Department News

Alumna Sarah Day-O'Connell wins national award for innovative course design | Fri Jan 09, 2009

Sarah Day-O'Connell (Ph.D. '04, history and world music), assistant professor of music at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, has received a national award for innovative course design. Day-O'Connell was one of three winners in the 2008-09 Innovative Course Design Competition, sponsored by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The award-winning music history course is "Listening to Music In/Of the 18th Century."

"Generally speaking, there are two kinds of music history courses, and each has its shortcomings," Day O'Connell says, "What are called 'survey' courses provide a sense of a long sweep of history, but they also carve up the past into neatly-labeled chunks that overemphasize certain connections while obscuring others. Ultimately, they ignore musics that don't fit the dominant paradigms."

"The alternatives are known as 'topic' courses, because they look at music in light of a specific theme," Day-O'Connell says. "Students learn to find their own answers and develop a critical relationship with music history. But topics courses also have been criticized for leaving students without a clear sense of the chronology, terminology, and assumptions that, even if imperfect, continue to anchor our relationship to the past. They may even put so much emphasis on critical thinking, that they discount students' sense of awe and wonder at the 'great works'."

Day-O'Connell said she felt compelled by arguments on both sides of the pedagogical debate. So she set out to design "a hybrid survey and topic course" -- Listening to Music In/Of the Eighteenth Century.

"It's a survey course, in that it proceeds roughly chronologically, and it relies on a textbook to provide structure for our listening to the music 'of' the 18th Century. At the same time, it's a topic course, in that it also focuses on the topic of listeners and on the social act of listening -- both 'in' the 18th Century and in the present. Listening becomes the door through which we approach the survey content."

See Knox College full release.