Part 1: What?
Provide a brief description of your experience.
The objective of this experience was to develop and implement an empirically based music therapy intervention program for at-risk youth. For the past several years, I have been a volunteer music instructor and teen mentor at the Music Resource Center (MRC). At MRC, we use music to provide disadvantaged youth a sense of empowerment and accomplishment in the urban community. Weekly one-on-one sessions lasting several hours involve vocal training, mentoring, and just getting to know each other. However through this particular project, I was able to bring my research interests to the MRC community. In collaboration with music therapists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center (CCHMC), we created a songwriting and rap program to study how music affects the mood, stress levels and self-esteem of urban disadvantaged teens.
What did the experience entail?
With guidance from music therapists at CCHMC, clinical psychologists at the UC’s Center of Integrative Health and Wellness, and experienced staff at MRC, I designed a research protocol for an innovative rap and songwriting program called “Believe in Your Voice.” The empirical nature of this project was essential--although previous projects in the extant literature had claimed success based subjective reports, few had been able to collect compelling empirical evidence to support the results of music interventions. I hoped to rectify this issue in this project by (1) offering incentives for the participants, in order to decrease likely attrition, (2) using validated measures such as the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Sense of Belonging Scale, Adolescent Coping Orientation for Problem Experiences (A-COPE), and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and (3) employing an experienced music therapist to facilitate the implementation of a more detailed music therapy protocol. After securing funding through UHP and obtaining approval from UC’s Institutional Review Board, we were set to begin.
Through a series of school visits, colorful fliers, and frantic phone calls, I succeeded in recruiting 16 eligible adolescents for the project. Eight subjects agreed to take part in the MRC Intervention Group, while the other eight were content to join the “non-music” Control Group. All subjects first completed a series of validated questionnaires measuring (1) demographic information, (2) baseline positive and negative affect, (3) perceived stress, (4) coping skills, (5) self-esteem, and (6) sense of belonging amongst peers. The Control Group continued to participate in activities unaffiliated with MRC for a period of ten weeks; at the end of the ten weeks, subjects completed the same questionnaires for a second time. Meanwhile, the MRC Intervention Group proceeded to meet for 90-minute sessions once a week for a period of ten weeks. In these sessions, students explored the music-making and songwriting processes while learning to express their emotions and build trust amongst peers. Throughout the ten weeks, subjects worked together with a CCHMC music therapist and MRC staff to write, perform, and produce an original song, entitled “The Struggle.” The project culminated in a performance and CD release party to celebrate the accomplishments made by the youths. After the celebration, MRC Intervention Group subjects completed the same series of questionnaires for the second time, as well as a 5-minute semi-structured interview in which they were asked to describe their experiences in the program.
How did the experience meet and/or differ from the expectations you described in your proposal?
I was unprepared for how complicated it can be to implement any sort of program, let alone a controlled research study, in the urban community. I was not expecting how difficult it would be to organize and communicate with the youths; high school students are difficult to corral regardless of their backgrounds, but I soon realized these youths faced additional uncertainties and challenges that I had not considered. This certainly complicated my naïve plan to meet once a week at a predetermined time for a full 90 minutes. I began to truly empathize with the youths as I learned to adapt the program to fit their unpredictable lives. In overcoming this hurdle, I found that the effects of the program exceeded my original expectations, in terms of the positive changes we were able to induce in the youths.
How have you have made progress towards meeting at least 2 of the community engagement learning outcomes you identified in your proposal?
(1) I believe this experience helped me make progress towards recognizing how public policies and practices, and power and privilege, have an influence on social issues. Numerous studies have noted the reduced life expectancy, IQ, language skills, and mental health in urban youths. Some have attributed these discrepancies to the increased substance abuse, violence, and family instability measured in this population. However, I would hypothesize that these issues in-part stem from the lack of opportunities afforded to these youths. Lack of mentoring, inconsistent social support, and reduced exposure to culture and art are just as likely to contribute to low IQ and reading scores. Meanwhile, children of power and privilege are often exposed to many diverse opportunities, and therefore reap the benefits (e.g. improved self-esteem, social support, mood) then go on to influence social issues, policies, and practices. I believe that programs such as MRC, whose mission is to elevate lifetime and academic achievement of urban youth through arts and culture, may effectively promote positive social change in this population. Through this experience, I have contributed preliminary data that may support this belief.
(2) This project would not have succeeded if I had not learned to relate, communicate, and work effectively with others towards sustainable social change. For example, during the initial sessions, Believe in Your Voice programming was viewed as a somewhat separate entity in the MRC community. The music therapist and I worked in a secluded studio with the subjects, and then left as soon as the session was over. I started to realize that the youths felt disconnected from the rest of the community during the sessions. I suggested this issue to the staff at MRC, and they immediately offered to help out during the sessions and integrate Believe in Your Voice programming into their schedules. Their contribution turned out to be crucial to the success of the program. If MRC staff, research staff, and youths had not learned to relate, communicate and collaborate with each other, we would never have been able to write and produce a song in 10 weeks time, let alone influence a change in the psychological perspectives of the youths.
