Learning to teach composing with LEGO: A hands-on workshop exploring the affordances and constraints of compositional task design

Abstract

This workshop will engage participants in experiences using LEGO blocks as a metaphoric materials set for exploring music composing task design and assessment. Each participant will work with a commercially available LEGO “Reflections” kit, consisting of a variety of construction blocks. Through a progressive sequence of building and reflecting experiences, participants will explore the practical parallels and connections between the design of creative building experiences with LEGO and creative composing experiences with and in sound. Participants will be led through four modes of experience design – prototypical, focused, convergent, and divergent (see following table): Design Mode Lego Task Music Composition Task Prototypical Design Build a Tower Genre study (ex. Write a ‘Blues’) Focused Design Build something, but no blocks of the same color can touch or be in the same plane. Etude (ex. Write an ABA piece in the Lydian mode) Convergent Design Build a 4 x 8 x 5 solid block Highly constrained task (ex., Using only crochets and quavers, write a melody that ascends beginning on A to an F and back to an A over 4 4/4 bars.) Divergent Design Build anything you’d like Free/Open composition Participants will be asked to identify the “genres” of buildings that emerge through the building experiences and how the reflective conversation with materials (Schön, 1996) over the course of the experience influences their anxiety, creative freedom, and selfefficacy. Finally, participants will be asked to connect their own experiences composing music in school and out-of-school settings to their experiences working with the LEGO kits. The pedagogical structure of the workshop was developed through action research exploring metaphors of building and architecture as a means of introducing advanced concepts of music composition task design and assessment to pre-service music educators without a deep, pre-existing experiential base in composing and composing pedagogy.