Eva's Service-Learning Reflection

Eva Reyes-Smith

Service Learning Reflection

1. Introduction.

The service-learning population for my project included older adults in our Office of Lifelong Learning program at University of Kentucky. Our Office of Lifelong Learning here at UK offers various courses throughout the year ranging from music to cooking courses. I chose to incorporate my service-learning project into the current course I teach: Music Composition and Computers, and build upon it, potentially into a future course. I chose to do this because my current students expressed interest in furthering their music experience beyond this current classroom. There is only so much you can fit in a few months, so I am really excited about continuing these lessons. 

Initially I was extremely intimidated by being involved with this course, especially when I decided to do a project within this course. I was not particularly confident in my skills of working with older adults, as well as what exactly a service learning project entailed. However, once we got into the swing of things, it ended up meshing together much better than I had initially anticipated. 

2. Outcomes about myself. 

Throughout my service-learning project, I learned a lot about myself and my service-learning partners. We were able to accomplish many things including: basic usage of the digital audio workstation, Soundtrap, basic notation, song form, and keyboard notes. In this course I wanted to focus a lot on creation and sharing creations within the class. I thought that aspect of the course is what I did particularly well. 

One of the primary ways I learned things about myself is through feedback. I was really appreciative that I was able to receive consistent feedback throughout this project, especially because I’m hoping to create a secondary course at the end of this project. The main feedback received had to do with my timing of activities. For example, I would rush things or not have enough planned for my lessons for students with varying abilities. My community partner gave me great ideas should I do these lessons, or ones similar, again. This includes how to change the lesson structure if need be, or ideas on expanding the lessons, such as allowing students to bring in their own MIDI devices from home if they have them. 

3. Outcomes regarding the community partner.

The assumptions I made about the students involved were that most of them would have zero music experience. That ended up not being true, many of my students had some sort of musical experience. I had to remind myself that OLLI has offered multiple music courses in the past, and some of my students had various high school music experiences or were in a local choir. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about the many experiences lived throughout individuals in my classroom. 

I was fortunate enough to have a very insightful and experienced community partner, my co-teacher for this course. The feedback I received throughout this project was very helpful. The community partner was able to see and share with me what worked, and gave me advice for what did not. Following this, I’m hoping eventually I can have my own course, with improvement from this feedback. Luckily, she was very open and saw the importance of providing feedback. 

4. Outcomes regarding my knowledge and skills.

The gaps in my knowledge mostly revolved around my lack of experience in working with older adults. I am really grateful for this experience, and it certainly helped fill a lot of gaps in my knowledge and experience. Not only is every individual unique, but varying age groups are as well. Moving forward I’d love to work with older adults again, perhaps in a more music therapy way. I’d love to learn what musical projects exist to enhance end of life care for older adults. 

I was able to connect course work from the class via multiple UDL and SEL principles. For example, in Activity 3, I  incorporated the principle of providing multiple means of representation. I did this by providing shapes and symbols for the A and B sections of music. Another example of this in my lessons includes throughout all activities I encouraged and allowed students to share their works with the class. This was the element of SEL that is relationship skills, which was very prevalent due to the ability to share their work and work with others. 

5. Outcomes about my values.

While teaching, diversity, equity and inclusion is always at the forefront of my lessons. However, this course allowed me to gain knowledge of new tools I necessarily would not have thought of.  Personally, I believe you can never be too prepared. Instead of being surprised when someone needs accommodations we should do our best to be prepared and welcome various learning needs.

I really enjoyed this service-learning project because I was able to learn new ways of how to make technologies more accessible. For example, for my students with hearing aids, they were receiving a lot of feedback and unpleasant sounds with “typical” headphones (over the ear). We were able to try out bone conduction headphones for them and had a much better experience. My one issue with these, however, is that they can be quite expensive. In a perfect world I would love to have these accessible to my students without them having to provide their own. 

Since the pandemic, we’ve had to be really careful about trying to keep everyone healthy and safe. New protocols have been enforced such as encouraging mask wearing/vaccinations, and we are now wiping down desks and headphones (if they are shared) at the end of each class session. Because my project was focused on older adults, I was careful to encourage personal health matters and to express that my goal is to keep everyone safe. I would not have necessarily thought of these matters before the pandemic started. I believe it’s changed everything we’ve done since. It would be interesting to see my course done virtually as well in case of another major outbreak. These are certainly values and goals I will keep within education as I move forward. 

6. Outcomes about action.

The end goal of my service learning project is to propose a “part two” of this course. I’ve had so many students express interest in continuing/going beyond our current offerings. I will still be proposing this course with OLLI, but the timing did not work out to use for Activity 3 like I would have liked. I’m hoping to have this approved and start in July or August, which is particularly exciting to me. This course will dive into further music making technology as well as musical concepts. 

Moving forward, if I could give any advice to someone that may take a course like this, it would be to be patient and embrace it if things don’t go quite to plan. For example, it took 90 minutes of the first session just to get everyone logged into computers and Soundtrap. Some things are going to have learning curves and sometimes things don't’t go to plan. That is okay, oftentimes my best lessons are ones that didn’t stick right on target or stay within the plans I had made previously.

This project has motivated me to stay involved within this community. I have been so lucky to have had the most kind students, I’ve enjoyed every second of this project. Upon graduation, I have accepted a session-based position with a company called Senior Music Connection. In this role I’m lucky enough to be able to assist in individual and small group music therapy based sessions. This will include sessions with older adults as well as K-12 students of varying abilities. I’m particularly grateful for this opportunity because this position allows me to do sort-of a trial run of music therapy-like work before making the decision of going back to school to get certified. 

7. Outcomes and conclusion.

In particular, I believe I made a lot of progress in the usage of SEL and UDL learning outcomes and goals. Before this course, I had not learned in depth what these principles entailed. Only good things have come out of gaining this knowledge, I now have a better and more accessible classroom, which is extremely important to me. While simple, I did not know how to add alt text to images before this class, and I also did not know how to add closed captioning to videos. These are simple, but necessary, things every educator should be doing. 

There are so many skills I have learned from this project in particular. Not only my own personal strengths/weaknesses, but terms and actions of making things accessible, equitable, and justice centered. I particularly enjoyed how these are skills you can typically apply to any classroom/lesson regardless of if it is music related or not. I have unfortunately never had to think too in depth about service-learning before this course. I believe I am a much more equipped student and educator because of it.