Sophie Friauf

Writing 1
Elica Sue
27 January 2022
1

Autism and Music Therapy

I have recently been researching how to use music in my classroom to support my students with
Autism. I want to be able to support their learning as well as make it the safest environment
possible. If you have read my other blogs, you know I want to make my classroom a community
space where children are free to be their truest and most authentic selves. In doing an internet
deep dive to try to implement techniques into my classroom, I found a few articles that might’ve
done the trick. We all love music, right? Well, I find my students also love dancing and singing.
Others might find this as a disruption but I find they are more eager to learn when they have had
some sort of music intervention throughout the day.

So what did I do?

I’m glad you asked. After reading, I found music definitely can be beneficial to children. So, I
decided I would give the kids a thirty-minute break where we would stretch and dance and play
their favorite songs. Kids would request their favorite songs and I would play them at a decently
loud level (sorry teachers). We played everything from Gangnam Style to Taylor Swift (for all
my girl kiddos). They loved it. I saw smiles on their faces and some really fun dance moves,
even a bit of my own. I’ve been doing this every day for two months. I’ve been told by other
teachers that I am “wasting classroom time” but am I?

So what happened?
Since my kiddos have a lot of verbal communication struggles, I was hoping this would help.
And it has!! I’m so proud! We’re getting so much better at diction and forming words. Some of
my nonverbal kids are making sounds and forming vowels in their communication! I am
THRILLED. I’ve also noticed them socializing more with each other. Because we’ve allowed
each other to show up authentically and dance and sing and celebrate, they have been more
comfortable working with each other, and even hanging out together. While they are little wins
they are WINS! This is huge, especially with kids with autism.

So, do I recommend it?

Whether you are a parent or teacher, please allow your kiddos to have musical breaks. I think this
is by far one of the most important things I’ve implemented as a teacher. Seeing these kids grow
is exactly why I became a teacher for kids with autism. They are beautiful souls and
supplementing them with music has only made them blossom more. Kids that do not get this in
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the classroom should at least get this at home. Dance with your kid and celebrate their
authenticity!

Most love, Ms. Friauf

Music Therapy, Autism, and Genres

In writing this translation, I found that a lot of the procedures and results got lost;

however, the main points still came across. This is because, in my blog post writing as a teacher,

I could not effectively translate scientific processes into a classroom. The kids are not subjects,

so I could not implement scientific music therapy to help students. I had to translate it into a

classroom setting. My translation is effective as it gets the main results and topics across while

staying in the blog genre, addressing teachers and parents, helping others implement these

techniques, and staying in a classroom environment. Approaching this translation, I studied

others’ blog posts (Learning in Wonderland 2022) and consulted what I already knew about blog

posts. Dirk (2010) explains this way of researching genres as “efficient… as we can see how

people have approached similar situations” (Dirk, 2010, pg.259). I researched how others,

specifically, teachers, have approached blog posts. I also found it interesting because in the

academic article it is all reasoning above feeling or emotion but translating it into a blog post was

very emotional and driven by feeling. Irvin explains this well as academic writing has to be very

logical and without sensual perception or feeling (Irvin, 2010, pg. 14). This was the biggest

difference in the genres. The blog post was wound up in how lovely and exciting the intervention

therapy was and how it has beneficially affected the students. In contrast, the academic article

was stating facts on improvement and procedure.

At the beginning of my translation, I wanted to understand exactly what a genre was. I

consulted Dirk and Irvin’s writings. Dirk in his writings explains how we understand genres
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without even being taught them. I was able to recall blog posts I have read in the past to begin

writing mine. This is how I began to navigate the translation piece. However, first, to understand

the academic article and how to break it down, I consulted Irvin’s “What is Academic Writing”

article. Breaking the academic research down into categories of audience, occasion/context,

message, purpose, and genre (Irvin, 2010, pg. 7) helped me grasp what the article was trying to

get across. These categories helped me transfer the content into a blog post. For example, I

thought about the audience of both.

The audience for the academic article was other psychology researchers and people in

academia (Sharda, 2018, pg. 4). The new audience was moms and teachers of kids with autism.

The address and rhetoric are entirely different. I had to imagine how I would tell this to a mom or

first-grade teacher. This continues with each category Irvin purposes. Translating from academic

jargon to casual was mostly about removing numbers, keeping the main points, and breaking

down the language into everyday conversational style. This conversational style is the foundation

of blog postings.

