Project Coordinator & Graduate Research Assistant – Research for Youth, Music and Education
Affiliation: Simon Fraser University
Email: dpeluso@sfu.ca
Twiter: @dccp
Personal Website: www.dccp.ca
Deanna C. C. Peluso is the Project Coordinator for Research for Youth, Music and Education (RYME). She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Arts Education program at Simon Fraser University, where she is pursuing research that brings together her background and interests in music education, media literacy, positive psychology, and multimodal literacy. Deanna’s diverse research background compliments her practical experience as a composer, artist, musician and social media and gaming enthusiast. Her research is unique in its innovative and relevant approach to current and emerging educational issues, as it utilizes the changing technological nature of contemporary society, building upon 21st Century paradigms that harness digital media application within research and practice.
Current Research
For the past three years, Deanna have been the Project Coordinator for RYME, where initial analyses of interviews with youth in British Columbia, revealed that young people are engaged in music, media and digital forms of communication and expression in ways that are increasingly multimodal compared to earlier generations. Deanna’s research builds on these findings to provide an in-depth empirical investigation of youth engagement with music and digital media that examines the benefits and constraints of these contemporary mediums of musical learning.
Background
Deanna has been involved in the academic community and in music education over the past decade. She has studied Classical music performance, history and theory and then completed a Bachelor degrees in both Music and in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, where she focused on music composition and world music. She then earned a Master of Education in Educational Psychology and Leadership Studies from the University of Victoria, where she researched the instigating motivation and benefits of K-12 teachers pursuing post-graduate degrees in Education. She has published a book, “Motivation, Purpose and Persistence: Pursuing a Leadership Degree”, on her research on this topic.
Deanna has a passion for utilizing technology and music as learning tools. She has conducted workshops on team building and using technology within academic and educational settings, and also conducts seminars on using music and other fine and performing arts as ways of developing a multisensory educational process. She believes that by incorporating the Arts, such as music performance and composition, into the educational curriculum, the learner can become engaged in an interactive process, rather than passively absorb the information. She believes that the role of the learner and the teacher has the ability to be a collaborative and supportive process for both involved.
In addition to her academic and research background in music performance and composition, she has been composing music for the past 20 years for soloists, chamber music, orchestra, choir, and collaborative pieces for theatre and dance. She teaches music to adult learners and learners with disabilities by using various Arts-based techniques, such as the exploration of acoustic awareness through music, photography, and painting. In the search of developing an embodied style of education, Deanna embraces an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach to her teaching and the dissemination of her research.
A creative person is always most excited when something happens that he cannot explain, something mysterious or miraculous. Then he is very nervous.~ Karlheinz Stockhausen