What was most significant about this experience?
I was humbled by this project, as it was one of the most complex, demanding, and gratifying endeavors of my college career. Through my work at MRC, I have experienced the joy of giving back to the community through music. In addition, designing, securing funding, and implementing a music and wellness research program has taught me a great deal about the investigative process in the urban community. Most significantly, it was wonderful to be given the opportunity to pursue my primary interests simultaneously: music, wellness research, and service to others. Looking back, I am most grateful that the experience met my rather lofty expectations—we observed a measurable change in the youths participating in the MRC Intervention Group, we were able to write a song together, and, most significantly, our group formed a lasting bond that continues to shape my life today.
Part 2: So What?
What academic theories, readings, courses, or concepts did you rely upon to inform to your experiential learning work? How did knowledge of this theory, reading, course, or concept contribute to your learning in this project?
In crafting the protocol for Believe in Your Voice, I began by conducting a comprehensive literature review of relevant research. My search was primarily focused on the following content areas: (1) protective factors associated with urban adolescent psychological health, (2) results of music therapy interventions focused on decreasing stress and improving mood in other populations, and (3) specific articles describing music therapy intervention programs for urban youths. These texts provided me with a baseline understanding of the goals for this project, as well as some of the challenges faced by previous music therapy interventions. I also called upon some of the academic theories and concepts presented in the Introductory Psychology curriculum I studied last summer (CLEP credit). Finally, I relied on my 6+ years of experience teaching urban youth at MRC when I was faced with actually connecting and communicating with the subjects.
This baseline knowledge provided the foundation on which I built my understanding of urban youth. The texts, courses, and previous experience gave me a logical, idealized understanding of how to run a successful intervention program. I was grateful for the plans I had made as I began the chaotic process of recruitment, initial data collection, and early session work. However, it became quickly apparent that we would need to be flexible with this baseline plan in order to effectively work with this population. Terminating a subject after missing one session would have meant terminating our entire intervention group, so we increased the number of allowable absences; youths disliked sitting down with a pencil and paper after a full day of school, so we projected songwriting exercises on a whiteboard and used colorful markers; bringing snacks always resulted in better attendance and cooperation. Little tweaks and additions to our original, well-researched plan allowed us to adapt the program to the specific needs of the youths. In return, they began to trust us and speak openly about their emotions, thoughts, and experiences during the songwriting/music activities. This combination of adaption and prior knowledge resulted in a truly marvelous bond between the research staff, MRC staff, the youths, and me.
Part 3: Now What?
How are you integrating what you learned from this experience into your life? What connections have you drawn between this experience and other experiences both within the classroom and beyond?
I initially began volunteering at MRC to gain experience teaching voice lessons. I quickly realized that my students were not typical kids—they were at risk for mental health and school performance issues due to their life circumstances. As a freshman in CCM, I was captivated by the fact that these teens sought music as an outlet for their challenging lives. Over the years, I have learned how to adjust to each student’s goals and facilitate their personal growth through music. MRC not only began to change my outlook on the importance of music in a community, but also transformed my attitude towards music in my own life. This volunteer work became one of the first of many experiences that catalyzed my decision to pursue a service-oriented career.
Through this experience, I connected my love for the service work I perform at MRC with my interest in the nexus of voice science, music cognition, and wellness research. This experience was so inspiring and rewarding that I now plan to pursue such endeavors in my professional career. It has had a large effect on my medical school application process; since Believe in Your Voice, I have searched for programs that would allow me to continue to pursue interdisciplinary and service-oriented projects. Now that I have chosen to attend Harvard Medical School, I am confident that I will be able to continue integrating what I have learned from this experience into my daily life and future career.
How have you shared your learning with others and disseminated your work? Who was your audience and what did they learn? What did you gain from the experience of sharing your learning with others?
In these last two months since the completion of data collection, I have continued to volunteer at MRC while running data analysis and writing up preliminary findings. While we are not yet prepared to publish our findings, we expect to construct an official abstract and submit our final article to the Journal of Music Therapy by June 2015. I also plan to present the data at the Department of Laryngology’s World Voice Day Conference in April 2015. Finally, I hope to continue to bring awareness of MRC’s mission to the Cincinnati community, with the intent of obtaining additional funding for more projects and programming in the future. Through this process of disseminating my work, I have learned the value of community support—the more people that learn about MRC and our mission, the more lives we can improve through our work. I look forward to sharing my work with the Cincinnati community over the next few months.