After consulting Dirk’s writing on genre, I had to pick my own. I chose the genre of a

blog post because I do believe music therapies should be used to help students, especially those

with autism. Blog posts will reach a wider audience. I think putting it in a relatable, applicable

format would help others apply this to their lives. It will spread more to the general public than

an academic article would. The foundation of the academic article was all research-based. It was

an academic journal written for those that read academic journals for research and work. In

pursuit of changing that, I had to think about how this would turn into the genre of blog posts.
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A big component of blogs is the language. The language of the blog became casual so

that the information would reach a certain audience, particularly mothers and teachers. This

genre is meant for people to enjoy while receiving information and advice. Blog posts are

relatable and show personality and I wanted my translation to reflect this. An academic journal

voids all personality and spark and gets down to factual points. In the academic article, research

results were stated as such: “Communication scores were higher in the music group

post-intervention (difference score = 4.84, P = .01)” (Sharda, 2018, pg. 3). I had to understand

this in context and then begin to break it down for the blog. I added in the personality and

relatability and formed it into a story. Integrating information into this new genre was tricky. I

had to lessen the number of hard facts into livable data. For example, the academic article had a

data number to measure the rate at which communication increased. Instead, I wrote on my

experience and how I saw the children forming vowels and using sounds that are typically

nonverbal. I have personally used music therapy to work with students with disabilities so even

the parts added that create the experience of the teacher are based on true experiences.

The actual use and application of music therapy is slightly different in both genres. As the

academic article is about research, researchers used test groups and studied which group did

better when music was played or not played during the intervention. They tracked this using

brain connectivity and neurobehavioral analysis. Now, a teacher writing a blog post would not

“test” kids and analyze their brain patterns as this would not be ethical. I had to adopt these

techniques in a classroom setting. I did this by giving students music breaks instead of scientific

observation sessions. I measured the productivity of the therapy by conversations and social

skills I viewed in the classroom rather than a brain scan. While this scientific data is important, it

holds less relevancy to a blog post as posts are supposed to be easy to read and applicable to
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everyday life. I also left out a control group of students not listening to music on breaks. Splitting

kids up in a classroom and testing is not very moral and would not go over very well. I also had

previously observed the effect of no music because up until that point, no music was played on

breaks so a controlled group would not even be needed. Having a controlled group is not an

everyday classroom thing so it would be very odd to do. A teacher also wants to benefit their

students and leaving some out from that would be harmful and not just of a teacher to do.

With the academic article being very scientific, I had many concerns with the translation

as much had to be altered. I was most concerned with not getting the methods and procedures

across correctly. It is immoral to experiment as a teacher on your students but I wanted to keep a

procedure that would align with the actual procedure but also be helpful and easy to do in a

classroom. In order to do this, I had to think about a way that a teacher could put music therapy

into the class agenda. By doing that I keep the method of playing music in a learning

environment to produce beneficial results without actually testing music and evaluating kids.

While there is an analysis in both cases, the analysis in the blog post is specifically created to

help kids and teachers apply this to benefit the students. The blog posts make these techniques

easy, helpful, and applicable to real-life situations instead of a lab or office. I needed to use the

skills of both a researcher and an empathetic teacher. I had to keep the main points so that the

therapy is effective but also have the best interests of the students and their education in mind. It

was important to fully analyze what the academic article was wanting to prove. Understanding

the article was proving the benefits of music on communication and social skills, I thought about

it from a teacher's point of view and how to make this something everyone could do. This is what

Dirk talks a lot about, especially in his examples of the ransom letter (Dirk, 2010, pg. 257). The

letter, while having most of the same information is written in completely different genres thus,
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interpreted in completely different ways. I was trying to master this with this translation of

keeping the main points but changing the perception in which the information is received.

With concerns came challenges. I faced many difficulties when confronting these

concerns. In translating the articles I wanted to make sure the same thesis came across. The

academic article was serious and factual, the blog was fun and loving. To keep consistency

across the board was difficult but fun to push myself. One was meant for people in medical

academia and the other was for a typical mom or teacher. The blog post felt natural to write but I

continuously checked back in with the academic article to make sure I had my information

correct. I had fun putting personality into the blog post. It felt like a diary entry or like talking to

a friend. I am genuinely interested in this research and have even applied these therapies into

classrooms myself so I felt like the blog post was truly my blog. It was great to have previous

knowledge on this topic but I still think I learned a lot from the academic article itself.

I successfully translated the academic article on music therapy for children with autism

into a blog post from a teacher’s perspective after consulting Dirk and Irvin’s work on genres and

academic articles. I highlighted main points but completely changed tone, audience, purpose,

genre, and made the techniques applicable. The blog post reaches its target audience of teachers

and parents in a way that the academic article does not.

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Works Cited

Learning in Wonderland. Reading comprehension mini books. (2021, September 13).

https://learninginwonderland.com/2021/09/reading-comprehension-mini-books.html

Lowe, C., Zemliansky, P., & Dirk, K. (2010). Navigating Genres. In Writing spaces: Readings on

writing. essay, Parlor Press.

Lowe, C., Zemliansky, P., & Irvin, L. L. (2010). What Is "Academic" Writing? In Writing

spaces: Readings on writing. essay, Parlor Press.

Sharda, M., Tuerk, C., Chowdhury, R., Jamey, K., Foster, N., Custo-Blanch, M., ... & Hyde, K.

(2018). Music improves social communication and auditory-motor connectivity in children with

autism. Translational psychiatry, 8(1), 1-13.