Some Documentation on my Pedagogical Practices

By Filipe Felizardo on September 19, 2024

Some Documentation on my Pedagogical Practices

Serendipity and collegiality reminded me i do have an abstract for an as of yet unwritten paper that maybe could be of some use if made available. I'm not very much into keeping research a secret, nor for denying anyone else the chance to apply tools or methods i developed for my pedagogical practices.

Filipe Felizardo - 2022

The paper may be developed all the same, but not right now. Time, drudgery, and so on. So what I'm leaving here - lest the world end before i actually share what i constructed - is the abstract for "For More Noise in the Classroom", something i came up with responding to a call for papers touching upon Mattin's theoretical framework of Social Dissonance. I developed a pedagogical activity since 2011 that more or less hinges on turning introduction to music in the infancy on its head. The personal aspect of this is: having gotten a gig for teaching guitar to groups of young children, and not being bound by any curricula, I started doing what appeared to be the most just and pleasant for anyone involved. Not being able to not treat a young person as I would treat an adult, to limit myself to implementing technique and "form" without providing rational explanation for it, things quickly unraveled into collaborative experimentation. I mean, these guitar lessons weren't mandatory, they were extracurricular activities sometimes imposed by parents who wanted their kids to "learn how to play Nothing Else Matters". From that, we got into coming up with stuff like topographical scores or randomly picking entries from the Dictionary of Imaginary Places and improvising with sound in response to those (if i remember well, we once came up with the national anthem for Pierre Guyotat's Ectabane from Tombeau... - which i hadn't yet read back then). Sometimes that got me in trouble with parents, but anyway. The main idea was to allow the learners to find out how they wanted to learn what i could share, and to find out what interested them - not only in music, but in the world.

In the last 13 years i've developed this into a core program for a workshop where i mix music and philosophy in theoretical practice. It can happen in one or more sessions, it has been mostly for groups aged between 6 and 12, and recently i tried it out with ages between 2 and 6 - and that was incredible. You'll get more details below, but with regard to the latter, recent experience: to boil down methods and concepts to the most simple and everyday usage was an incredible exercise for me, and it elicited even more intriguing results. My stakes are: yes, it is perfectly possible to have a conversation with a child about the concept of sameness or negation, especially if helped by musical experimentation and explication of these, in a piece-meal, Socratic fashion. It was very heart-warming to learn that some of this stuff we (me and the kids) came up with in the workshops and those guitar lessons was to be found in Vygotsky and Ilyenkov. Here's looking at you, nameless slave from the "Meno".

In this post you'll find:

1 - The abstract for my paper on the workshop and social dissonance.

2 - A brief entry to show you a link for a broad breakdown of how the standard workshop can go.

3 - A sample from another tool i've developed for myself and provided to teachers as well. The "Infinite Tasks" cue cards. They're in portuguese - a bunch of drawings and words that can be use as cues for mime games, discussion, musical improvisation, whatever. Email me or find me on IG or Twitter and I can provide you with files for printing them.

Here goes!

PART 1 - ABSTRACT for
"For more noise in the classroom: The Constructive Listening Workshop and its pedagogical methodology"

The Constructive Listening Workshop has been performed since 2011 in Portugal and across Europe, aimed at ages between 6 and 12. A recent iteration has extended the age gap to 3-year old children. It is designed as a pedagogical activity relaying musical and philosophical concepts and methodologies through theoretical practice. It hinges on a pedagogical – as opposed to didactical - approach to the act of listening and contact with unusual ways of music-making. Participants are invited to listen to the environment, recordings, and especially themselves, in order to learn concepts and dynamics which will enable them to regard sound as a material for expression and emancipation. The workshop aims to provide synthetic tools in which interpersonal listening is to be seen as a fundamental act of making new music and realize, explicate, or interrogate meaning.

After describing the core structure of workshop, this paper will elucidate how pedagogical practices with this general blueprint hinge on the concept of social dissonance. Such a concept will be proposed as being the locus of the synthetic/dialectical act of learning, as informed by the research of L. Vygotsky and E. Ilyenkov.

We hypothesise that this workshop is appropriate as proof-of-concept, by virtue of the fact that it starts out via an explication of the dual concepts of music and noise, as developed by the learners themselves. We contend that this duality is fruitful for pedagogical purposes, given its polemical semantic status. Furthermore, that this duality's non-representational and thus correlatively presentational status as a cultural form is an ideal starting point for semantic mapping. Such mapping branches out beyond any purportedly self-contained web of musical concepts, and learners are quickly faced with philosophical inquiry.

Discussion between the participants and the instructors accompanied by practice with found objects allows for structuration of a space of possibilities and varied determinate negations as developed from the learners own observations. This method lays out the transparency of social dissonance to learners themselves: their statuses as mere listeners or mere practitioners, as well as those of their performed intentionality, are shown to be in reified form.

Concurrently, the learners can grasp themselves as practitioners of alienation. This allows for three sorts of development: an acknowledgement of meaning as normatively constituted; the possibility of discovering meanings previously unknown to oneself through the explication of instituted norms with others; and the possibility of constructing new meaning in the abstractly negated space of such norms.

To further the main claim of this paper, we suggest that the methods above can be mapped on to any discipline. This is to be done by proposing that, by virtue of its novelty, many concepts transmitted in a learning environment are potentially perceived by the learners as noise. Under this lens, social dissonance is – and must be - always lurking around the classroom: unless any novel concept is dialectically organised with guidance from instructors, learners can only assimilate them in reified and thus, pseudo-intelligible form. In sum, if social dissonance is not recurrently resolved, one is merely being educated as a person-in-a-vat – whereas if it is resolved, one becomes a learner and a social individual.

We aim to show how noise/unintelligibility are interchangeably transformed into music/intelligibility through orthogonal alienation – that is, how new, strange, or complex concepts can be bootstrapped into clearer iterations through engagement with their apparent abstraction. In this manner, learning will be seen as making unintelligibilities intelligible as such, and realizing such noises as newly intelligible semantic facets for a transformed and enriched interpersonal experience.

PART 2 - CONSTRUCTIVE LISTENING WORKSHOP MODEL

In this brief interview after doing the workshop for Insomnia and Skaņu Mežs festivals in 2022, i talk about how the workshop can proceed in some practical detail not mentioned in the abstract above.

PART 3 - INFINITE TASKS: A SAMPLE

The "Infinite Tasks" cue cards are something i came up with after some activities in a public school setting where artists were invited to actively collaborate with teachers (those who were open to it!) in a "education through art" framework. Long story short, i was sort of put into a corner and mostly only allowed to work with two teachers who already had some hours a week for some sort of "socio-cultural integration" (UGH) activities. Of all the docent body in this school, only a 7th grade physics teacher asked me to collaborate - and damn did that go well! We worked on acquiring concepts from physics of sound through engaging with Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room". Anyway - those "socio cultural activities" appeared to involve using some standard issue mime games cards - with, uhm, domestic chores and "professions" - basic, run-of-the-mill, education-for-labor disguised as "fun." That was that: i did my own cue cards, seriously upping the ante into nonsense ("cloud steak"), highly abstract stuff, and some research-based professions.

A bunch of drawings and words that can be used, as originally, cues for mime games, but also for discussion, musical improvisation, whatever. They're in portuguese, but i know some people have used them for the drawings as well, so...
You have to give a lesson in room without any whiteboard or projector? These come in handy. It's only a matter of veering towards where you want to go - or better, where the learners take you to.
Email me or DM me on IG or Twitter (look for Filipe Felizardo, you'll eventually find me) and I can provide you with files for printing the whole collection.

Here's a sample collection: