Two weeks ago, we were given an assignment for MHST 537 (Teaching Music History) class: Find a reading outside the syllabus that is connected to prejudice in the classroom, and introduce that reading to the class.

The reading I chose—Strangers From A Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Ronald Takaki)—is one that was part of the syllabus for a course (”Asian Americans and Education”) I took while at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. That course, the reason I took it, and what I got out of it are posts for perhaps another time. I remembered this Takaki reading because of one particular section titled “The Myth of the ‘Model Minority’” that resonated with post-grad school experiences I’d had. Takaki writes:

Today Asian Americans are celebrated as America’s “model minority.” In 1986, NBC Nightly News and the McNeil/Lehrer Report aired special news segments on Asian Americans and their success, and a year later, CBS’s 60 Minutes presented a glowing report on their stunning achievements in the academy. “Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well in school?” Mike Wallace asked, and quickly added, “They must be doing something right. Let’s bottle it.

[A] Pattern of Asian absence from the higher levels of administration is characterized as “a glass ceiling”—a barrier through which top management positions can only be seen, but not reached, by Asian Americans. . . . Asian Americans complain that they are often stereotyped as passive and told they lack the aggressiveness required in administration. . . . Asian American ’success’ has emerged as the new stereotype for this ethnic minority. While this image has led many teachers and employers to view Asians as intelligent and hardworking and has opened some opportunities, it has also been harmful. (Takaki, 474-477). 

I grew up in a society predominantly Asian and Polynesian, so I was largely insulated from the “model minority” views that Takaki relays. However, while studying for an additional degree beyond my Harvard one, I did encounter some of the reverse racism that Takaki might suggest would come about as a result: That because Asian Americans are perceived as success stories, it becomes acceptable by others to taunt, berate, and bring up Asian ethnicity as a means of “leveling the playing field” for those of other racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Here are a few short anecdotes that I feel relay my experiences:

• At one point, when I was taking a historical survey course (and was doing rather well in it, because of a lot of effort I’d put into studying the material), the instructor insinuated that my success was ethnically based rather than on my skill set. 
• Another teacher commonly made analogies that somehow connected musical scores with Chinese menus and Oriental massage. 
• I also had new acquaintances remark, “You’re the first Asian friend I’ve had—the others are so nerdy” and “Why are you damn Asians so good at everything?”

Though I wanted to take those experiences and remarks in good faith, I found it increasingly difficult to tolerate and stomach them. While the easiest way to interpret some of these experiences may be as harassment (racial and sexual), I see them as being related to the “Model Minority” syndrome. At no time during these occurrences did I observe members of other minorities or ethnic/racial groups receive similar treatment. 

Significantly, Asian-American “success” has been accompanied by the rise of a new wave of anti-Asian sentiment. On college campuses, racial slurs have surfaced in conversations on the quad: ‘Look out forthe Asian Invasion.’ ‘M.I.T. means made in Taiwan.’ ‘U.C.L.A. stands for University of Caucasians Living Among Asians’. ‘Stop the Chinese before they flunk you out.’ (Takaki, 479).

Implications for Classroom Teaching

Clearly, one lesson that I can draw from reflecting on my own experiences is that teachers must strive to be pro-active and conscientious individuals who value objectivity equal to their own interpretation and analysis. Another is that we must always consider what misunderstandings could result from the ambiguities of language and metaphor. I would also argue that organizing coursework and work products in a way that students’ learning processes are most evident can help to counteract any perceived obstacles for students that will come from a variety of cultural, ethnic, racial backgrounds.

Concentrate on a particular area of technology that interests you, and be prepared to explain to your colleagues its current state of development; where it might be in five years; and the pros and cons of its usefulness in the classroom.

—Assignment for this week’s Teaching Music History course (MHST 537), taught by Anne Hallmark

One specific adaptation of technology that interests me is the use of “blogs” as a means for after-class discussion and discourse. Blogging shares many benefits with similar technologies (such as online bulletin boards, forums, email), in that its asynchronous format allows discussants to log on at their leisure; carefully think about what they want to share, and respond in thoughtful ways. A blogging website can offer users several types of opportunities, like: reading or viewing class events passively; re-articulating what happened in class (such as, from the student’s personal perspective) by writing a “post”; and/or commenting on others’ perspectives by leaving comments at the bottom of each post. As with other Internet technologies, online blogging websites usually allow the inclusion of hyperlinked articles, multimedia (videos, audio, pictures, slideshows), rich text (bold, underline, bullets, other formats), and also function as archives. Many blogging websites (such as Blogger, Xanga, MySpace Blog, BlogSpot) already exist, and most offer free general-use blogs that include some kind of technical support for inexperienced users. For a higher level of customization, “open-source” (non proprietary) software like Wordpress (which this blog is run on) or Movable Type are also popular, though these often require a more sophisticated sense of technical expertise. 

