in music, as participants or supporters of the arts.

Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio; Advisor: Laura Joss

At Baldwin Wallace, 100 percent of the eighty-two students majoring in music education are members of NAfME Collegiate. This is brought about in part by an annual social event on campus.

At the beginning of every fall semester, the Baldwin Wallace NAfME Collegiate chapter and the music education program host a welcome picnic for all new music education students. The new students are given a written riddle describing a specific location in the music building. The newcomers decipher the riddle and go to a location where they find their own chapter mentor (assigned by the advisor) waiting for them with a welcome goodie bag.

The Mentorship Program is a long-standing tradition at Baldwin Wallace, and its primary goal is to support new music education students. It provides the students with a new friend and extra guidance through the first year of college and in their campus life as a music education student.

After the welcome picnic, the chapter follows up with the freshmen through e-mail and personal contact by their mentors. The Mentorship Program ensures that all new music education students join NAfME Collegiate within a few weeks of the picnic.

Indiana University, Bloomington; Advisor: Peter Miksza

The Indiana University (IU) NAfME Collegiate chapter had set a goal to offer at least three master classes to chapter members on music education topics. By mid-December 2013, the chapter had far exceeded this number goal. Typical attendance at a master class is twenty to thirty members.

Spring semester master classes included:

Fall semester master classes included:

Additionally, the chapter helped send five representatives to the NAfME National In-Service Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and one member to NAFME Hill Day in Washington, D.C. These members returned and shared with the chapter what they learned at these national events.

Boise State University, Boise, Idaho; Advisor: D. Gregory Springer

The Boise State NAfME Collegiate chapter hosted its first annual “Take a Risk” recital. Since music education majors study a variety of instruments, piano, and voice, this concert gave them the opportunity to perform on secondary instruments in front of a live audience to showcase their proficiency levels in those areas. The concert was entertaining and enlightening.

Musicians performed on brass, string, percussion, and wind instruments and guitar, piano, and voice. A program of diverse repertoire representing several periods was performed.

Because of the popularity of this first recital, the chapter has decided to make it an annual event.

The chapter projects receiving honorable mention are as follows:

Congratulations to all NAfME Collegiate chapters on your hard work this year!