Collaboration Canvas

Remixing a unit plan was a really interesting learning experience for me.  I wasn’t sure what subject area I might want to collaborate with so I browsed our class submissions until I stumbled upon an English unit plan that focused on poetry.  I immediately thought of a couple of directions I could take this unit and apply it into a music curriculum, so I decided to remix the canvas into my subject area.  I presented a new unit on poetry in music that mainly focused on tone poem compositions.  These composers created a new style of music that was directly inspired by popular poems, or ones specifically written for the genre.  This unit could lead into program music, a similar compositional technique where music is set to any non-musical sources like poems, landscapes, paintings, and many others.  On the analytical side of this unit we could discuss how poetry made its way into rap music as well.  On the original canvas the author used Shel Silverstein as an example of a poet to study.  Silverstein is also a musician and I made the connection of the subject areas with a video of him speak-singing a poem of his while playing guitar. The remixed version of the canvas can be seen
here.