Using the public radio can be a great tool for learning in and outside of the classroom. There are great local stations that play music from all kinds of genres and artists. The stations I would recommend are listener funded stations because they are commercial free and usually have discussions about the music more than commercial stations. All listeners have the opportunity to discover new music each day and learn about it’s history and origin.
The radio helped me a great deal when I was preparing for listening exams. Trying to guess the time period of the music, the composer or artist, and style of the music gave me a unique experience. Because the music selection was out of my control I wasn’t familiar with everything I was hearing. There are hardly any repeat songs on these kinds of stations so it became a good challenge for my ear.
There are also composers like John Cage who have incorporated random station selection into his compositions. An example of a piece of music requires a couple of musicians to scan through stations live and stop when they get a signal. They all do this simultaneously and it creates a really interesting effect. There are probably many more creative examples of using the radio for learning inside the classroom as well as in the car or at home. These two I have mentioned are just some examples of how the radio can be incorporated as a resource for a music classroom.
Here are some of my favorite local stations:
WQXR
WBGO
WFMU
I recently taught in an elementary school and it got me wondering as to what kids listen to now. I literally have no contact with people under my age because I am too busy at college. I am assuming that the radio is dying out because all these younger folk have all their music digitally and there is no need for the radio. The conversation that I want to have is if the radio is even important anymore. Some of my favorite stations are NPR and WQXR but, I can certainly live without them. I get my NPR fix through their website too, so it's not even like I'm missing one. If it truly is important than I can see the educational gains of incorporating it into a lesson. Perhaps you can have the students listen to a predetermined station for 15-20 minutes and have them write about what they listened to. It could be news or music, whatever will give them the most.
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