Authors: Brian Culver • Nancy Reale
We have seen from many years of experience teaching a complex and demanding set of core humanities courses that deal with the verbal, visual, and musical arts of many traditions across the globe that instructors of our Cultural Foundations courses face a range of pedagogical challenges; with teaching music among the most daunting of these. In an effort to address that problem, we have invested considerable time developing resources that might assist our colleagues in a variety of ways. We have developed background materials that can be directly assigned to students and listening charts to guide listeners through specific performances. We also created screencasts and videos, hoping to capitalize on some of the digital capabilities NYU offers through Bobst Library and the IT staff of FAS. We next incorporated much of our work into the online Cengage platform currently being used for Cultural Foundations with the Gardner art history text used across the Program to make the work on music available to faculty and students at all Liberal Studies sites. The goal was to offer resources that could be selected by individual instructors for use in their classes and/or to allow students to explore those resources independent of their classes. Nevertheless, we were less than satisfied with what had been an effort to keep pace with our needs by modifying the delivery systems available to us. We felt we needed a better repository of our resources that could serve as a single “go-to” site that would make clear what resources and tools are available and that would present those materials in a systematic way.
Consequently, during the summer of 2016, we resumed work on the dissemination of teaching materials related to music, this time with a new slant: the creation of a dedicated Google Sites website available to (G)LS faculty and students anywhere in the world. With the assistance of IT staff, we were able to give shape to a website that is now partially populated with a variety of materials and that—critically—has the potential to grow with relatively little regular oversight. It also has the great benefit of being a closed site, open only to those in the NYU community who are invited to use it.
Our project fell into three parts. The first was a poll of faculty (both here and at the away-sites) to get a sense of both the kinds of resources that would be most valued, and the forms (electronic and otherwise) these should take. Second, based on our poll data, we needed to design a site that would best accommodate the materials we had produced during past summers. Third, again based on our poll data, we wanted to create a few new materials to meet what were thought to be the most urgent needs faculty had expressed.
The learning curve was relatively steep as we were guided by our liaison in IT regarding choices about appearance and organization of the site. For instance, she made clear to us the reality that students would be more likely to access the site from their smartphones than their computers, so we should think about presentation of material from the standpoint of appearance on a small screen. We had to learn how to mount materials and add links, how to create hierarchies, how to set permissions, and so forth. We also considered where to build deliberate redundancies into the site so that materials could be located by people beginning from a variety of starting points. It was clear that a search engine would be crucial, and, fortunately, Google Sites makes inclusion of this important tool effortless.
Thus, for the summer, our goal was to begin to mount resources that we had already created and to write some new material, concentrating on materials that would be relevant to the Cultural Foundations 3 courses being taught this fall. This direction was determined both by our poll data and by our desire to offer a range of models for teaching music in the context of our Liberal Studies classes. We added, for instance, a relatively long essay on Algerian rai music that offers historical context for this popular form (with other supporting materials) and also multiple shorter “case studies” of particular pieces of contemporary music.
The site, while not complete, is fully functional and now available to our colleagues at all our sites. Indeed, all LS and GLS freshmen have direct access to the site because a tab for it has been added to freshman Cultural Foundations NYU Classes sites. The website was introduced to some of the faculty at the global sites during a summer LS Conference in London, and it is currently being introduced to New York faculty at various meetings during the fall semester. It is our hope that our colleagues will not only use the materials we have produced and gathered, but also make their own contributions to the site both to enhance the ways we teach music in Liberal Studies and to deepen the connections among the faculty members who teach Cultural Foundations for Liberal Studies across the globe.