Joanie Calem has been a performing musician, music teacher, and storyteller since 1983. She graduated from the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem, Israel, with a major in piano and went on to study music education at the Levinsky Teaching Seminar in Ramat Aviv, Israel. She studied composition with Israeli composer Hagar Kadima in Tel Aviv, Israel, and completed her degree, Music in Community Building, at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Having lived overseas for 23 years, Joanie is well versed in multi-cultural experiences and cross-cultural interchanges. Joanie moved to the Columbus, Ohio, area in 1998 and has been teaching music and performing all over the Midwest ever since.

Joanie’s goal in every teaching residency and performance is to share the magic of music with students/audiences, using music as a platform for community building and learning non-musical topics. Her programs are always interactive, providing multiple opportunities for participants to solidify their learning experience through active involvement, be it through adding on-the-spot new verses to “zipper” songs, participating in body percussion or hand movement accompaniments, as puppeteers, or acting out roles in song stories.

Joanie is experienced in using multiple learning styles to teach inclusive classrooms and to make sure that everyone has comfortable access to the learning material being shared. With a background in music, special education, and community building, Joanie is also sensitive to the non-academic factors that can impede children’s and elders’ learning, such as learning challenges, Sensory Processing Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, PTSD, ACES, cognitive decline, dementia, arthritis and other mobility issues, etc. Joanie is able to quickly adapt her programs to incorporate the needs, personalities, and learning styles that the children, elders and/or classrooms are presenting and adjust her program to appropriately reach those present through her music and stories. Through the Ohio Arts Council, Joanie has taught Creative Aging percussion and ukulele classes at Stygler Commons in Gahanna, and through Arts Possible Ohio Joanie has taught at GEMS, The Graham Elementary and Middle School, and at the Juniper School.

RECENT PROJECTS: “From Heart Beat to Drum Beat” – Creative Aging program for older adults at Stygler Commons Retirement Community, Gahanna. For 7 weeks, we spent an hour exploring rhythms and songs from different parts of the world.

Music Clubs, GEMS (Graham Elementary and Middle School), Columbus, 6th- 8th graders, twice weekly, quarter-long music clubs. We did one quarter of guitar , one quarter of ukulele, and one quarter of drumming and percussion.

Weekly music classes, Juniper School, Columbus,1st – 6th grades. We explored general music basics, combining the Waldorf Education curriculum using folk stories with musical elements for the younger grades, and learning history and about general world events through songs for the older grades.

Availability

Upon request

Video courtesy of the teaching artist. This video sample of Joanie is of a drawing story
song, adapted from the Indian folktale “The Seven Blind Men and the Elephant.” This was
part of a summer library show at the Pataskala Library.