Art, Music, Physical Education--and Pronunciation

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Here is a document showing essential K-5 outcomes in Art, Music, and Physical Education. Careful examination (with your "analogy-detector" activated) reveals any number of ways in which pronunciation instruction shares features and fundamental pedagogical strategies with those three disciplines, including being seen by many as peripheral to core instruction.

In fact, many of the current shortcomings of contemporary pronunciation teaching relate quite directly to its not being sufficiently artistic (tied to expressiveness), musical (attending to prosodic features such as intonation and rhythm) and "physical" (cf. HICP, of course!)  Likewise, when the education culture sees art, music and physical education as first in line during budget cutting, it should come as little surprise that pronunciation instruction falls in the same category. Although there are any number of reasons within the recent development of the field from communicative language teaching forward for the declining interest in pronunciation teaching, the trend represents a more general evolving, post-modern societal attitude toward form, body and person.

Pronunciation teaching as we know it, as a more or less discrete, "skill-based" specialization that is of sufficient value to the field such that it should be reestablished in teacher training programs in these times of fiscal and form-based restraint may well be beyond resuscitation.

Aesthetic (haptic) touch

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For many, the idea of attending to touch is considerably outside of their conceptual box and comfort zone. Linked above is a nice piece from a sculptor, Rosalyn Driscoll, that helps to inform our understanding of the way in which the creative use of touch can be experienced. One dimension of her art is that the audience actually touches the pieces or projects and in that manner comes to interpret and appreciate it. The felt sense of that process--and HICP work, I might add-- ought to to be an attitude or mindset of curiosity, sensitivity and appreciation. When it is, being able to later recall and integrate what was in focus is much more than just a nice "aesthetic touch"--it is the essence of sound learning. Our students as well ought to be "touched" by our EHIEP instruction and theirs.