The major hurdle that I’ve observed is not with the blogging technology itself, but rather it’s use and how it is supported by the instructor, and included in the classroom: A class with access to a blog is a very different story from a class whose members post regularly to the blog, and whose instructor actively moderates the students’ posts and comments. Also, the kind and style of writing that is posted to the blog will make a significant difference in the level of engagement students have with the blog:

• What will draw them into reading the blog? 
• What type of discourse is the instructor hoping to achieve via the blog? 
• To what extent will the blog be able to help students make connections beyond what is discussed in class? 
• How can learning on the blog make the jump, back to classroom learning?

It’s my inclination that these types of issues and ideas will be with us in 5 years, 10 years, even 50 years—that it’s not the technology that poses questions like this, but the ways that educators structure and vet their own teaching processes, when working with and engaging students of multiple, or varied, learning styles. 

As parts of my professional roles (Information Architect for the Music-In-Education National Consortium, and Program Coordinator for the  MIE Concentration here at NEC), I have spent the last few years researching and developing educational communities that support blog technology. The CMIE NewsBlog (http://centerformie.org/blog) is one example of my work. It is contributed to, on a weekly basis, by a selection of students from currently-running MIE courses and Guided Internships. These students are designated as “Documentation Specialists“—they each are charged with the responsibility of collecting evidence and examples of classroom teaching/learning n their respective MIE classes or internships, and reporting/sharing/articulating what’s going on in those classes. I have designed a number of post types that students can use as springboards for writing. I also regularly meet with students to mentor them on what kinds of documentation they should collect, and how that documentation can be used in a portfolio or NewsBlog post. We try to steer our writers so that they have an uninformed audience in mind; the premise is that a thoughtfully-written NewsBlog post can also be used in a teaching portfolio, or as the basis for academic writing of some kind. Finally, each MIE instructor incorporates the NewsBlog into his classroom in  a course-appropriate way: the MIE Intro class, for example, uses the NewsBlog as practice for students learning to collect and reflect on documentation. As MIE Program Coordinator, I use the NewsBlog to show a birds-eye view of how each part of the department works in relation to the whole. 

The readership of the CMIE NewsBlog is large and varied: Not only do the Documentation Specialists’ classmates read the NewsBlog; but also MIE faculty, students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, members of the MIE National Consortium, and the general public. NewsBlog posts are moderated by myself and other MIE faculty members, and posters often receive extraordinarily deep feedback on their writing. In fact, since the NewsBlog begun, the MIE Department has seen a marked increase in the quality and maturity of written portfolio work. I am sure that this is not unrelated. 

As long as the teacher is supportive, aware, and comfortable with the use of blogging websites, the inclusion of blog technology is generally un-intrusive and can be a welcome complement to synchronous classroom discussion. I welcome my colleagues to visit the CMIE NewsBlog, read and comment on our students’ work, and contact me should they have any questions or suggestions on its use.

-Randy Wong

We began this session by learning a few folk rounds. The first was a bluesy MoonDog tune that reads as follows:

Nero’s expedition up the Nile
Failed
Because the water hyacinths
Had clogged the river
Denying Nero’s vessel’s passage
Through the Sud of Nubia

(I found a transcription online if anyone is interested in joining along!)

The second was a curious tune that compared a frog to a strange form of bird. This piece reminded me of a showtune more than a folk melody. Its text read:

What a queer bird a frog are
When he sit he stand almost
When he jump he fly almost
When he sing he cry almost
And he ain’t got no tail
Hardly he ain’t got no tail
And he sit on what he ain’t got almost…
What a queer bird a frog are!

