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Music is a powerful therapeutic medium to explore course content and foster reflexivity in higher education.

Self-exploration, vulnerability, and enhanced social connections are key attributes of musical activities.

Assessing students' deeply personal and sometimes traumatic content is a challenge for teaching assistants.

By Drs. Treena Orchard & Anushka Ataullahjan

Music has been used to foster therapeutic outcomes (i.e., connection, reflexivity) and enhance academic achievement among post-secondary students, particularly those in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, for decades. Increasingly, musical performance, storytelling, and other creative activities are recommended across disciplines to help mitigate the deleterious impacts of AI use among university and college students.

Using qualitative data from a recent study that explored how a creative musical assignment among first-year health studies students impacted learning outcomes, we consider the positive outcomes of using arts-based assessments and the challenges encountered by the teaching assistants (TAs) responsible for marking and assessing the emotionally rich and sometimes traumatic content students submitted. The implications of this study are of interest to educators who employ creative or arts-based assessments and practitioners seeking insights about how music, specifically, can be used to connect with young people and enhance their reflexive skills in various pedagogical settings.

Project Overview and Methodology

The Therapeutic Playlist Assignment was developed by Dr. Orchard as a way of combining personal reflexivity and creative writing with critical thinking in a fun and applied assignment. Students select 10 songs and reflect on them in terms of........

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