Graphic Design in the Classroom?

Why might incorporating graphic design into the music classroom be valuable?

This week's readings provided several examples of how to incorporate graphic design into the classroom to benefit student learning. As I thought about the different types of learners that I see in my music classes, certain points stuck out as to me as to why graphic design would be valuable in my class. Graphics can appeal to a multitude of learning styles that we see in our classrooms every day. The most obvious is the visual learner. But having students use graphics in the classroom also can help the kinesthetic learners, who learn by DOING, by having students work on creating their own graphics for projects. Students who become stressed with lots of words or auditory information, can more easily process the information from a graphic, which presents information in a simple, to-the-point manner. While most of the projects we do involve graphic representations of music notes, I suppose I could find a way to have students add graphics to their compositions, and produce a video of their compositions instead of just an audio recording. 

How might we better support the learners in our classrooms?

Knowing that students learn in multiple means, such as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, by providing activities such as bell-ringers or projects where students can create their own graphics, students who need hands-on learning opportunities can benefit from creating graphic visuals. Using graphics to introduce an idea can help visual learners understand information more easily by providing less visual distractions. Since students retain 80% of what they see and do (Wyzowl, 2019), students with multiple learning styles would truly benefit from the use of graphics in their lessons.

Teachers can support the learners in our classrooms by presenting material using infographics and allowing students to demonstrate learning through creation of infographics. Infographics can be used to demonstrate understanding of factual information, play games, spur classroom debates, or add to presentations. This provides multiple means for students to demonstrate understanding of concepts.

How would I use this in music?

While I am struggling to think of how I could have students use additional graphics in my classroom, I could definitely introduce musical concepts through graphics in my presentations. Much of what we already do in music uses graphic representations of notes through icons. These icons are then transferred to plain black dot notation, another graphic representation, and then finally the actual music notation. 

For students, we use most of the graphic representation in our music compositions, where students are using music notation to represent their sounds. Last year the 4th grade students used graphic representations of music notes in a Google Slide to notate their music compositions that they had recorded in FlipGrid. In 1st grade students used graphic notation in Chrome Music Lab to compose a melody on top of a rhythm. I am hoping to extend the graphic compositions to 5th grade this year using SoundTrap to represent musical loops. As far as infographics, I would probably have 4th graders add to their music compositions by inserting a graphic into their presentations.

The Power of Visual Communication Infographic, (Wzyowl, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.wyzowl.com/infographic-the-power-of-visual-communication/.