004769
Hi Angelica and Erin, we hope you are fine!
Luciana Arraes (from the board of AMSBrasil) and I are contacting you to talk about how to handle the following situation.
The Suzuki Center of Manaus is promoting a training course for piano teachers at their school, which will be taught by a teacher who is not a Teacher Trainer, but claims in his presentation to be a specialist in early childhood education and the Suzuki Method.
You can check out the video here, but since it’s in Portuguese, I’ll give a brief summary of what it’s about:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DR0b8hGgZGz/?igsh=amVqN3ZnaGpibm9y
In the course presentation, Marcelo Thys (who will be teaching the course) comments on his highly specialized training in music education for children, even mentioning his training in the Suzuki Method. The course will cover pedagogy and its various aspects, and how to start teaching music for children if you don’t know where to begin. The course will be from December 18th to 21st and is called “How to Teach Piano to Children”. He mentions the word Suzuki several times.
This will be a 4-module course: Module 1: How to teach an instrument to children (open to any teacher of any instrument and also to parents), in which the Suzuki foundation will be covered. Module 2: What to do in the first lessons, focusing on the Suzuki piano repertoire. Module 3: For the slightly more advanced student, focusing on the Suzuki repertoire. Module 4: Teaching music reading, group lessons, and game strategies. Masterclasses will be included in these activities.
Finally, we would like to know how we can deal with this situation together with SAA, as we imagine this is not the first time you have encountered this.
************
We see that the problem lies in using the word Suzuki, in saying that he will teach using the Suzuki repertoire, and mentioning book 1 of piano. Even if the publication changes (the Suzuki name doesn’t appear, for instance), we now understand that the course will be about how to teach using the Suzuki Method.
Initially, we thought about contacting the Suzuki Center in Manaus today, explaining that this course cannot be offered in this format (he is not authorized to teach how to teach using the Suzuki Method), and asking that the publication be taken down.
We would like to know what else we can do to resolve this misunderstanding.
We are looking for Barbara’s email address to pass on to you (she is one of the people in charge of the Suzuki Center in Manaus). But her profile on SAA is not enabled, and we were unable to obtain this information from there. She is not a member of AMSBrasil.
We look forward to your suggestions.
All the best,
Araceli and Luciana
