ANN MARIE STANLEY
Ann Marie Stanley, Ph.D, is Assistant Professor of Music Education at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. She specializes in general music teaching and learning, student musical collaborations, and music teacher professional development. She has published in Arts Education Policy Review, Bulletin for the Council for Research in Music Education, and Research Studies in Music Education. She has degrees from Wichita State University, teaching credentials from California State University-East Bay, and the Ph.D. in music education from University of Michigan. She taught public school elementary general music and children’s choir for seven years in Napa County, California.
Opposing Oppressive, Omnipresent, and Obsolete Models of University Pedagogy: Or, How I Learned to Teach At a Dinner Party
The field of music education has benefited from a critical examination of K-12 pedagogy. Terms such as “student-centered teaching,” “culturally responsive pedagogy,” and “democratic learning environments” have entered the lexicon of music teaching practice and teacher preparation courses. The jury is still out on whether such concepts can be widely and meaningfully translated into actual school music teaching practice. However, it speaks well for our profession that thoughtful writers, researchers, and practitioners have moved us beyond models of music education reliant on direct, systematic instruction (Rosenshine, Froelich, & Fakhouri, 2002) in a discrete body of knowledge and skills. Instead, in K-12 music pedagogy, we are rightly encouraged to consider global, multicultural, creative, constructivist, collaborative, diverse, socially just, democratic, integrated, and inclusive ways of teaching and learning (see Webster & Campbell, 2010, for an excellent compendium of this literature).
However, the positive changes in K-12 music education have not been paralleled in the academy. Papert’s (1993) “instructionism” views knowledge as a collection of facts and procedures. Schooling is intended to impart these facts and procedures to students in an expedient, teacher-controlled, testable manner. In this paper I will deconstruct and argue against widespread, traditional, and indeed, instructionist university music teacher education practices, and provide alternatives.
Instructors of music teacher preparation courses fail to model the multitude of excellent pedagogical approaches detailed above. We lag behind our colleagues who apply a critical lens to K-12 music education and successfully translate critical theory into K-12 curricular change. At the university, we obey NASM and NCATE requirements; the “cloak of professionalism” is a bulletproof vest protecting our choices (Talbot & Mantie, 2013). When our courses are not microcosms of the progressive, effective learning environments we expect our students eventually to establish, we do a disservice to the next generation of music teachers. How can they reproduce what they have never experienced?
And especially, if we hope to equip our students to “grapple with challenging prevailing discourses,” (Benedict, 2007, p. 5) shouldn’t they witness their professors likewise struggling to challenge mindless or hurtful educational malpractice? Benedict (2007) speaks for me here:
Many of us desire to facilitate environments in which our students are willing and able to engage in habits of inquiry that will enable them to make problematic and interrogate the power relations embedded in the programs from which they came, the programs they find themselves in now, and the world they will enter. (p. 1)
But can we translate desire into meaningful change in our professorial practice? Feiman-Nemser (2001) wrote, “If we want schools to produce more powerful learning on the part of students, we have to offer more powerful learning opportunities to teachers” (p. 1013). In this paper, I will contextualize Feiman-Nemser’s quote as my personal quest: I am a professor seeking “more powerful learning opportunities” for her students and then hopefully, in the best of a trickle-down scenario, their students.
I will first examine some typical modes and models of music teacher preparation, revealing oppressive, outdated, and discriminatory practices. I follow the collected work of postmodern feminists (Luke & Gore, 1992) in reading typical music teacher pedagogical encounters and texts for their assigned meanings related to “power,” “citizenship,” and “voice,” and how these meanings “correspond to specific practices and embodied relations in classrooms” (p. 4). I will then report my travels through junior professor land: my suffering under the “tyranny of the syllabus” (Author, 2008), the frightening experience of being issued a copy of a “survival guide” (Bakken & Simpson, 2011) to my own employment, and finally, my foray into serious, meaningful self-study research methodologies that proved transformational in my teaching.
I present my journey not as one who has successfully created a college classroom ripe with powerful learning opportunities; not as one who has managed to model every pedagogical ideal. Rather, I present my evolving practice of problematizing assumptions about university teaching. As exemplars, I will provide music education course ideas garnered from colleagues’ work. I suggest a metaphor for consideration: professor-as-dinner-party host, and my efforts in a recent seminar in music education philosophy in which I tried to sustain that metaphor throughout. I conclude by sharing the creative “recipes” brought to the table by music teacher education students.
REFERENCES:
Bakken, J.P., & Simpson, C.G. (2011). A survival guide for new faculty members: Outlining the keys to success for promotion and tenure. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Ltd.
Benedict, C. (2007). Embracing powerlessness and empowerment: Coexisting contradictions within teacher preparation. Visions of Research in Music Education 9 (10), pp. 1-16.
Feiman-Nemser, S. (2001). From preparation to practice: Designing a continuum to strengthen and sustain teaching. Teachers College Record, 103(6), 1013-1055.
Luke, C., & Gore, J. (Eds.) (1992). Feminisms in critical pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York: Basic Books.
