Project Coordinator & Graduate Research Assistant – Research for Youth, Music and Education
Affiliation: Simon Fraser University
Email: dpeluso@sfu.ca
Skype: deanna.peluso
Personal Website: www.dccp.ca
Deanna C. C. Peluso is the Project Coordinator for RYME – Research for Youth, Music and Education. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Arts Education program at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on the subjective perceptions of musicians and teachers about music and music education, and how those perceptions and their implementation in practice are influenced by their engagement with the Arts, media, and the multimodal capabilities of technology (both old and new). She incorporates her background in music, psychology, technology and performance into her research and teaching.
Ms. Peluso 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.
Ms. Peluso has a passion for Arts-based education and researching the use of technology and music as a learning tool. 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, Ms. Peluso embraces an interdisciplinary 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
