Basic module - level 1

Music experience lessons and multimodality in special education
This hands-on course focuses on music education for children in all clusters of special education. We take the multimodal pedagogy as our starting point, that is, we start from the question of how to elicit a musical experience from the child with a disability. In doing so, we put all the senses on edge. Experience in and through music is the starting point.

Multimodalitty
In this course, we look at how multimodal pedagogy can be used in music education to stimulate and regulate a musical interaction process between the music teacher and the child with a disability. By multimodality we mean the information that the music teacher deploys from different sensory modalities, such as gestures, whole-body movements, speech, images, sound and the use of materials. This involves not only the deployment of different senses such as hearing, touch, sight, smell, taste, and proprioception, but more importantly the way in which the senses are connected and integrated, with the goal of enhancing the musical interaction process and communicative skills in children with disabilities (Hull & Nelson, 2005).

Music experience lessons
Multimodal pedagogy is practically applied in music experience lessons. These lessons in special education are characterized by activities in which musical characteristics (such as tempo, measure, atmosphere) are directly connected to the experience. During the course, you will learn how by using various sensory experiences (such as feeling materials, seeing and participating in gestures, movements and facial expressions, and hearing intonation of the voice and sound of the music) you can elicit a musical experience in through different physical levels (senses).

Curriculum
The course consists if two Saturdays and an internship period in-between. 

• participants develop knowledge and skills about multimodal pedagogy and music experience lessons in special education
• these knowledge and skills are supported with theory and applied in practice
• during their internship, participants learn how to design music experience lessons in special education.
• participants learn to design their own music experience lessons independently.
• participants learn to reflect on their own professional actions through intervision and to analyze how interaction between teacher and student can be strengthened using a multimodal pedagogy.

Certificate
If the student has fulfilled the assignments, he/she will receive the certificate ‘Music Experience Lessons and Multimodality in Special Education’ from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam at the end of the course.

Please note: this course is taught in Dutch