"Researching Sing Cincinnati on the Virtual Stage" - Kristy Swift
From Angela Swift
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Presenter: Kristy Swift, Assistant Professor, Musicology
Title: Researching "Sing Cincinnati" on the Virtual Stage
Description: Online instruction at UC this semester offers remarkable opportunities for creative problem solving. As part of the CCM musicology faculty’s collaborative digital scholarship project “Cincinnati Sounds,” I am teaching the online class, “Sing Cincinnati” (MUHS 6066-003), aiming to prepare digital exhibits based on original student research and storytelling. Working individually and in small virtual groups, the students collaborated remotely with archivists, arts leaders, librarians, museum curators, and music performers, carrying out interviews and exploring original archival and ethnographic resources. Students will use that research to revive and communicate stories of people, organizations, recordings, and venues dedicated to singing in Cincinnati, c1840–2020. After showing a short course trailer and leading a brief exhibits tour, this session describes delivering online instruction that encourages musicians to gain experience with original research and skills in digital storytelling. I demonstrate scaffolded assignments of brainstorming, data collecting, data cleaning, and digital storytelling for active learning.
Abstract: Online instruction at UC this semester offers remarkable opportunities for creative problem solving. As part of the CCM musicology faculty’s collaborative digital scholarship project “Cincinnati Sounds,” I am teaching the online undergraduate/graduate class, “Sing Cincinnati” (MUHS 6066 003), aiming to prepare digital exhibits exploring our city’s vocal attributes, now and historically, through original student research and storytelling. Through teaching, the course has opened portals for community building not only within the class, but also across the UC campus, the city, and beyond. Working individually and closely in small virtual groups, the students have collaborated remotely with archivists, arts leaders, librarians, museum curators, and music performers, carrying out interviews and exploring original archival and ethnographic resources. In devising digital exhibits, students are using that research to revive and communicate stories of people, organizations, recordings, and venues dedicated to singing in Cincinnati from c1840 to 2020. Examples of the students’ research include exploring Black minstrelsy, vaudeville, and opera as racial uplift, blues singer Mamie Smith, Baldwin pianos, early May Festivals, performing jazz and sacred music during the 1918 and 2020 pandemics, radical feminism and New Downbeat, and relationships between drag queens, timbre, and venues. These wide-ranging and inclusive student projects reveal rich cultural intersections of singing in Cincinnati then and now. I propose a synchronous session at the Fall Teaching Showcase in order to demonstrate the delivery of online instruction that not only supports the students’ active learning, but also encourages an entire class of musicians to achieve experience with original research and to gain skills in digital storytelling, leading both the students and me to achieve benchmarks in areas of learning and teaching excellence that I have not worked with previously in in-person teaching. I will demonstrate to participants in this showcase session scaffolded assignments of brainstorming, data collecting, data cleaning, and digital storytelling for active learning. In response to a short course trailer and a brief tour of the digital exhibits, participants will then contribute to a guided discussion.
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