Abstract

Mediated Learning is a didactic approach which nurtures quality and synchronized teacher-student interactions and stimulates meaningful learning. Three criteria define and characterize a Mediated Learning Environment:

Focusing and Reciprocity – a process by which the teacher focuses the pupils’ attention while encouraging active response. For example, listening and responding to music fosters a need to concentrate on auditory input and ‘make sense’ of it.

Expanding enables students to think beyond the immediate. Thus, teachers may encourage students to draw on multiple representations (kinaesthetic, graphic representation) to demonstrate their understanding of musical structures and procedures.

Mediation of Meaning occurs when teachers convey respect and enthusiasm for unfamiliar practices and traditions, thus promoting communication skills. This session will engage students in live exercises, demonstrating the potential of Mediated Music Learning Environments.

Adena Portowitz, PhD, musicologist and music educator, senior lecturer, founder and director of the Department of Instrumental Music Education at the Givat Washington Academic College in Israel. Her research interests’ focus on underlying mechanisms linking music education and the cognitive, social and personal development of at-risk children and interconnections between expression, as manifested in musical topoi, and formal structures in tonal music. The results of her research appear in leading international publications, including the Journal of Musicology, The Symphonic Repertoire, Vol. I: The 18th Century Symphony, Research Studies in Music Education, and the International Journal of Music Education. Since 2002, she has served as editor of MinAd: Israel Studies in Musicology Online.