When we broke into canon (I believe at one point we were in 4 or 5 parts) I began to get so excited that I couldn’t help but sing at the top of my lungs and by the end I had definitly broken a sweat. At times I stopped (just briefly) in order to experience the composite harmonies and rhythms as they flew by. This is the music that shaped me into the man (and musician) that I am today. My mother sang folk songs from her youth to me when I was an infant (and in fact even before I was born). When I was older she bestowed unto me her collection of LPs that contained her favored renditions of these tunes (they are still in frequent rotation on my record player). There is a strange sense of community that is lost when these songs and their traditions are ignored and undermined.

Later that night, after our class, Joanna and I took a couple friends up onto a friend’s rooftop deck. We taught them the songs that we had learned, and while a number of intoxicated college students stumbled home on the streets below, we rounded off the roof above them. This type of community is profoundly valuable. The sense of sharing is so unique and there is such a strong energy of liberation from all things ego. It is as though the music soaks into your skin and you feel such ecstasy from its internal resonance. These moments are rare (and increasingly so). We speculated in class on what life might be like if the price of gas escalated to an unreasonable and unaffordable height. Luxury as we now know it would cease to be an option. Touring musicians and ensembles would become rare and would force our community into a tighter knit microcosm. I believe that our scope of perception would narrow and we would begin to look inwards for entertainment. It is likely that our culture would return to an orally driven tradition with a focus on sharing, trading, familial communities, and the immediate experience of being. It is possible to speculate that within our current global community these things become insignificant and tend to disappear.

I would also like the mention the great attention devoted within our current cultural machine to the standardized process of test taking. This continues a conversation we began in class that Jenny also spoke of in her previous blog. As Jenny mentioned, learning to take a test, such as the SAT, targets strengths that you might use when balancing a check book. The strategies you learn when training for these exams in no way helps one to develop into a better artist, writer, musician, or creative thinker. Much of the way that high school English classes are conducted reflects this. Conversations surrounding literature and higher art are more often than not guided towards a specific end result or “correct answer” as defined by a teacher’s handbook. These so called ‘guided conversations’ are not real conversations and do not express anything but a prescribed formula and its subsequently derived answer. It leaves little room for creative thinking and no room for a student to learn freely. In tighter knit societies, we want people to sing with, to talk to, to be part of a community with.

We discussed in depth how much of what we learned as students was not what our teacher had been attempting to teach. For many of us, we learn in a variety of free-associative ways. We make connections and draw conclusions based upon previous experiences and our current understandings. It seems obvious, with this in mind, that our system of education can many times create a barrier for the minds of learners. In my view, education is something that cannot be prescribed. It is something that, when most effective, is coordinated with the specific needs and current situations of each student group (and in the most ideal situations, for each student individually). We have a long way to go in fulfilling the needs of our students, but I believe that in-depth speculation on the unique qualities of folk based communities will yield positive and provocative results.

A position statement by CMIE graduate student Hermann Hudde has been printed today in El Universal, a Venezuelan newspaper. Hudde, a guitar performance major and CMIE Concentration student, plans to graduate from New England Conservatory in Spring 2008.

Read Hudde’s article, via Google Translate, here:
El Universal Article - September 1, 2007 - Computer-translated (into English)

Read Hudde’s untranslated article here:
El Universal Article - September 1, 2007 - Untranslated (in Spanish)

The Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework has been around for over a decade. As far as I know, the term was first coined when during the years I served as the Founding Director of Research at the Leonard Bernstein Center for the Arts in Nashville (along with Eric Booth, Teaching Artist Director, David Steiner, former Head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Alexander Bernstein) where the term was used to understand the Leonard Bernstein’s persona and his life’s work as a synthesis of his artistry, teaching, and scholarly publications and lectures.

Nine years ago at NEC, I worked with Alan Fletcher (now CEO and President of the Aspen School of Music and Festival) to establish the Artist-Teacher-Scholar (ATS) Framework as the conceptual framework for NEC new Music-in-Education Program. It was the ATS framework – employed as an educational model for MIE students at NEC – that attracted years of federal funding to help NEC establish its Music-in-Education Program and the Research Center, representing the two key components of the Center for Music in Education.

