Caring for our Planet: a World Apart or Same Difference? Online Collaborative Composing Across the Miles

The 2022 UN climate change conference highlights opportunities that the arts and music education have in responding to the ongoing climate crisis through the creation of artworks as activism. Digital music technology tools for creating have been shown to support a range of outcomes and may contribute to climate change education more broadly which we have observed as music teacher educators in Aberdeen, Scotland and Melbourne, Australia. We undertook a collaborative online music and video creation project with our students: Caring for Our Planet: A World Apart or Same Difference? This experience was facilitated using Soundtrap for Education, a cloud-based digital audio workstation. 10,427 miles, music education students worked in groups of six with a mix of Aberdeen and Melbourne in each group. They gathered video of their local environment that was meaningful to them and then created music. To examine our experiences of facilitating this project, we undertook collaborative self-study research as music teacher educators. Data collection included reflective discussions and analysis of project artefacts including music and video creations and end-of-project reflections. In this workshop, we examine our experiences of facilitating this project and share examples of students’ work. We discuss musical and extra-musical outcomes, and challenges. We argue for greater attention to the affordances of digital collaborative music technology tools to facilitate real-world composing projects. Workshop participants will undertake a version of the project. They choosean image that captures an aspect of their local environment and then use Soundtrap to create music using any device including a mobile phone or laptop. Finally, participants reflect briefly and share ideas for similar projects with young people or within teacher education. O