Montana State’s Kristin Harney helps secondary teachers integrate music into their classrooms

BOZEMAN - Graphic novels. Artificial intelligence. The Silk Road trade network. At first glance, these topics have little in common.

But all three can be better understood in the context of music, according to the recently published book "Integrating Music Across the Secondary Curriculum" by Kristin Harney, a music education professor in the College of Arts and Architecture at Montana State University.

The book, published by Oxford University Press, includes 20 lesson plans and more than 100 teaching strategies to help middle and high school teachers thoughtfully use music to increase student engagement and learning outcomes across all subjects. The lessons were reviewed by MSU faculty and field tested by 16 public school teachers who primarily work in Bozeman.

"This is really woven into the design of this book: You don't have to be an expert in music to do music integration," said Harney, who has 14 years of elementary teaching experience and now coordinates the bachelor's and master's music education programs at MSU. "Team up with the music teacher, the choir, the band, the orchestra, and work together. Even if you're not going to co-teach, you can partner with somebody, and it will be such a rich experience for you as a teacher and for your students."

Harney began conceptualizing the book in 2020 on the tail end of publishing her first book, "Integrating Music Across the Elementary Curriculum." Inspiration for lesson plans struck while she listened to songs on the radio or watched fellow faculty members' performances, she said.

Harney devised a way to connect music with art using Montana rivers after listening to music technology professor Linda Antas perform a sonic interpretation of Montana's Ruby River during a recital. Harney drew connections between the piece and a local painter's interpretation of the Jefferson River. She proposed that students listen to recordings of the Yellowstone River and map them sonically, meaning data points on the river's speed, elevation and location were translated into pitches and rhythms using an app - much like Antas did for the Ruby River.

"When I'm designing a lesson, I think, 'If I'm going to have fun, the kids are going to have fun,'" Harney said. "It's a little spark of joy, spark of life."

Each lesson also meets national standards in the arts, English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies. Harney said many public schools now require teachers to demonstrate how they meet these standards, which will be made simpler using her book.

Her lesson plans extend beyond art. In one science classroom, students analyzed an AI-generated version of Beethoven's 10th symphony, a work for which he only left brief sketches, and discussed where society should draw the line defining AI's role in traditionally human tasks. Another class at Gallatin High School studied climate science and environmentalism through popular music, specifically in Childish Gambino's "Feels Like Summer."

The students analyzed lyrics and imagery in the song's music video, with the red-tinted sky reminding them of wildfire season in Montana, said Steve Riccio, who introduced the lesson to his ninth-grade geophysical science class in 2024. He found that music is an accessible means of communicating science compared to other outlets such as scholarly journals, which often require a certain level of education and reading comprehension to understand.

After testing Harney's lesson plan, Riccio provided feedback for the book, such as including times for students to pair up and discuss their thoughts. He hopes to revisit the lesson later this spring during his class' climate unit.

"Incorporating practicing teachers into the conversation like Kristin did is really important because we're doing this every single day," he said. "Teachers can add to projects like this from their perspectives on pedagogy and what works and what doesn't. I love being involved in research like this because it makes me a better teacher."

Harney's interdisciplinary work relating to music education extends to her research and teaching interests at MSU. As part of a national research team, she explores how practicing teachers, college professors, undergraduates and K-5 students experience music integration across the country, informing the techniques she teaches her music education students as well. Along with retired MSU associate professor Priscilla Lund, she also created MSU's Arts and Lifelong Learning course, which is required for elementary education students and helps them learn to integrate art, drama, dance and music within K-5 classrooms.

"I feel incredibly lucky that what I research is also what I teach," Harney said. "It's all connected."