Founded in 2018, the mission of the Center for Music Education at Georgia College is to bring accessible music education opportunities to middle GA. Our student initiatives, such as the Early Learning Center Violin program and Bobcat Keys focus on providing free musical opportunities for students who lack access to similar experiences. Similarly, our annual professional development series brings musical learning opportunities closer to Middle Georgia’s music teachers. We will continue to assess the needs of students and music teachers in middle Georgia to refine and expand our opportunities in the coming years.
Bobcat Keys
This after-school program, under the direction of Dr. Owen Lovell, provides free, weekly beginning piano instruction by GCSU piano majors to enrolled Wilkinson County Elementary School students, in Porter Hall’s modern piano lab. For more information, please contact owen.lovell@gcsu.edu.
Early Learning Center Violin
Our Suzuki-style strings program, under the direction of Dr. Bryan Emmon Hall, provides a class of violin instruction by string majors to prekindergarten students during the day at the Early Learning Center of Baldwin County Schools. For more information, please contact bryan.hall@gcsu.edu.
Student Composition Competition
The newest offering of the Center for Music Education at Georgia College is a composition competition aimed at composers 19 years old and younger. Our second composition competition is scheduled for the fall of 2024, student composers are encouraged to write short pieces for small ensembles and submit them by October 1, 2024, for evaluation. The winning composition(s) will be premiered in the spring 2025 semester by the appropriate Georgia College ensemble. In the future, we plan to host a similar event in even numbered years (2024, 2026, etc.) For more information, contact tina.holmes-davis@gcsu.edu .
Professional Development Series
Professional Development is a component of continued certification for in service teachers in Georgia. Teachers must earn professional development hours annually to renew their professional certificates, but little school-based training is geared toward our music teachers. This initiative provides music specific professional development opportunities to fill this gap. Participants earn certificates of participation that can be used as evidence of their progress toward the professionalism standard in their Teacher Keys Evaluation System (TKES) or for certificate renewal.
Register for 2023-24 workshops at https://forms.gle/ZyccSE8D75dwvRJaA
View archived workshops in our Knowledge Box at https://kb.gcsu.edu/cme_profdev/