Provide a brief description of your experience.
The objective of this experience was to develop and implement an empirically based music therapy intervention program for at-risk youth. For the past several years, I have been a volunteer music instructor and teen mentor at the Music Resource Center (MRC). At MRC, we use music to provide disadvantaged youth a sense of empowerment and accomplishment in the urban community. Weekly one-on-one sessions lasting several hours involve vocal training, mentoring, and just getting to know each other. However through this particular project, I was able to bring my research interests to the MRC community. In collaboration with music therapists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center (CCHMC), we created a songwriting and rap program to study how music affects the mood, stress levels and self-esteem of urban disadvantaged teens.
What did the experience entail?
With guidance from music therapists at CCHMC, clinical psychologists at the UC’s Center of Integrative Health and Wellness, and experienced staff at MRC, I designed a research protocol for an innovative rap and songwriting program called “Believe in Your Voice.” The empirical nature of this project was essential--although previous projects in the extant literature had claimed success based subjective reports, few had been able to collect compelling empirical evidence to support the results of music interventions. I hoped to rectify this issue in this project by (1) offering incentives for the participants, in order to decrease likely attrition, (2) using validated measures such as the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Sense of Belonging Scale, Adolescent Coping Orientation for Problem Experiences (A-COPE), and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and (3) employing an experienced music therapist to facilitate the implementation of a more detailed music therapy protocol. After securing funding through UHP and obtaining approval from UC’s Institutional Review Board, we were set to begin.
Through a series of school visits, colorful fliers, and frantic phone calls, I succeeded in recruiting 16 eligible adolescents for the project. Eight subjects agreed to take part in the MRC Intervention Group, while the other eight were content to join the “non-music” Control Group. All subjects first completed a series of validated questionnaires measuring (1) demographic information, (2) baseline positive and negative affect, (3) perceived stress, (4) coping skills, (5) self-esteem, and (6) sense of belonging amongst peers. The Control Group continued to participate in activities unaffiliated with MRC for a period of ten weeks; at the end of the ten weeks, subjects completed the same questionnaires for a second time. Meanwhile, the MRC Intervention Group proceeded to meet for 90-minute sessions once a week for a period of ten weeks. In these sessions, students explored the music-making and songwriting processes while learning to express their emotions and build trust amongst peers. Throughout the ten weeks, subjects worked together with a CCHMC music therapist and MRC staff to write, perform, and produce an original song, entitled “The Struggle.” The project culminated in a performance and CD release party to celebrate the accomplishments made by the youths. After the celebration, MRC Intervention Group subjects completed the same series of questionnaires for the second time, as well as a 5-minute semi-structured interview in which they were asked to describe their experiences in the program.
How did the experience meet and/or differ from the expectations you described in your proposal?
I was unprepared for how complicated it can be to implement any sort of program, let alone a controlled research study, in the urban community. I was not expecting how difficult it would be to organize and communicate with the youths; high school students are difficult to corral regardless of their backgrounds, but I soon realized these youths faced additional uncertainties and challenges that I had not considered. This certainly complicated my naïve plan to meet once a week at a predetermined time for a full 90 minutes. I began to truly empathize with the youths as I learned to adapt the program to fit their unpredictable lives. In overcoming this hurdle, I found that the effects of the program exceeded my original expectations, in terms of the positive changes we were able to induce in the youths.
How have you have made progress towards meeting at least 2 of the community engagement learning outcomes you identified in your proposal?
(1) I believe this experience helped me make progress towards recognizing how public policies and practices, and power and privilege, have an influence on social issues. Numerous studies have noted the reduced life expectancy, IQ, language skills, and mental health in urban youths. Some have attributed these discrepancies to the increased substance abuse, violence, and family instability measured in this population. However, I would hypothesize that these issues in-part stem from the lack of opportunities afforded to these youths. Lack of mentoring, inconsistent social support, and reduced exposure to culture and art are just as likely to contribute to low IQ and reading scores. Meanwhile, children of power and privilege are often exposed to many diverse opportunities, and therefore reap the benefits (e.g. improved self-esteem, social support, mood) then go on to influence social issues, policies, and practices. I believe that programs such as MRC, whose mission is to elevate lifetime and academic achievement of urban youth through arts and culture, may effectively promote positive social change in this population. Through this experience, I have contributed preliminary data that may support this belief.
(2) This project would not have succeeded if I had not learned to relate, communicate, and work effectively with others towards sustainable social change. For example, during the initial sessions, Believe in Your Voice programming was viewed as a somewhat separate entity in the MRC community. The music therapist and I worked in a secluded studio with the subjects, and then left as soon as the session was over. I started to realize that the youths felt disconnected from the rest of the community during the sessions. I suggested this issue to the staff at MRC, and they immediately offered to help out during the sessions and integrate Believe in Your Voice programming into their schedules. Their contribution turned out to be crucial to the success of the program. If MRC staff, research staff, and youths had not learned to relate, communicate and collaborate with each other, we would never have been able to write and produce a song in 10 weeks time, let alone influence a change in the psychological perspectives of the youths.
