An examination of the educational records of more than 62,000 adult undergraduates at 48 colleges finds that students who had sought and been awarded academic credit by their institutions for "prior learning" earned in the military, corporate training and other non-classroom settings were more than twice as likely to graduate, and to persist even if they did not graduate, than were their peers who had not earned such credit.
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News: The 'Prior Learning' Edge - Inside Higher Ed - 15 views
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“CAEL’s research confirms that prior-learning assessment can help adults move faster toward their associate’s and baccalaureate degrees. We need to see more institutions offering this option and more adults participating in it.”
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The concept of "prior learning assessment" is decades old, and it has grown to include multiple types of mechanisms for measuring knowledge and skills that students have accumulated through various types of formal and less formal formats, such corporate training, work experience, and independent study. The most common types of assessments include standardized exams developed by the College Board (the College Level Examination Program exams and Advanced Placement exams), the American Council of Education's guides for recognizing credit for instructional programs offered in the military and by employers, and institutional reviews of individualized student portfolios.
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credit awarded through prior learning assessments offers an opportunity to entice adults back to college with the prospect that they can build on learning they've already gained and reduce both the time and money they might have to expend to earn a credential.
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"Do PLA students have higher graduation rates because PLA enhances the self-esteem and motivation of students by showing them that they have already mastered college-level learning? Is it also because PLA students already possess characteristics that are associated with better academic outcomes? What institutional policies are influencing whether and how students are using (or not using) PLA, and whether or not this helps them achieve a shorter time to degree?"
Notely : Student Organisation Made Easy - 68 views
Jim Burke: English Companion - 29 views
www.englishcompanion.com/...notemaking.shtml
study skills studyskills note taking note-taking graphic organizer graphicorganizers
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shared by Keith Rowley on 20 Jun 11
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Brief meditative exercise helps cognition - 5 views
www.sciencedaily.com/...100414184220.htm
meditation cognition exercise brain mindfulness psychology spirituality personal news
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deniseahlquist liked it
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"Simply stated, the profound improvements that we found after just 4 days of meditation training- are really surprising," Zeidan noted. "It goes to show that the mind is, in fact, easily changeable and highly influenced, especially by meditation."
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Both groups also improved following the meditation and reading experiences in measures of mood, but only the group that received the meditation training improved significantly in the cognitive measures. The meditation group scored consistently higher averages than the reading/listening group on all the cognitive tests and as much as ten times better on one challenging test that involved sustaining the ability to focus, while holding other information in mind. "The meditation group did especially better on all the cognitive tests that were timed," Zeidan noted. "In tasks where participants had to process information under time constraints causing stress, the group briefly trained in mindfulness performed significantly better."
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"Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention,"
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seems to be strong evidence for the idea that we may be able to modify our own minds to improve our cognitive processing -- most importantly in the ability to sustain attention and vigilance -- within a week's time."
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The meditation training involved in the study was an abbreviated "mindfulness" training regime modeled on basic "Shamatha skills" from a Buddhist meditation tradition
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participants were instructed to relax, with their eyes closed, and to simply focus on the flow of their breath occurring at the tip of their nose. If a random thought arose, they were told to passively notice and acknowledge the thought and to simply let 'it' go, by bringing the attention back to the sensations of the breath."
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"The simple process of focusing on the breath in a relaxed manner, in a way that teaches you to regulate your emotions by raising one's awareness of mental processes as they're happening is like working out a bicep, but you are doing it to your brain. Mindfulness meditation teaches you to release sensory events that would easily distract, whether it is your own thoughts or an external noise, in an emotion-regulating fashion.
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"This kind of training seems to prepare the mind for activity, but it's not necessarily permanent," Zeidan cautions. "This doesn't mean that you meditate for four days and you're done -- you need to keep practicing."
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shared by anonymous on 04 Sep 11
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Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 70 views
www.nytimes.com/...-faces-questions-on-value.html
technology schools change critique measurement effectiveness integration
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Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
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there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again
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“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
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$46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
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The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
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Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
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“Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
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The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
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rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
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creating an impetus to rethink education entirely
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But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
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“There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
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Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
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“Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
SLCC - Learning Handouts - 85 views
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A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views
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at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
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What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
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students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
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As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
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Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
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Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
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It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
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Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
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Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
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Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
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Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
Note-taking - 98 views
www.memory-key.com/...notetaking.htm
note taking study skills memory psychology Cognitive Learning Theory elaboration
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High School Graduates Feel Unprepared For College and Work, Survey Finds - College Boun... - 44 views
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5. Have an assessment late in high school so students can find out what they need for college (77 percent.)
