Using the National Core Arts Standards in El Sistema-inspired Programming

Description

The Longy MAT Graduate Fellows are pursuing how to help El Sistema better serve students and complement in-school music teachers through National Core Arts Standards driven curriculum. When El Sistema and El Sistema-inspired programs occupy the same community, we need to bridge the gap between excellence in music performance and help ensure our students are meeting national and state standards. Similarly, in communities with only El Sistema music education, we propose utilizing these standards to ensure these students are meeting the same benchmarks (or exceeding them) as their peers in other communities. The significance of this is to expose El Sistema programs who do not have in-school music education (and support the in-school programs) in their communities to the standards that develop higher level skills and knowledge in students deemed as vital by nationally recognized organizations. The standards aim to build not only on performance excellence, but also have students engage in creating and producing new content, responding to, and connecting to the world they live in through music education. We propose presenting these standards in ways that are more friendly to those who have not engaged with the standards deeply, or are otherwise unfamiliar. We intend to show lesson and unit plan templates that can be utilized to organize the El Sistema teaching space in a way that addresses standards while maintaining the integrity of El Sistema’s standard of excellence.

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