What was most significant about this experience?
I was humbled by this project, as it was one of the most complex, demanding, and gratifying endeavors of my college career. Through my work at MRC, I have experienced the joy of giving back to the community through music. In addition, designing, securing funding, and implementing a music and wellness research program has taught me a great deal about the investigative process in the urban community. Most significantly, it was wonderful to be given the opportunity to pursue my primary interests simultaneously: music, wellness research, and service to others. Looking back, I am most grateful that the experience met my rather lofty expectations—we observed a measurable change in the youths participating in the MRC Intervention Group, we were able to write a song together, and, most significantly, our group formed a lasting bond that continues to shape my life today.
Part 2: So What?
What academic theories, readings, courses, or concepts did you rely upon to inform to your experiential learning work? How did knowledge of this theory, reading, course, or concept contribute to your learning in this project?
In crafting the protocol for Believe in Your Voice, I began by conducting a comprehensive literature review of relevant research. My search was primarily focused on the following content areas: (1) protective factors associated with urban adolescent psychological health, (2) results of music therapy interventions focused on decreasing stress and improving mood in other populations, and (3) specific articles describing music therapy intervention programs for urban youths. These texts provided me with a baseline understanding of the goals for this project, as well as some of the challenges faced by previous music therapy interventions. I also called upon some of the academic theories and concepts presented in the Introductory Psychology curriculum I studied last summer (CLEP credit). Finally, I relied on my 6+ years of experience teaching urban youth at MRC when I was faced with actually connecting and communicating with the subjects.
This baseline knowledge provided the foundation on which I built my understanding of urban youth. The texts, courses, and previous experience gave me a logical, idealized understanding of how to run a successful intervention program. I was grateful for the plans I had made as I began the chaotic process of recruitment, initial data collection, and early session work. However, it became quickly apparent that we would need to be flexible with this baseline plan in order to effectively work with this population. Terminating a subject after missing one session would have meant terminating our entire intervention group, so we increased the number of allowable absences; youths disliked sitting down with a pencil and paper after a full day of school, so we projected songwriting exercises on a whiteboard and used colorful markers; bringing snacks always resulted in better attendance and cooperation. Little tweaks and additions to our original, well-researched plan allowed us to adapt the program to the specific needs of the youths. In return, they began to trust us and speak openly about their emotions, thoughts, and experiences during the songwriting/music activities. This combination of adaption and prior knowledge resulted in a truly marvelous bond between the research staff, MRC staff, the youths, and me.
Part 3: Now What?
How are you integrating what you learned from this experience into your life? What connections have you drawn between this experience and other experiences both within the classroom and beyond?
I initially began volunteering at MRC to gain experience teaching voice lessons. I quickly realized that my students were not typical kids—they were at risk for mental health and school performance issues due to their life circumstances. As a freshman in CCM, I was captivated by the fact that these teens sought music as an outlet for their challenging lives. Over the years, I have learned how to adjust to each student’s goals and facilitate their personal growth through music. MRC not only began to change my outlook on the importance of music in a community, but also transformed my attitude towards music in my own life. This volunteer work became one of the first of many experiences that catalyzed my decision to pursue a service-oriented career.
Through this experience, I connected my love for the service work I perform at MRC with my interest in the nexus of voice science, music cognition, and wellness research. This experience was so inspiring and rewarding that I now plan to pursue such endeavors in my professional career. It has had a large effect on my medical school application process; since Believe in Your Voice, I have searched for programs that would allow me to continue to pursue interdisciplinary and service-oriented projects. Now that I have chosen to attend Harvard Medical School, I am confident that I will be able to continue integrating what I have learned from this experience into my daily life and future career.
How have you shared your learning with others and disseminated your work? Who was your audience and what did they learn? What did you gain from the experience of sharing your learning with others?
In these last two months since the completion of data collection, I have continued to volunteer at MRC while running data analysis and writing up preliminary findings. While we are not yet prepared to publish our findings, we expect to construct an official abstract and submit our final article to the Journal of Music Therapy by June 2015. I also plan to present the data at the Department of Laryngology’s World Voice Day Conference in April 2015. Finally, I hope to continue to bring awareness of MRC’s mission to the Cincinnati community, with the intent of obtaining additional funding for more projects and programming in the future. Through this process of disseminating my work, I have learned the value of community support—the more people that learn about MRC and our mission, the more lives we can improve through our work. I look forward to sharing my work with the Cincinnati community over the next few months.