Educational CyberPlayGround ®

Interdisciplinary Educational Curricula

Music is Language and Language is Music.


About the Educational CyberPlayGround:

Our Transcendent Purpose: Everything we do, everything we believe in, is about challenging the status quo. The way we challenge the status quo is by using interdisciplinary thought.

Our Education Values: We believe in showing the big picture. We compare and contrast. Through comparison we come to learn the truth. We provide links to the research so that you find the thought leaders, honest brokers of information.

It's easy to hid the problems by cutting them up into little pieces - into different categories, domains, or academic turf. That's why we want to know and show the big interdisciplinary picture.Through contrast we find what remains the same, no matter what they say.

When you show the big picture, people usually become very uncomfortable, it can be depressing, but you can't ignore the problems, you are a citizen and need to tell truth to power!

Are you ready
to discuss
the elephant
in the room?

Western K-12 curriculum emphasizes process over test results.

Western K-12 "HIGHER ORDER" THOUGHT PROCESSES ARE: classifying, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, valuing, relating, and synthesizing." aka Dispositions of Mind.

Western Curriculum emphasizes process over results.
In science class, students conduct labs by asking a question, building a hypothesis, experimenting, observing, and drawing a conclusion. In English and social studies classes, students write a research paper by planning, researching, assessing and analyzing information, formulating a thesis, writing an outline, and editing drafts.

Take Away

The Ideal Approach and the Real Goal of All Education is . . . . A Just and Kind Society.

Interdisciplinary thought has been the enemy of Socrates - who - according to Plato argues for specialists the opposite of the renaissance man. Our world has always been off the natural process since Socrates.

IT IS ALL ABOUT PROCESS - working together, problem solving , team building, imagination, creativity and failure, which carries into art, math, writing, science, reading, social studies, and all other parts of the curricula.

Warning: In a society where students' futures are determined by their ability to get the right answers on multiple-choice state examinations, 'process' will become an alien concept.

Creativity Pulls - Don't Push - Attract people through the Arts to bring people to learning. It touches their soul and not one of them saves their math tests or essays or science tests. That is reason enough for art to spearhead the curricula process.

The Arts turns data into actual information - something we can comprehend - which we can now understand. Knowledge is based on information not data. We can only get information through the skills of the artist who helps us comprehend and manage knowledge.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win." Attributed to Gandhi

Watch Something Within Me
"Something Within Me" takes us into St. Augustine where music transforms the school despite being in one of the poorest sections of the South Bronx.

HUMAN SYNCRONY
Synch or Swim

The purpose of the Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc. is all about improving literacy through arts education and advocacy, by providing collaborative and interdisciplinary resources for understanding the universal laws of perception, underlying the rhythms of both speech and music; world culture and our national culture.

We try to focus on "Honoring the Unknown Culture Maker" ~ Karen Ellis
while bringing the arts to life on the Web, for all ages.

To begin . . .
Humans make music to communicate like many other animals who use language and sound for the same reason. We are pack animals. Evolutionary Science shows how our biology makes us Tune In, we need to be In Synch to swim and swarm with the school and the pack to survive. We like to be in with the crowd.

Our musical roots lie in our voice speech spectrum which predicts the chromatic scale. Tonal Language cultures demand attention to pitch and they develop perfect pitch as a result (see Human SILBO Whistle Language). Learn about the Evolutionary Science research that explains the Roots of Language also learn more about Biophony and Soundscape.

William Condon says: "Your body's locked precisely with your speech".

The baby cries in the same language of their parents

Chant is the heartbeat of culture, designed to bring everyone together in harmonious synchronicity as any traveling pack animal culture needs to have for survival. It's the tribal drum, when you have to be tuned in to know what is going on. I am fascinated by unknown culture makers, and the evolutionary science and roots of music that are shared by many animals, not just the human variety.

Interdisciplinary - Music is Language, Language is Music

Survival demands acknowledging the fundamental truth of our need to Sync or Swim.

Starlings Preform Life-or-Death Dance: A flock of starlings, known as murmuration, swoops and dives in unison, evading birds of prey and dazzling bird watchers in Ireland.

 

Evolution of perfect pitch, rhythm, Rhythm Syllables, Words, Poetry, Song, Story, Preliterate History - The Bard, The Cantor

Song stories were used to keep people alive and explain culture. They helped you to memorize information, like the time of year to travel, plant or find food, how to hunt, remember the history of your tribe. The need to display ourselves, is the nucleus of all art. and since the invention of writing we've forgotten our roots. We don't remember why we we used to be able to sing a story.
Speech and Song ARE an oral / aural tradition, is useful when there are stories to tell that may be as long as 2,500 verses. These same principles have been shown to even help in special education programs.

TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
Combats Pedantic Scholarship
and cultural decolonization.

Quill to Key Convergence - Think 21 Century Literacy Skills.
Web 2.0 tools allow for synchronicity beyond the geography of the neighborhood playground to the Educational CyberPlayGround. The social net tools ultimately allow our species to sync and swarm with a pack, a tribe, with like minded friends. The take away is the American K - 20 system of education does not make use of and integrate the knowledge known because of pedantic scholarship.

Transdisciplinarity is the synthesis of apparently different disciplines, like using music to teach reading. I think we can agree that a basic primary goal of education is to make sure everyone can read.

