Perfect Together

Musicals for Integrating Intelligences and Styles

 Musicals are a major form of entertainment, but they can also be content-rich sources for student learning. Curricular approaches can help define how students learn successfully.

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In their book So Each May Learn: Integrating Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences, Silver, Strong & Perini (2000) argue that the use of Multiple Intelligences and learning styles are complimentary approaches that work well together. Musical- related activities and projects are not only for music and drama. They can be utilised in multiple subject areas. Using musicals can be a classroom endeavour or an even school-wide initiative.

Why Musicals?

Musical theatre and subsequent musical film and TV musicals can all impact student learning. Although musicals are designed for entertainment, many of them are written to convey strong messages through storytelling. Both stage and film musicals can be used to educate. Musicals have evolved, especially those written during Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s collaboration from 1943 to 1959. They developed the integrated musical that so many others replicated. Whether the musical is a classic such as The Sound of Music or My Fair Lady or one from a newer genre such as Hamilton or Wicked, there is a musical for everyone. Musicals are creative endeavours that can inspire student and teacher creativity. For detailed information about musicals, consult “The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, Film & Television,” at http://www.musicals101.com/.

Musicals provide strong messages through storytelling, settings, time periods, characters and of course, the musical score. Many songs in musicals are standards that are prominent within popular culture. Songs such as, “Over the Rainbow,” “The Sound of Music,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “Till There Was You,” and “I Could Have Danced All Night,” are a few examples of standards deriving from musicals. All of these components can inspire activities and projects at all levels of instruction and in numerous subject areas.

Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles: Perfect Together Specific learning theories popularised in the 20th century
still have validity today. Multiple Intelligences, developed by Howard Gardner, is one example. He observed that
within education, verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences are emphasised, especially in standardised testing. Yet other types of intelligence are also present within our student populations and should be fostered. While Gardner describes eleven intelligences in his later work, eight of the intelligences have been embraced by educators. Besides verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical, Gardner outlined spatial, musical, kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic. These have been utilised for decades by teachers to encourage student success.

Regarding learning styles, various frameworks have been popularised. Some educators choose to be eclectic, picking and choosing from various best practices and combining them. Silver, Strong & Perini (2000) have created a fusion of Multiple Intelligences and Jungian learning styles for curriculum design. They explain: “One driving mission became to bring these two great models of learning together in a way that would make it easy for educators to use” (p. 2).

The learning styles that Silver et al. (2000) utilise are as follows with a list of abilities (p. 29):

• Mastery: Plan and carry out projects, report, organize, build. • Understanding: Explain, develop theories, research, argue.
• Self-Expressive: Express and create, articulate ideas, develop original solutions, think metaphorically.
• Interpersonal: Teach, build trust and rapport, respond, empathise.

The resulting fusion of Multiple Intelligences and learning styles enables learning to be tailored to students’ strengths. Some activities or projects may emerge more easily for students than others because they match students’ strengths. Yet students should not be precluded from choosing projects that challenge them because this allows them to grow and practice areas that need strengthening. Online quizzes can help determine students’ strengths and weaknesses for both Multiple Intelligences and Jungian learning styles, useful to both teachers and students.

Musicals in the Curriculum

Curricular considerations are key when implementing musicals using Multiple Intelligences and learning styles. It would be interesting to confirm how the numerous learning style models would fair compared to the model based on Jung’s personality theory. You can implement differentiation by using this combination as well as curriculum integration, habits of mind, thematic and interdisciplinary learning, cooperative learning, project-based learning, self-paced learning, design thinking, creativity and the flipped classroom. Educators who buy into a framework can certainly get positive results.

Silver, Strong & Perini (2000) have combined the Multiple Intelligences with Jung-based personality learning styles. By using the eight Multiple Intelligences with the four learning styles, we get 32 combinations to explore collectively with students. Students’ strengths will narrow in on a few that are natural to them, but many educators may wish for students to stretch and explore areas that are weaker for them which will encourage them to get stronger.

The integration described here can be utilised with technology and will also support 21st century skills. This could also focus on concept-based curriculum where facts and skills would be strengthened with concepts. A variety of musicals might work best to encourage breadth of coverage from which a class could collectively benefit. To illustrate how the Intelligences and styles can work in combination, I adapt Silver, Strong & Perini’s fusion and use it to explore school musical integrations, activities from my language classes and hypothetical examples. It is hoped that these will inspire your own creative activities bridging musicals to Intelligences and styles.

Keep in mind that combining subject-specific material with one or more musicals can create an integrated lesson or unit. Students can do math when completing a musical activity or world language, language arts, science, social studies, theatre arts, visual art, music, home economics or industrial arts. As a teacher of Spanish and Italian, I regularly had my students undertake activities and projects tied to our school musicals. Students always completed their projects using the target language whether they were fabric projects, storybooks, postage stamps, paper dolls, fairy tales, show posters or show programs. Foreign language cast albums and soundtracks are also available to enhance these language-musical integrations.

Table 1 outlines the four learning styles combined with eight Intelligences providing a menu of suggested activities for students to undertake. Due to the numerous musicals available, the 32 combinations presented actually represent a plethora of possibilities for student learning. The ideas can be used with students for school musicals, teacher-selected musicals or student-selected musicals, whether by individuals or student groups. For example, a Mastery/Verbal-Linguistic project has students writing an article or creating a magazine or Playbill. Another example, for Intrapersonal/Self-Expressive, has students create art artefacts tied to a musical’s settings and themes.

The remaining examples in Table 1 offer 30 additional ideas for fusing the Multiple Intelligences with learning styles. Table 1: 32 Activities menu fusing intelligences and styles to musicals.

Summary

Through experimenting and planning, both teachers and students alike will discover how exploring musicals via Multiple Intelligences and learning styles in combination are perfect together.

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Dr Keith Mason


Keith has been a world language educator and linguistics specialist for
35 years. He is based in New Jersey, U.S.A. Keith’s teaching and research
areas include musicals in the curriculum, foreign language pedagogy, Romance linguistics, and curriculum. He received eight Rising Star Awards from the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, U.S.A. for integrating musicals in the high school curriculum. He is currently writing a book Musicals across the Curriculum. kmason369@hotmail.com