Hourigan, R. M. (2009). The invisible student: Understanding social identity construction within performing ensembles. Music Educators Journal, 34-38.
I found this article very helpful for the me as a future music teacher. I thought the different suggestions and topics that came up in the article would be useful in my future classes.
I liked that the author gave many different examples on how to make invisible students not feel so alone an help them become more sociable, somewhat come out of their shell. I thought they would be great examples to use when faced with it in a real situation. I also agreed with the author when they wrote about having a peer guide system with the older and younger students in the ensemble. I feel that this would be useful because the older students could communicate what is expected of them in the ensemble and what their experience has been like throughout the years. This is what the author also mentioned, that it is more useful for students to learn these rules from other students rather than having the teacher explain it to the ensemble and having some of the students not pay attention.
I also liked the example of field trips and how the teacher should divide the class so that the "invisible student" does not sit alone or is excluded by other students. I think what I would have done, was something the author explained not to do because it creates negativity and awkwardness between the students. My idea was to number the students and make them sit together, but now after reading this article I feel that I will try to find another way of pairing students up. One useful way to pair the students, that the author explained was to make a sitting list yourself and present them to the students so that way the students will know who they need to sit beside and that it won't cause any trouble. Another strategy that we as teachers could use during field trips, is create the buddy system so that students are not left wandering alone. This not only helps with creating relationships with invisible students but also prevents losing a student at a bigger field trip such as an amusement park.
As well the author mentions that we should always be modeling acceptance and zero tolerance for inappropriate behavior. In doing this our students will learn from what we model and they will not be judgmental to other students or in any case bully them.
I was very frustrated at the fact that bullying still occurs even till today, and I find that this is unacceptable. No one should ever exclude anyone from participating in an activity, or be made fun of because of the way they look or how they act. I feel that promoting safe environments in our classes and also modeling acceptance will also open the eyes of our students to not completely end but to be more aware of being inclusive of others.
Overall I really enjoyed this article and feel that it was also very useful to me as a future teacher because it has many different examples of how we can improve the communication between us and our students. As well, it gave many scenarios of how we should be interacting with invisible students and a way that we could make these students be more interactive with other students in class or ensembles.