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Francis Ward, a Fulbright Scholar of Music Education in 2019-20, teaches Irish dance to students at Seattle’s Laurelhurst Elementary. -
Francis Ward, a Fulbright Scholar of Music Education in 2019-20, works with students at Seattle’s Laurelhurst Elementary. -
Former Music Education student Bethany Grant Rodrigues led the Music at Laurelhurst program during her UW studies (photo: Steve Korn)
The Laurelhurst-UW Music Partnership is a long-standing program located at Laurelhurst Elementary School, one of Seattle’s public K-5 schools just minutes away from the UW campus. Since 1994, this partnership has served as a laboratory for the design and delivery of children’s musical education, with accent on the study of music in world cultures that children can learn through singing, dancing, playing, and thoughtful listening.
Classes are taught and performances are facilitated by a “seasoned teacher” with successful experience in teaching music to children (and who is also enrolled in PhD studies in Music Education). UW students visit the school to observe the program, to teach supervised lessons, and to conduct research, and members of the UW faculty and student body occasionally visit to perform for the children.
A critical goal of the Laurelhurst-UW Partnership is the provision of opportunities to learn a wide variety of music, from Western Art Music to West African drumming, Turkish folk songs, Japanese koto, Afro-Caribbean dance, Irish tin whistle, Bulgarian song, and Brazilian percussion.
The current teacher within the program is PhD student Elisabeth Crabtree, whose study and experience in Orff Schulwerk (in Austria and the U.S.) and the Kodaly pedagogy make for a lively experiences in music of world cultures that children are taking to heart, whether in person or in their online learning sessions.