Today I understand that the success of both NEC programs is aligned with the inter-related principles of the ATS framework. That is to say, as many students develop musically over time, they become increasingly interested in both the ‘teaching of the musical arts’ and the ‘artistry of teaching’ in schools or in outreach programs regardless of what career path they choose. And eventually it is not unusual for these musicians to recognize the importance of building both a personal ‘scholarship of artistry’ and a ‘scholarship of teaching’ as they develop career paths.

As evidence of this ongoing progression, NEC faculty whose courses count toward the MIE program - all highly trained and experienced musicians - engage in scholarship that takes the form of publishing, lectures, research, advocacy, community leadership, curriculum development, outreach programs, assessment, social action and policy shaping through our local programs and national collaborations relevant to music in education and our society. I believe that the ATS model helps to explain the genisis and effectiveness of these faculty initiatives.

Further evidence of the impact of this framework can be understood through changes in institutional policy. Nine years after the creation of NEC MIE programs and its research center, there are now guided intern programs, concentration programs in Music in Education, and even new research institutes in our partnering organizations nationally. Googiing on the internet I discovered there are now Music-in-Education programs established internationally independent of our work. I think these events have not occurred in absentia of an evolving conception of the artist’s developing persona as an artist-teacher-scholar.

Personally, the conception of the ATS clarifies the need for research and assessment in music-in-education practices. For me, artistry and education have limited impact on public policy, practices or leadership without ongoing research that is both rigorously conducted and aimed at practical significance for musicians, teachers, parents, administrators and students. Without having to arrive at a lock-step view of the ATS framework as a model for NEC faculty or students, I think it is fair to say that Patrick Keppel, Randy Wong, Lyle Davidson, Warren Senders, and Paul Burdick and our many other colleagues at NEC and in our partnering schools, see this framework as a driving force behind NEC’s national or local initiatives, Journal publications and the presentation of student portfolio work coming out of the NEC MIE and outreach programs.

I look forward to seeing more alums presenting their work on the www.mieatnec.org website and blogs. I hope everyone reading our new Journal in May will be stimulated through seeing the work of fellow MIE interns in other institutions. Nonetheless, it is my fondest hope that anyone investigating the publications, student, and alum work will appreciate the evolving forms of artistry, teaching and scholarship represented by NEC faculty and students as a resource and inspiration for advancing music in education and our society.

- Larry Scripp

Larry Scripp is Director of NEC’s Center for Music-In-Education and Executive Director of the MIE National Consortium. Scripp is also on NEC’s Music Theory and Music Education faculties, and is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This post is intended to solicit some feedback for a thought that has been occurring to me while participating in Paul Burdick’s MIE course, “Performing Artists in Community Outreach.” Throughout the first three weeks of class I have become familiar with various definitions of what a ‘community’ is, but couldn’t help but notice that when one uses the term ‘outreach,’ it often only refers to select/few types of communities. These are primarily for schools and assisted living centers.

To me there are many reasons for this. For example, I can see these two types of communities as gaining the most enrichment from an outreach program, especially that of music. There is no doubt that lives are enhanced by what a performing artist can do in these venues. Beyond that I also see a need for outreach within these institutions. Schools need people to come in from the outside world to display an infinite amount of things that prove invaluable to students. Assisted living centers need our performances to among many other things provide an escape from the everyday. This is by no means an exhaustive list of what we as performing artists can and of course actually do at these facilities, but what about the other communities?

Most of the people on this planet are not in grade schools nor are they in assisted living centers? Do these people in the long mid-roads of their life not need enrichment and outreach the same way as our young and our elderly? Can they not benefit all the same or perhaps even more? Is there some way we can bring outreach to other communities, more regular communities, communities we have yet to think of? Yet to penetrate?

What do you think?

-Andy

Andy Stetson is an undergraduate trumpet performance major in his senior year at NEC. As an MIE Concentration student, Andy was the lead organizer for the 2006 Music-in-Education National Consortium conference held at NEC, and has written an article titled “Hands Across The Americas: Experiencing the Transformative Power of Music in Venezuela,” which will be published in the Inaugural Issue of the Journal for Music-in-Education, 2007.

From the article abstract by editor Drew McManus:

Nearly all orchestra musicians are familiar with in-school education programs implemented by their respective education departments. But what options do players have if they want to become more active with in-school education programs or are not satisfied with their current options?

Dr. Larry Scripp, Executive Director of NEC’s Center for Music-in-Education responds to this charge in an article at www.polyphonic.org!