Teaching Music Visually – Transcendence and Flow in Visually Augmented Music Pedagogy: Towards an Educational Practice Using Kandinsky’s and Csikszentmihalyi’s Concepts of Mindfulness as a Way of Teaching and Experiencing Music to Adolescents

The core study of this PhD research is a practical application in teaching Visually Augmented Music Pedagogy (VAMP). VAMP is my pedagogical approach explored in this research project, which combines Kandinsky’s (1914) belief of mindfulness as a divine state when experienced holistically (auditory and visually), along with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990:49-70) nine dimensions of Flow in an activity where the balance between challenge and skill is achieved. The visual aspect has been injected into teaching sessions in various ways, such as via the use of visual displays of images of music (either derived from a video projector, the teacher or the students) along with the visual classroom experience itself by using dance, movement, and various classroom activities. By adjusting the given curriculum, introducing VAMP in the music classroom enhanced the teaching experience by putting into practice the research’s interpretation of Kandinsky’s and Csikszentmihalyi’s concepts of mindfulness.

The classroom activities were divided into ‘Control Groups’ and the ‘VAMP-infused’ groups, and at the end of each teaching session (that might take up to 3 lessons), the students were asked to score the experience based on Csikszentmihalyi’s list of dimensions in an EduFlow seven-point Likert scale questionnaire (Heutte et al. 2014:32 and Mawas and Heutte 2019:497). The data results support the hypothesis that when Teaching Music Visually, the students demonstrate a Flow state of optimal experience. Future research aims to investigate the relationship between teachers and students in facilitating Flow, as well as ways to adjust existing curricula of various subjects and modalities (such as special education), based on the VAMP model.