FOBISIA Music Teachers eConference

from THE FOBISIAN February 2022, Term 2 Issue 38

FOBISIA's Love of Learning

FOBISIA MUSIC TEACHERS eCONFERENCE: MUSIC EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE

Beth Bown, Director of Music Dover Court International School

Gareth Groves, Head of Performing Arts & Creative Outreach The ABC International School Ho Chi Minh City

The past two years have been a steep learning curve for those of us in education, with the move to virtual learning proving a challenge for so many. We have felt the limitations of online learning hard within the FOBISIA Music Community as our live musical collaborations became a distant memory. The Music Committee has tried to keep this collaborative spirit alive and to continue to provide challenge and opportunity for our young musicians to perform together. The success of last year's FOBISIA Voices project proved that there was still a huge desire for our students to collaborate, even if this could not take place in person, and we are continuing to build on this with the forthcoming Battle of the Bands and Virtual Orchestra events taking place this year.

The aim of our 2021 annual conference, ‘Music Education for the Future’, was to equip our teachers with the necessary skills

to continue making musical learning effective and engaging, whether delivered online or in the classroom. Whilst we have lost so much live music in recent years, one small silver lining we have gained from the pandemic is that there has been a huge increase in the quality and sheer amount of online professional development, where previously this might have been considered unviable. We certainly used this to our advantage and, in the past, where we would only have been able to accommodate a single keynote speaker to lead the vast majority of the conference, we were no longer bound by those constraints. Therefore, we were able to invite a multitude of different presenters to impart their expertise across a huge range of areas, including body percussion, digital audio workstations (DAWs) and Dalcroze Eurhythmics to name but a few. Presenters included some familiar faces such as Musical Futures International, Charanga, Sing Up and Andy Gleadhill from Drums for Schools, all of whom have presented in person at previous events. However, there were also a number of new presenters, such as Kaboom Percussion, Ollie Tunmer from Beat Goes On and Roo Piggott from Songwork International, who were able to give us a snapshot of their work in Music Education.

Another advantage of transferring the content online meant that we could run a number of different sessions concurrently and, as all of the sessions were recorded and accessible for up to a month afterwards, the delegates were able to catch up on missed sessions or share particularly useful content with colleagues. For the registered schools, the CPD sessions were open to any interested staff, including non-music specialists and visiting instrumental teachers, and therefore the content was able to reach a wider audience than previous inperson conferences. It was wonderful to see so many schools signed up for the conference, including several who had never been involved prior to this, and, although there is no doubt that we would rather be networking in person, the e-Conference nevertheless provided a wonderful opportunity for us to reignite the collaborative spark which makes our FOBISIA Music Community so special.