Singing Folk Songs in the Elementary School Classroom
by Rika Ruebsaat, VFSS member and teacher
In February 1983 I was hired by the Surrey School District to teach grade six and seven music in five schools in south Surrey, temporarily replacing a teacher on maternity leave. There were apparently over a hundred applicants for the job and I think the reason I was successful is because the Surrey Fine Arts Coordinator who interviewed me was familiar with the work Jon and I had done in schools.
When I started the job the teachers in the schools I worked in kept telling me how the kids hated music class and that I had a tough job ahead of me. My first thought was that my predecessor obviously didn’t know how to musically engage the kids. I also realized that in a culture where songs are a commodity, getting children on the cusp of puberty to sing with their peers could be a challenge. I trusted that the Canadian songs I taught and the interesting stories that went with them would engage the children sufficiently to overcome their reluctance to sing. I was right. With the exception of one grade seven class, all my pupils sang enthusiastically. The highlight of the term was the French immersion pupils at Sunnyside Elementary who mastered some tongue-twisting, rapid-fire Quebecois songs.
In the following two school years I was hired to teach the Core Music Program to grades one to four pupils in three Surrey schools. The purpose of this program was to teach musical literacy. I had serious reservations about the relevance of teaching musical literacy in a culture where people are alienated from music-making. I thought having fun making music together was much more important. I kept my mouth shut, however, and proceeded to teach what I thought was important, throwing in the occasional musical literacy lesson to cover my ass. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t actually want to be a music teacher because I believed that singing should be integrated into everyday life rather than being something separate that only specialists could teach. I was thus overjoyed when I was told apologetically that the music budget had been cut and that after 2 ½ years as a music teacher I would have to be a classroom teacher. Thus was launched the most satisfying period of my teaching career.
I realize upon reflection that my approach to singing in the classroom was an attempt to replicate the integrated, situational way I had experienced singing while growing up. I believed that singing was not the reserve of professional performers or music specialists; everyone could sing and songs could happen anytime, not just during music class. Singing should be part of daily classroom conversation and contribute to the formation and consolidation of the classroom community. I therefore integrated songs into the overall curriculum. I developed themed units of study that incorporated mathematics, science, social studies, language arts, drama, physical education, visual arts and singing. “The Lumberyard” was one such unit. For science we studied trees – how to identify them and how they grow – and forest ecology. We also studied the physics of fire culminating in the building of campfires in the forest behind the school. In social studies we studied the history and technology of logging. In art we made pictures and sculptures illustrating what we had learned in social studies. In language arts we read logging stories and histories and wrote tall tales modeled on Paul Bunyan stories. In physical education we learned the type of dance that would have happened in a logging camp. In music we sang logging songs. In drama we put on a performance incorporating the songs and stories we had studied. At the end of the performance pupils and families did the dance we had learned in physical education. In math we learned how to measure volume, how to draw a plan and how to budget. Parents donated scrap lumber which pupils measured and priced by volume. Each pupil was given a budget and an old chequebook with which to buy lumber for their building project. The unit ended in a week of measuring, sawing, hammering and building with parent volunteers and their tools working with pupils to build birdhouses, benches or whatever.
I taught several such units on themes such as homesteading, tall ships and transportation. (See Songs and Stories of Canada here.) In all of these units the singing was integrated seamlessly into the curriculum rather than being set apart.
This integration of song raises some difficulties. When I was in elementary school we had no music specialists. Singing was taught by classroom teachers who likely had a repertoire of songs in their heads and/or felt confident enough to teach the songs in the music curriculum songbooks. There were also CBC Schools Broadcasts to draw from. These days most classroom teachers—except perhaps those in the early primary grades—don’t sing with their pupils. In fact, the thought of singing in front of others, even children, intimidates many people. This means that pupils sing maybe once or twice a week when the music specialist parachutes into the school. The message is that singing is not as important as the other subjects and is the domain only of special people.
I think that in my classroom teaching I was successful in creating communities where singing was an integral part on the ongoing conversation. This was evidenced by the enthusiasm with which my pupils sang and the degree to which they took ownership of singing. On field trips pupils would burst into song on the bus and would even sing the interstitial guitar bass runs that I usually played in the classroom. Singing happened even during math class: one pupil would hum one of our songs to themselves and pretty soon the whole class was singing while doing their math. Whenever I happened to run into adult former pupils they would tell me how important the singing had been for them: that they still had their classroom songbook or that they got together with former classmates to sing the songs.
