Madison Howbert

Culturally Diverse Lesson

● What makes the students within your classroom unique and diverse?
○ What makes our students unique and diverse is the experiences they’ve had in
life so far, their home lives, their backgrounds, their personalities, and the
support system that our students have in place.
● What are their linguistic and learning needs?
○ Their linguistic and learning needs would be to foster the ability to make music,
as well as understand the background of the piece and understand where the
composer is coming from/motives behind making the piece. Additionally, being
able to identify where themes are recurring and where they come from.
● What factors did you take into consideration when planning this culturally responsive
literacy lesson?
○ I took into consideration different areas of the world that I can incorporate into my
classroom, and ways that I can get my students immersed in the culture to
further understand the pieces.

Variations on a Korean Folk Song

Before- 10 Minutes:
Before the students get their parts, I will give them some background on Korean folk songs.
Then I will go into detail about the regions around Korea and how the culture came to be, as
well as what influences from the different cultures may show in their music and history.

During- 30 Minutes:
During the sight-reading, I’ll have them road map the piece before we even play it. I’ll have them
circle important notes such as key changes, tempo changes, accidentals, and take note of any
articulation discrepancies. After I give them a minute or two to look through the piece a little bit.
We will start reading it. After we dig into it a little bit, I’ll have them start to identify themes in the
piece and where they think they originated from. After that, I’ll give them some background
about the piece and the composer, and any additional information the piece provides. After
giving them that info, we will dig back into reading and practicing the piece with the background
knowledge.

After-10 Minutes:
After reading the piece during class, I will have the students take the themes that they
recognized and do a little preliminary research. I will have them predict what region they think
the influence could be from. Then to wrap it all together I’ll have them do a Think, Pair, Share
with a partner to see what the ensemble thinks. After we do a Think, Pair, Share, then each pair
will create a story about how they think the piece represents the culture and the region. After we
talk about how the culture is represented in the music, I could have the students compose a little
16 bar piece of their own that they think is also representative of the culture.

Drums of Rwanda

Before- 10 Minutes:
Before the students get their parts for Drums of Rwanda, I will play the recurring anthem in the
piece for them with a speaker. I will then have them guess where they think the music is from.
After I take some guesses, I will tell them the title of the piece and where the piece is about. I
will only give basic background information as I want them to do some of their own research
later.

During- 20 Minutes:
I will hand out the piece and we will begin the sight-reading process. I will have them road map
the piece by giving them a minute or two to look at the piece for any key changes, tempo
changes, changes in time signature, and any spots that they might need to hash out a little first.
After we make it through the piece once, I will have them listen to the main theme that I played
at the beginning and have them identify where they have that theme in their music.

After- 20 Minutes:
After we have identified the themes of the piece, we will do some research on the region. I will
then assign each student a role in the community of Rwanda and they will then have to tell us
what it would be like to live a day in the community. They can do this by either telling us a story,
or by composing a short little piece about their life. We may not get to all students in the 20-
minute period, so if this happens then we will resume the stories/presentations next class
period.