Rosenshine, B., Froelich, H., & Fakhouri, I. (2002). Systematic instruction. In R. Colwell & C. Richardson (Eds.), The new handbook of research on music teaching and learning (pp. 299-314). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, A.M. (2008). The adaptive professor versus the tyranny of the syllabus (pp. 85-86); and, Shifting identity (pp.88-89). In C. Conway and T. Hodgman (Eds.), Teaching music in higher education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Talbot, B., & Mantie, R. (2013). Blinded by bureaucracy: The pitfalls of professionalization. Paper presented at the Society for Music Teacher Educators Symposium, Greensboro, NC, September 28, 2013.
Webster, P.R., & Campbell, M.R. (2010). Tipping over: Selected literature on music teacher education redesign, v.2. Paper presented at the Biennial Music Teachers National Conference, Anaheim, CA, March 26, 2010. Retrieved January 20, 2014 from http://smte.us/aspas/restructuring-the-curriculum/.
However, the positive changes in K-12 music education have not been paralleled in the academy. Papert’s (1993) “instructionism” views knowledge as a collection of facts and procedures. Schooling is intended to impart these facts and procedures to students in an expedient, teacher-controlled, testable manner. In this paper I will deconstruct and argue against widespread, traditional, and indeed, instructionist university music teacher education practices, and provide alternatives.
Instructors of music teacher preparation courses fail to model the multitude of excellent pedagogical approaches detailed above. We lag behind our colleagues who apply a critical lens to K-12 music education and successfully translate critical theory into K-12 curricular change. At the university, we obey NASM and NCATE requirements; the “cloak of professionalism” is a bulletproof vest protecting our choices (Talbot & Mantie, 2013). When our courses are not microcosms of the progressive, effective learning environments we expect our students eventually to establish, we do a disservice to the next generation of music teachers. How can they reproduce what they have never experienced?
And especially, if we hope to equip our students to “grapple with challenging prevailing discourses,” (Benedict, 2007, p. 5) shouldn’t they witness their professors likewise struggling to challenge mindless or hurtful educational malpractice? Benedict (2007) speaks for me here:
Many of us desire to facilitate environments in which our students are willing and able to engage in habits of inquiry that will enable them to make problematic and interrogate the power relations embedded in the programs from which they came, the programs they find themselves in now, and the world they will enter. (p. 1)
But can we translate desire into meaningful change in our professorial practice? Feiman-Nemser (2001) wrote, “If we want schools to produce more powerful learning on the part of students, we have to offer more powerful learning opportunities to teachers” (p. 1013). In this paper, I will contextualize Feiman-Nemser’s quote as my personal quest: I am a professor seeking “more powerful learning opportunities” for her students and then hopefully, in the best of a trickle-down scenario, their students.
I will first examine some typical modes and models of music teacher preparation, revealing oppressive, outdated, and discriminatory practices. I follow the collected work of postmodern feminists (Luke & Gore, 1992) in reading typical music teacher pedagogical encounters and texts for their assigned meanings related to “power,” “citizenship,” and “voice,” and how these meanings “correspond to specific practices and embodied relations in classrooms” (p. 4). I will then report my travels through junior professor land: my suffering under the “tyranny of the syllabus” (Author, 2008), the frightening experience of being issued a copy of a “survival guide” (Bakken & Simpson, 2011) to my own employment, and finally, my foray into serious, meaningful self-study research methodologies that proved transformational in my teaching.
I present my journey not as one who has successfully created a college classroom ripe with powerful learning opportunities; not as one who has managed to model every pedagogical ideal. Rather, I present my evolving practice of problematizing assumptions about university teaching. As exemplars, I will provide music education course ideas garnered from colleagues’ work. I suggest a metaphor for consideration: professor-as-dinner-party host, and my efforts in a recent seminar in music education philosophy in which I tried to sustain that metaphor throughout. I conclude by sharing the creative “recipes” brought to the table by music teacher education students.
REFERENCES:
Bakken, J.P., & Simpson, C.G. (2011). A survival guide for new faculty members: Outlining the keys to success for promotion and tenure. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Ltd.
Benedict, C. (2007). Embracing powerlessness and empowerment: Coexisting contradictions within teacher preparation. Visions of Research in Music Education 9 (10), pp. 1-16.
Feiman-Nemser, S. (2001). From preparation to practice: Designing a continuum to strengthen and sustain teaching. Teachers College Record, 103(6), 1013-1055.
Luke, C., & Gore, J. (Eds.) (1992). Feminisms in critical pedagogy. New York: Routledge.
Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York: Basic Books.
Rosenshine, B., Froelich, H., & Fakhouri, I. (2002). Systematic instruction. In R. Colwell & C. Richardson (Eds.), The new handbook of research on music teaching and learning (pp. 299-314). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, A.M. (2008). The adaptive professor versus the tyranny of the syllabus (pp. 85-86); and, Shifting identity (pp.88-89). In C. Conway and T. Hodgman (Eds.), Teaching music in higher education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Talbot, B., & Mantie, R. (2013). Blinded by bureaucracy: The pitfalls of professionalization. Paper presented at the Society for Music Teacher Educators Symposium, Greensboro, NC, September 28, 2013.
Webster, P.R., & Campbell, M.R. (2010). Tipping over: Selected literature on music teacher education redesign, v.2. Paper presented at the Biennial Music Teachers National Conference, Anaheim, CA, March 26, 2010. Retrieved January 20, 2014 from http://smte.us/aspas/restructuring-the-curriculum/.