By Mary Trachsel
Mary L. Cohen is an Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of Iowa with a joint appointment in the College of Education and the School of Music. She researches music-making and well-being, songwriting, and collaborative communities. She has been a member of the advisory board for the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights for over ten years.
Back in 2008, Mary Cohen was planning to launch the Oakdale Community Choir. Drawing membership from the Oakdale Prison (officially known as Iowa Medical and Classification Center or IMCC) and the Iowa City area community, she wanted writing to play a role in the choir’s development. With limited time for weekly rehearsals and with choir members often separated into sections, there was little opportunity for “inside” and “outside” singers to get to get to know one another, so Cohen implemented a weekly writing exchange and invited all choir members to participate. Each week she issued new writing invitations, many of them focused on elements of the musical selections choir members were learning, including lyrics, rhythms, tempos, and dynamics. Other prompts asked singers to reflect on their musical experiences and tastes, and some simply asked singers to report on their daily lives (“What was the best thing that happened to you this week?”). Inside and outside singers exchanged their responses to these weekly prompts and wrote back to one another, creating small-scale written conversations that helped choir members begin to know one another. Because Cohen collected and read these conversations before returning them to the original writers, the exercise helped her perceive and respond to both musical and social challenges and opportunities experienced by choir members.
Soon after the choir’s inception, another kind of written participation spontaneously emerged: songwriting. Realizing that this was an expressive outlet choir members were eager to explore, Cohen inaugurated a songwriting workshop as an adjunct activity to the choir, and in the intervening years, inside and outside members of the choir have composed a total of 159 songs, 75 of which the choir has performed at its biennial concerts in the prison gymnasium and recorded on CDs made available to friends and families of choir members
The use of writing in the teaching of music and music education methods is something Dr. Cohen also practices in her work on campus as Associate Professor of Music and Section Head of Music Education. Following the example of her former mentor, Dr. James Daugherty of the University of Kansas, she has implemented a writing response system throughout Music Education classes, including the Introductory and Practicum courses as well as her Introduction to Research course. The system, called HAT, is designed to deepen students’ engagement with course readings. As they read, students record three types of written response: H= huh? (a question about the reading indicating something they don’t fully understand); A= aha! (an insight gleaned from the reading); and T=transfer (how an idea in the reading relates to something else).
Songwriting, too, plays a role in Cohen’s on-campus instruction. Her General Music Methods class features a songwriting unit in which she provides instruction on how to teach songwriting. Everyone in the class is assigned to write songs (parody, new melody to existing lyrics, and an entirely original song). She also encourages Music Therapy and Music Education students in her Introduction to Research course to write songs to help with understanding and remembering content.
When helping music students learn the conventions of academic writing in her Introduction to Research course, Cohen adopts an incremental, process approach that scaffolds to a finished research prospectus. The process entails the completion of four research evaluation forms in which students summarize and critique published research findings, a research proposal, a sentence outline, draft and (multiple) revisions.
Convinced that writing can intensify and focus reflection, Cohen routinely uses reflective writing assignments to help students process readings, discussions and lived experiences. These kinds of assignments are a hallmark of all her classes, including the Peacebuilding course she has recently implemented as part of the University’s Liberal Arts Behind Bars (LABB) Program at the Oakdale Prison.