Saturday 11 April, 11:15am-11:45am CET, in room: 04-Konzertsaal FutureArtLab (AW)

Together with third year students of the bachelor Music in Education at the conservatory of ArtEZ University of the Arts in Enschede, I will deliver a workshop at the EAS conference in Vienna.

Abstract of the workshop:

“How to teach about democracy through technology that connects learning objectives from three subject areas: music, digital literacy, and citizenship education?” This was last semester’s innovation assignment for third-year students (pre-service music teachers at a conservatoire in the Netherlands) in the music education laboratory course called moLab(Author, 2021). This practice paper presents the context, process and outcomes of this assignment.

Education in the Netherlands is guided by national Core objectives—set by the government for different subject areas—that describe what pupils are expected to achieve during primary education and the lower grades of secondary school (SLO, 2025a). These objectives are now in the final stages of a national curriculum reform. In addition, learning objectives for two new subject areas—Digital Literacy and Citizenship Education (SLO, 2025b)—have recently been introduced to be integrated across the curriculum, with democracy as a key theme within citizenship education.

The moLab course aims to help students innovate music education through the iterative development and implementation of technology, while also practicing research skills and learning how to design technology as domain experts in music education.

To integrate the new Core objectives with music education, four groups of moLab students worked systematically on the assignment introduced above (two hours per week for 14 weeks), following six stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, 2018) and implement. This resulted in four different approaches: a technology-enhanced music board game; a technology-enriched escape-room activity (based on the historical Silk Roads) to teach about diversity and inclusion, and two different apps to musically teach how elections may be influenced by (social) media.

Finally, we reflect on these results. Participants leave with practical suggestions for using design thinking to link democratic and digital literacy goals to music education in their own teacher training programmes.