Jerome Bruner & Billy Joel: Enactive, Iconic, Symbolic!

Hello my friends! How is everyone? I hope everyone is having a good start to the school year. I wanted to share with you an activity that I did with my 9th grade general music classes. My 9th grade classes do a unit on protest music and how music has the power to move people through struggle and resistance. One of the songs we do is We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. The kids love it! The song lists important people and events chronologically from 1949 through the 1980s. The goal of the project is for them to create two stanzas that follows the rhythmic format and rhyme scheme Billy Joel uses, but writing about important people and events from 2008-2009. 

For example, instead of: Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray

They come up with things like: Bernie Madoff, Obama, Chris Brown & Rihanna

(It's a lot of fun.)

The first time I did this activity I noticed the students were very confused with writing within the rhythmic format. Here's where Jerome Bruner comes in! Enactive, Iconic, Symbolic! According to Bruner, when children are relying primarily on iconic representations, they can easily be victims of perceptual illusions (Abeles). Bruner says that children learn first through enactive representation, where actions are represented through motor patterns. Hmmmm! 

In order for them to write lyrics using the rhythmic pattern Billy Joel used, they would have to internalize and feel it first. So.....We sang the song in class 2-3 times over the course of two days and  we clapped the rhythm of the words (which is just simple quarter note, eighth note, and quarter rest patterns) many times, and I tried to have them internalize the rhythm as much as possible. Then we moved to iconic representation. Creating symbols, dashes, slash marks to represent quarter and eighth notes. They would take a line of the music and sing it, clap it, tap, stomp it, etc. and then notate it using iconic representation. Some of them made the leap to symbolic representation, but others stayed with the iconic representation. In general, everyone was pretty successful with following the rhythm.

The kids had a lot of fun with it and they came up with some really creative song lyrics. Fun stuff! (If anybody wants the project I can email it to you.) Hope all is well, sorry this is long. :)