The Real Goal of All Education. Justice = A Just Society - Interdisciplinary thought is the enemy of Socrates - who - according to Plato argues for specialists the opposite of the renaissance man. Our world has always been off the natural process since Socrates.

The Problem with Schools by Ken Umbach and Bob Jacob
Kenneth W. Umbach, Ph.D., Policy Analyst, California Research Bureau,
Phone: (voice) 916-653-6002 (fax) 916-654-5829
"Learning-Related Outcomes of Computer Technology in K-12 Education." In brief:
"This paper summarizes ways in which computer technology and communications have been found to enhance learning in K-12 classrooms. The paper has been prepared at the request of Assembly Member Kerry Mazzoni, Chair of the Assembly Education Committee, to support the work of the Commission on Teacher Credentialing in developing computer technology training standards for teachers. Those standards will respond to requirements of Assembly Bill 1023 (Chapter 404, statutes of 1997)."

From: Bob Jacobs
"The problem with our school system as I see it is the way we organize our courses.

In English, spelling and grammar compete with creative writing and literature. These have little in common. Spelling and grammar deal with the formal rules of language whereas literature and creative writing deal with the personal expression of ideas. Given the conflict, spelling and grammar are the obvious losers since literature and creative writing are so interesting.
I would redesign the school system into three departments:
1. Comparative language
2. Applications
3. Art
In comparative language students would learn not only the rules of English, but of French and Spanish, and of art and music, and of Quick Basic and HTML and of course, mathematics. In other words, interest would be generated in learning how different languages fill different niches... how some languages are preferable to others in their means of expressing certain types of thoughts and how their rules demonstrate this. I'm not sure that many are prepared to teach this course, but it would certainly generate some real knowledge of language as well as an interest and a meaning in the study of grammar and spelling. What students today do not learn is translation. Translation from the language of music to that of painting and then to mathematics.
In the Applications department, students can learn what has already been discovered... they can read Emerson, and study the works of Dali, and read the works of Lavoisier and learn about the models which we use to describe ourselves and our world. Much of what constitutes high school education is in the second department, however the subjects are now taught in isolated boxes separated by artificial subject matter barriers. Language, rather than bringing subjects together, serves as barriers to communication across these boundaries.
In the third department, art, belongs all things which are personal and creative. Designing experiments in order to solve scientific problems in the laboratory, and learning the reasoning process by which one designs experiments is here. Creating essays and works of art which deal with subject matter issues from department 2 are here as well.
A good mix of all three departments would make for more meaningful, quality education.
I guess this is pretty way out because it is so far from our present structure and because there are so few teachers who come out of college prepared to think in these ways. I gather that there will be some who will be upset by this separation of form from function.

Reducing Content to only that which is acceptable for children.
". . . The world's knowledge contains a lot of things that are shocking, divisive, offensive, or horrific, and people should be able to learn about them, and to educate others. Not including these things doesn't make them go away--it only makes it more difficult for interested people to learn from a source that tries to be neutral and educational. I don't think Wikipedia will ever be (or should ever be) "safe", for the same reason your public library will never be, either." [source]

"Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance" In one of my favorite books:Pirsig says. . .

"We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too . . .

SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING -------- BELIEVING IS SEEING."

FACT: Understanding is best achieved when aspects of reality are studied in isolation from each other (biology, history, physics, language, etc.).

CONTRADICTORY FACT: Understanding is best achieved when the holistic nature of reality is recognized so that all knowledge becomes part of a single, mutually supportive conceptual framework.

TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
protects the commons

The U.S. is the best country in the world.
Capitalism is Good, in fact, better than anything else
.

Regulations protect the commons.
Government must have regulations.
People in government must enforce regulations,
because unchecked capitalism destroys the commons and unsustainable for future generations.
It's not capitalism it's that People are corrupt and don't protect our commons.

Enclosure Movement 1750 - Present

Deregulation allows unsupervised global corporate privatization of our natural commons — food, air, land, water, and DNA. and the created commons: the Internet, scientific research, traditional knowledge, and music, art and culture in the public domain.
England's Enclosure Movement 1750 - 1860 when public grazing lands were walled off and parceled out to land owners thereby denying a shared resource to a community that had previously sustained it.

An English protest poem (by the folk)

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The villain here is the land-owner who was happy to prosecute the man or woman who stole property off of his land; but prospered blissfully unaccountable for the enclosure of that land, a theft in its own right — of a common.

Military, Industry, Corporations, the University, and Wall Street use media, lobbyists, lawyers, laws, and the courts to own anything they want with it without any oversight. The goal is to separate land and money from The Commons ie: The Folk.

The Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies is for students who seek master's degrees that integrate knowledge from several disciplines. The program addresses the rapidly evolving demand for unique graduate study by promoting advanced scholarship that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

To Big To Fail?
The Global Common Wealth is being robbed. Without Regulations and Oversight. Our Fair Use of the Common Wealth has been stolen. The ecosystem of life is threatened by deregulated psychotic corporate greed.

We show the big picture, it can be very uncomfortable, and depressing, but YOU can't ignore the problems,

You are a citizen too, stand up, and tell truth to power!

Thanks for your support,

Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc.

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Interdisciplinary Educational Curricula found on the Educational CyberPlayGround website. Retrieved July 18, 2010, from http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/

MLA Style
"Educational CyberPlayGround" Internet. Database available online. Internet.
Interdisciplinary Educational Curricula
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/
Date accessed July 18, 2010.