Teaching and Learning at the U of A spotlights instructors in the classroom and beyond. Through these stories, we hope to inspire others in our shared commitment to teaching and learning.
In one of Dr. Anna Chilewska’s Writing Studies classes, you’re just as likely to hear the riff from a heavy metal song as you are the buzz of students collaborating on a group project. That’s because Anna, who has been teaching at the U of A since 2000, uses music — heavy metal in particular — as a way to guide students through some of the core concepts she covers in her courses.
“Music is a tool I use to help students understand genres, forms and styles,” says Anna, a lecturer in the Department of English and Film Studies.
Anna has always been an interactive instructor, incorporating workshops and group work in her classes. She’s also a big heavy metal fan, attending countless concerts every year and even publishing on the topic. As her teaching style evolved over the years, she realized that her love of music could be an interesting way to explore the course content with students.
When she’s teaching them about genre and form in writing, for example, she’ll often play examples of songs from different heavy metal genres, from death metal to black metal and doom metal. “We’ll talk about the characteristics that set them apart, the characteristics they have in common, and then translate that to writing,” she explains. “If we start with music, it’s more accessible, it’s easier. It’s not as scary as reading a 30-page research paper.”
She’s found that form — the way a piece of writing is structured and organized — can be another challenging concept for students to dive into. So, she starts with a song, having them dissect a track that’s a few minutes in length. “We can dive into what the structure is, what are the various elements and how do they all fit together,” she explains. It serves as a precursor of sorts to mapping out a longer academic paper. The process of picking apart a song, from the lyrics to the guitar riffs and the steady double bass line throughout, gives students a roadmap for how to separate a piece of writing into all its components — and the confidence to know they’re capable of doing so.
While the process of exploring a song’s arrangement and various parts allows her to unpack more technical concepts like form for her students, the often political nature of heavy metal music also gives Anna a unique lens to present the art of the argument, something she covers in WRS 104 Writing Persuasive Arguments. “In heavy metal, artists write about social issues, animal rights, the environment,” she explains. “The lyrics can be quite graphic, the music videos are often extremely graphic, and they’re very specifically presenting arguments about the issues that matter to them.”
In analyzing how specifically a particular band conveys their stance on an issue that’s important to them, from the imagery they include in a music video to their lyrics, she’s able to highlight how different types of arguments can work. “It helps me teach my students about arguments because sometimes, especially if they’re just out of high school, they think an argument is just persuasion,” she says.
Finally, Anna harnesses the different subgenres of heavy metal to unpack the concept of discourse communities. For example, fans of doom metal are typically looking for songs with slower tempos and a somewhat distorted or heavier sound, whereas fans of thrash metal relish the quick pace and flashy guitar riffs that punctuate songs from that subgenre. “We identify the elements that a discourse community agrees on, expects and understands,” she says, adding that it can be an effective way to explain discourse communities and audience in writing. A reader will have very different expectations of a personal essay and an academic research paper, just as a metal fan would expect a different type of song from a doom metal versus thrash metal band.
She acknowledges that her use of heavy metal music as a teaching tool can be polarizing. For some students, it’s a deterrent. For others, it’s the reason they seek out her classes, eager to experience her unique approach in action.
Ultimately, for Anna, who considers herself an extrovert drawn to teaching partially because she enjoys connecting with people, music is a way to build connections in her class and further engage students. “I often ask my students to recommend music to me from their countries,” she says. “I love to learn about their culture, because I invite them to weave that culture into their writing.”