In a lecture delivered with the assistance of the Jeff Hughes Jazz Band, the professor emeritus illustrates some of the most important characteristics of a good teacher: clarity, creativity and spontaneity
With the aid of five musicians, Reginald Archambault last week fused two of his passions - jazz and educational philosophy - in a lecture that had well over 100 people swinging to the beat and nodding their heads in appreciation of both the music as well as the educational insight.
Archambault's lecture, delivered with the assistance of the Jeff Hughes Jazz Band and titled "Jazz as an Educational Metaphor: the Dynamics of Creating, Sharing and Conserving Values," was punctuated by some of the most important characteristics of a good teacher: clarity, creativity and spontaneity.
According to Archambault, professor of education emeritus, education is experienced universally, and familiarity breeds confusion. "In our confusion, we have turned to metaphors to assist us in seeing education and its key activities and components - teaching, learning, subject matter, and schooling - afresh and to seek out their essentials," said Archambault.
Throughout history such noted individuals as Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau and Brown's own Alexander Meiklejohn have created various metaphors to describe the educational process. But Archambault said he believes the most apt way to view the American educational process is through jazz and its appreciation.
"So often the things that we strive for in teaching, in setting an environment for learning, are evident in jazz performance," he said. "Jazz performance depends upon rhythmic development, the creation and release of tensions, empathic perception, climax, and resolution. These could be constructive paradigms for successful classes, at least for teaching of certain types.
"A good class, informed by a jazz model, would encourage its pupils to perform like amateur jazz musicians, attempting to take the material at hand and to appreciate it, interpret it, revealing their interpretations to colleagues; to color their interpretations with the views of others, participating in the process actively; to assume responsibility for their role in it and their obligations to its corporate structure; to respect the needs for manners, for discipline, and for dutiful willing contribution," Archambault said.
The jazz model is practical for classes that are taught using the Socratic or discovery method, but isn't applicable, according to Archambault, to lecture courses.
Archambault's jazz model extends to student capabilities as well. "The successful appreciation of style in jazz requires the possession of certain capabilities: the ability to listen, to observe through hearing; the recognition of the ways in which the immediate performance fits into the jazz tradition, and the ways it differs from previous performances," said Archambault, noting that all these abilities are those one wishes to imbue upon a student.
Jazz is a particularly strong metaphor for education in America. "Jazz's own history is a chronicle of continuity, tradition and respect for it, an invitation for evolution and revolution, and perhaps what is most relevant: the recognition and cherishing of music that is both indigenous the American experience and indicative from the heterogeneous roots from which is sprang and grew," he said.
Archambault's lecture and philosophical points were punctuated by the band, which performed three numbers during the lecture and several afterward. While they played, like any good jazz musician, Archambault scribbled notes, improvising his prepared speech.
When the last piece ended, Archambault tried to poke fun at himself by saying that combining a lecture with a live jazz band was courageous. "Great lectures were once considered works of art as well as examples of scholarship," Archambault noted at one point in his talk, "equal in value to scholarly articles or perhaps superior because of their ability to instantly communicate as well as to objectify and express." Judging from the reaction of the audience, this was one lecture that reached that greatness.