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So, how can high schools better serve students and bridge this divide? Respondents' top suggestions for change: 1. Provide opportunities for real-world learning (90 percent);
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A recent survey of public high school graduates finds about half feel they are unprepared for life after high school and most would have worked harder if they had realized the expectations of college and the workplace.
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I'm not so sure that I believe that less than 1,500 graduates nationwide over the span of just three graduating classes is exactly representative of all high school grads in America, but at least it was conducted by a nonprofit and not one of our education deformer companies or a textbook publisher. Also, isn't a certain amount of laissez-faire attitude a normal teenage brain condition? "I wish I'd paid more attention in high school" was a major theme of conversation at *my* 20 year high school reunion last year (did I just date myself) BUT I did feel better prepared in study skills and habits, perhaps because in 1993 we weren't so test-centered. Just sayin' Thanks for sharing!
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Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle - Scott Edinger - Harvard... - 99 views
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Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle by Scott Edinger | 9:00 AM January 17, 2013 Comments (78) In my nearly 20 years of work in organization development, I've never heard anyone say that a leader communicated too much or too well. On the contrary, the most common improvement suggestion I've seen offered up on the thousands of 360 evaluations I've reviewed over the years is that it would be better if the subject in question learned to communicate more effectively. What makes someone a good communicator? There's no mystery here, not since Aristotle identified the three critical elements — ethos, pathos, and logos. — thousands of years ago. Ethos is essentially your credibility — that is, the reason people should believe what you're saying. In writing this blog I made an effort to demonstrate my ethos in the introduction, and here I'll just add that I have a degree in communication studies (emphasis in rhetoric for those who want the details) for good measure. In some cases, ethos comes merely from your rank within an organization. More commonly, though, today's leaders build ethos most
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Using Social Bookmarking in Schools and with your Students- Part Two | Silvia Tolisano-... - 17 views
langwitches.org/...nd-with-your-students-part-two
b social bookmarking education bookmarking socialbookmarking social students web2.0 Technology
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need to evaluate and interpret information tag bookmarks (their own and/or the ones collected by their teacher) summarize bookmarks (their own and/or the ones shared by teacher) take advantage of “experts in the field” (by subscribing to their RSS for specific tags) learn to search for relevant information beyond “googling” collaborate with other members of a study group (local or global)
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Remember that it is NOT about the tools we use with our students, but the skills we are exposing them to and want them to get proficient in.
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a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.
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Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views
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"Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
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The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
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It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
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Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
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Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
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raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
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It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
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n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
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I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
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This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
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Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
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I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
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When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
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Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
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ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
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In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
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n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
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Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
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Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
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I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
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Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
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Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
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In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
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If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
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After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
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n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
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In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
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Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
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Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
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Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
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Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
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n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
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While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
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By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
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which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
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. On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
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Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
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Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
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The rise of creative youth development: Arts Education Policy Review: Vol 118, No 1 - 3 views
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The article describes creative youth development in the larger contexts of arts education and of education reform.
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Lastly, the article discusses policy, funding, and research needs and opportunities and provides questions for consideration.
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Yet these two worlds largely exist apart, failing to address the reality that youth learn and grow—or fail to reach their potential—through influences and experiences in all spheres of their lives, including home, school, and the settings where they spend time outside of schoo
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attention due to their high levels of youth engagement that contribute to substantial learning, enhanced critical thinking
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Decades of research findings link adolescent engagement, efficacy, and responsibility with opportunities for immersion and mastery, connection in a community of practice, embracing youth voice, and cultivating youth leadership with adolescent engagement, and non-school settings have emerged as crucial developmental and learning environments for youth
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Throughout the United States, teen participants in CYD programs assert that the programs saved their lives, putting them on positive trajectories and away from gangs, drug use, crime, and ennui.
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The creative process at the center of CYD programs contributes to profound personal growth for youth participants
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And as they experience the creative process over an extended period, they learn that they can use it to express their own identities, understand and change the world around them, and connect to the greater human experience.”
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community of practice of youth artists and their artist mentors, the paid, professional artists who comprise the full-time faculty. SAY Sí boasts a 100% rate of graduation and pursuit of higher education in a community with a 45% dropout rat
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hese programs had a central belief in the ability of young people to achieve and grow artistically and personally through creative expression and skill building in the arts.
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impact of arts-based youth programs in reducing risk factors and building protective factors in a study conducted in three American cities
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She also catalogued characteristics of effective CYD programs, such as supporting risk within a safe space (
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Teens develop intrinsic motivation as they immerse themselves and develop competence in a topic, connect with others who share this interest, and work with educators positioned as senior collaborators—