All God's Children Got A Song: An Exploration of Urban Music Education

Abstract

The three papers in this dissertation are conceptualized around the topic of urban music education. At the foundation of each paper lies an aim to analyze music teachers’ engagement with students in urban settings. What connects these three projects is the exploration of voices and perspectives that can strengthen our understanding of music teacher education to meet the unique needs of students in urban settings and address complexities within urban contexts. First, I examine my own journey leaving a predominantly White institution (PWI) twenty years ago to enter urban settings and teach music where I found myself unequipped in musical and nonmusical ways. I describe my journey toward musical and cultural competency over many years as I worked to learn to teach and engage with music that I had not been prepared to teach, in classrooms of students with whom I did not share a cultural background. As an impetus from that journey of both musical and cultural understanding, the second paper represents a deep exploration of Black Gospel music teaching as defined by three experts. Once again, while the study’s findings may offer musical insights in Black Gospel music, the greater lessons are the cultural components that inform Black music. In the last project, I study two urban school music programs that engaged community arts partners and music educators who learned musical and nonmusical lessons about the liberatory praxis of Black music. Emerging themes across these three projects reflect a need for rigorous and vibrant music teacher education reform that resonantly and responsively meet the needs of students in urban settings. In all three projects, participants (a) cited a need for music teacher education to move beyond content and include the intersection of race and teaching music; (b) discussed the centering of Western Art Musics (WAMs) in the academy; (c) encountered adolescent, high school age beginners in their music classes requiring a need for approachable, accessible, relevant tools to make music outside of traditional Choir, Orchestra, Band models; (d) found liberatory Black musical forms including Hip Hop, song-writing, Drumline, loop-based composition through digital audio workstations (DAWs), and Black Gospel music served beginners successfully; and (e) engaged or participated as culture bearers and/or experts on teaching unfamiliar Black musical forms and culturally competent communication across diverse groups. Given the themes across these three papers, I argue that critical reflection on the academy and music teacher preparation is necessary to enact reform that works against stagnancy and exclusion and moves toward inclusive musics and teaching for liberation available in Black music. I interrogate the three papers through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework through which I view, interpret, reflect, and find greater meaning to inform the preparation to teach music teaching and learning in urban settings. Visible across findings in all papers are examples of foundational tenets of CRT, whiteness as property and the permanence of racism, as participants felt unprepared to teach music outside of Eurocentric musical practices and cited the need for music teacher education to include the intersection of race and teaching. To make conclusions and suggest possibilities for reform in music education, I frame findings through the connection of two additional CRT tenets: interest convergence and counterstorytelling. Given the realities suggested in the first CRT tenets, I relied on the CRT theory of interest convergence to make recommendations for reform to music education. Theorizing that meaningful change is impossible without including interests of the dominant group, I propose “All God's Children Got a Song” as a call for interest convergence wherein systems and actors in music education work harder to include the 80% of students who currently do not participate in music. In naming areas for change, I suggest the use of counterstorytelling as a way to frame possibility for changing the narrative in music education in four areas that were common findings across papers: (a) to promote music education as approachable, age appropriate, and accessible for adolescent beginners, possible through curricula including but not limited to open, participatory, liberatory, and “family”-oriented forms of Black music including Hip Hop, song-writing, Drumline and loop-based composition using music technology, Black Gospel music, and choir; (b) to reimagine the concept of music literacy wherein students experience viewing music without navigating a written page; (c) to foster community capital whereby partnerships emerge with culture bearers who model and provide musical and cultural models of unfamiliar ways of making music alongside cultural and musical competence in communicating across diverse groups; and (d) to develop and implement comprehensive preservice education for future urban music educators that builds racial literacy skills to support content and pedagogy. Keywords: Urban Music Education, Gospel Music, Community