One of the reasons Jon and I decided to become teachers is because we wanted to have input into the way singing was taught in schools. Essentially we wanted our integrated approach to be more wide-spread. As certified teachers we thought that we might have the credibility to find a way to weave singing into the overall curriculum. When we produced the radio series and educational kit Songs and Stories of Canada we hoped that it would be a springboard for this to happen. I realize now that our hope was naive and that the only way we could have achieved our goal was to clone ourselves. You cannot create a classroom singing community in a culture where songs are a commodity and where only special people get to sing. Only people fortunate enough to have experienced a community of song can hope to replicate that experience in their classrooms. I discovered this when I taught at Simon Fraser University.
From 1996 until 1998 I was seconded as a Faculty Associate to the teacher education program at Simon Fraser University. Students in the program were divided into modules of 32 students, each led by two Faculty Associates. The module I worked in was for future elementary school teachers. We were based at Trinity Western University, which at that time had no teacher education program, and my students were predominantly TWU graduates. The program consisted of time on campus and two multi-week teaching practicums. While we were together on campus I began every session with singing. I taught songs orally and then for the longer songs I provided songsheets. All the songs were ones I had sung with my pupils. Where relevant I described the way in which I had incorporated each song into my classroom teaching. My original intention with the singing on campus was to create the same feeling of community that singing together in the classroom had engendered. I wanted the singing to be enjoyable and free of any sense of it being an assignment or of, “This is what you ought to do when you teach.” As a result we had a lot of fun singing together and, as it turned out, all of my student teachers sang with their pupils during their practicums, which was very gratifying. I remember one incident in particular. I was observing a student who planned to do a teaching-for-thinking discussion session with a grade one class. He was quite nervous about having me observe such a loosely structured type of lesson with pupils so young. To make matters worse, before he could begin the lesson he had to wait for some pupils to return from an ESL class. He decided to use the wait time to sing with his pupils and as the ESL pupils came straggling back to class they sat down and joined the singing. When the last song ended he launched into his lesson, which was a big success. The pupils were engaged and the discussion was fruitful. During our debriefing session he was quite stunned by how well the lesson had gone. I asked him if he had any idea why that should be. He had no explanation. I asked him to remember what was happening just before he began the lesson. Aha, the singing! We concluded that singing together had created such a sense of cohesion and focus that the transition into the discussion was seamless.
Another highlight was something that happened several years later when I was back in the classroom. After school a young woman who had been one of my student teachers came bursting into my classroom and gave me a big hug. She told me she was giving professional development workshops to teachers on incorporating songs into the science curriculum and that it was all thanks to how we had sung together on campus. I was, of course, delighted because, not only had she taken to heart the power of singing in the classroom, but she had understood and elaborated on the effectiveness of song across the curriculum.
I believe my success using song with student teachers was connected to the demographics of my students. The vast majority were practising Christians who were members of congregations and accustomed to singing together in church. They thus understood communality and were not intimidated by singing. Had I been based at the SFU campus I think my students would have been much more hesitant to sing. They would likely never have experienced singing as a community-building activity and would have felt extremely self-conscious bursting into song at the front of a class.
In our music-as-commodity culture it almost impossible to integrate singing into everyday classroom practice. Most teachers are products of mainstream culture where singing is done by professionals and is bought and sold via concerts and electronic media. Perhaps the only time they sing is while listening to the radio or perhaps in the shower with nobody listening. For them singing is a performance art done by special people. Unless they are churchgoers or belong to a choir they will have had no experience of communal singing. They would also not have a repertoire of songs in their heads to sing with their pupils. When I went to elementary school in the 1950s we sang in the classroom. In those days many teachers could play the piano and many classrooms had pianos in them. We learned songs from the songbooks that complemented the music curriculum. There was also a body of songs such as “Oh No, John, No,” or “The Quartermasters Store” that everyone seemed to know that we sang together. There is no equivalent today.
One could compare teaching music in schools to teaching physical education. Physical activity is essential to good health and is taught throughout the elementary school grades, usually by the classroom teacher. In high school physical education is taught by specialists. When I was in high school it was mandatory until grade 10. After that it was an elective. Today physical activity is included in the learning standards of the Physical and Health Education curriculum until grade 10. For grades 11 and 12 kids must document 150 hours of physical activity per week in order to graduate. What typically happens in high school is that PE teachers spot talented athletes and recruit them for teams that compete with other schools. Particularly talented athletes are encouraged to become professional.
Unlike physical education, which is considered essential, the place of music in schools has slid into the inessential realm. There is a K-12 music curriculum but in elementary schools, if there are no music specialists, the pupils receive no music instruction unless classroom teachers do it, which in my experience they don’t. In high school music is an elective that can be chosen from one of the fine arts together with drama and visual arts, all of which are taught by specialists. The musically skilled get to be in the school choir or the band and the gifted ones are encouraged to become professional. This propagates the notion that music is to be made only by special people whose performances we purchase. Rather than integrating music into people’s everyday lives, music education thus reinforces mainstream culture’s tendency to commodify everything.