I joined the Writing Fellowship in order to update the assignments for MUHST 212, a writing course about 19th- and 20th-century classical music for majors. In the past, the final project for the course was a research paper in which students were asked to make an argument about a piece of music and related primary sources, all of which I had pre-selected for them. I found that the papers, though often well put together, lacked creativity, and very few of the students seemed excited about them in our meetings. I wanted to revise the projects to bring a sense of discovery and creativity into the process, to help students understand both how and why music historians do our work.
After spending time in the fellowship, I have created two new assignments. The first, which will be the new big project for the course, is a history and analysis of a 19th-century virtuoso performer. Students are allowed to pick any performer they would like to study, although I have provided suggestions. They will write their history based on 19th-century reviews of the performer and on analysis of the performer’s repertoire. They are asked to write the history as if it is meant for inclusion in an anthology about 19th-century performers aimed at other college music students. The assignment thus asks them to do some of the same work with primary sources and musical analysis as the previous project but has greater scope for creativity and a clearer end goal. The assignment is also more explicit in asking them to write with flair in order to engage their target audience.
The second, shorter assignment is a post in the style of r/Askhistorians, an online forum on which historians answer user questions. Students will bring to class examples of implausible-sounding stories about classical music that they have heard over their careers as performers. We will have a random draw in class in which each student will pick a question. Then the student will have to research whether or not the story is true and explain the issues the story raises in a short post. This will help them learn how to use academic databases and reliable tertiary sources to investigate history and will hopefully teach them to be more cautious when hearing and repeating tall tales in classical music.
The fellowship has provided an important space to rethink my writing assignments as well as guidance and a supportive community.
Among the sessions, the most important to guiding my new assignments were the sessions on learning goals and on crafting formal writing assignments/multimodality. For our session on learning goals, we were encouraged to think through our different goals, outcomes, assignments, and small assignments. I particularly valued differentiating big goals from measurable outcomes, especially after listening to the other members of the writing group discuss their goals. This helped me think bigger for my course goals while also creating measurable learning outcomes related to those goals.
The session on formal writing assignments—and especially the readings on multimodality—were also useful in crafting the assignments. I find it useful to imagine formal writing as one in a number of different modalities that I could use for final projects. This enables me to think through what exactly I am hoping the students will gain from writing and to articulate to them how and why they should write.
More broadly, I often find that I put off major revisions to a course (such as rewriting all the assignments) in an effort to save time. This fellowship has provided space and structure to do this work as well as a great community for providing feedback. Like many of my students, I need deadlines, structure, and constructive feedback in order to do better work.
