Here are my thoughts on the importance of “peeling the onion” as we do social justice work, critically thinking, looking and acting toward justice:

1: Onions are very hardy. They survive in lots of different kinds of climates. They adapt and grow regardless if the climate is its original temperate climate. So does injustice. Injustice, especially racial injustice is like a Hydra; you chop off one head like overt racism such as the gatekeeping of Black scholars, and two other ones come up, like asking people to do work for free, and white fragility.

2:The outer layer of the onion is shiny, waxy, and classified by color. It is designed to protect the insides. It’s shell is not that tough, it is paper-like, but it still is there. Usually there is more than one layer of paper. At first, because one cracks the outer layer and because it took so much work, so much [unpaid]- labor usually by Black people, by People of Color, and very often women- so much organizing, for so long, by so many people, it might look like one is taking two steps forward when it reality, one only peeled the first papery onion, to only find more equal as hard-to-peel papery layers. The onion at the point, still has not even yet been peeled to reveal the first inner layer

3: Onions are one of the oldest cultivated plants. So is injustice, especially racial injustice. We “cultivated” and still do, today. We are still “onion” farmers.

4: Onions release oils that when you peel, cut or chop them, make you cry. The oils are sulphur oils. Do onions want to prevent you from cutting them? I don’t’ know but it sure does feel like it when you peel,cut & chop them. We all have defense mechanisms, especially when we want to survive. So does Whiteness. Whiteness will make you cry with its oil as we peel, cut & chop.

5: The layers at first, begin as “hollow” leaves. As the onion grows, it stores food in the leaves, and the leaves swell into the shape we come to know the onion by. So does racism. Racism feeds and grows by what we do, and by what we don’t do. Especially by White folks letting the latter fatten up the layers.

6: Bulbous plants, like onions, have many layers of scales (leaves) to protect the bulb. So does racial injustice. The many layers are described in the “overt and covert racism chart that we’ve seen making the rounds on the internets. https://www.wearebeloved.org/blog/2020/5/29/white-supremacy-amp-anti-blackness-a-covert-amp-overt-beast

7: The roots are at the bottom of the bulb, feeding the onion from the soil that farmers AND nature and the land. When we get an onion in our kitchen, we rarely have the roots attached. Most often the roots are invisible to us, and most of us don’t event know what/where the roots are. Same with racial injustice. Not knowing the where the roots are allows us to continue harvesting onions without questioning the soil. Not knowing what the roots are, allows us to continue eating the onions without questioning who gets a sweet one and who does not.

8: Racism is the land, the water, the sun, the soil AND the farmer, not just the farmer. Another non-onion analogy I found helpful as I better understand racism: Racism is the water, not the shark.

9: Peeling, Chopping and Cutting the onions is hard, painful and messy work. So much about this work is hard and tricky to do, though it shouldn’t be. We will err unintentionally AND intentionally because a) we are human, and b) because we have been socialized to eat the onions without peeling them. Because of these reasons, we must lean on the power of relationships, hold one another close(r) while the sulphur oils release, help one another wash the eyes with cold water (or whatever works), rub lemon in our hands so the onion smell goes away and also just witness. We must do the labor of staying engaged though the process, instead of pledging to never again buy or eat onions

10: We must remember that it is not just onions. There are also shallots, leeks, garlic, shallots, and others. These bulbous plants are a family; a system. Racism is a system too. not just individuals holding on to all the power, but systems of Whiteness tokenizing and weaponizing the voices of Black people, and People of color as face shields when the tears come in, as we, the people peel, cut and chop the onion.

”Find something you love doing, and do it ’til it kills you.”

Nobody knows if it was Van Dyke Parks or Bukowski who said this, but that is beside the point. The point is, whether or not we love bands, orchestras, choirs, jazz bands, hiphop cyphers, or flute ensembles, we should not have to actually let it kills us, much less kill others. Pun intended.

In times of Corona Virus, we must rethink music education if we want it to not just survive the pandemic, but to grow and thrive. School based music ed as we know it, is in fact a petri dish for viruses. Most ensemble performance classes depend on groups of people engaging with one another in small spaces and in close proximity to others and in real time [internet, you suck!]. Instrumental ensembles, especially ones in which instruments require the blowing of air are like high speed drones for coronavirus droplets. Chorus class under a pandemic is no longer a breath of fresh air, it actually is quite the opposite. Piano class or Rock bands where students are sharing instruments period after period are disasters waiting to happen.

We must go beyond the ensemble format, the buzzword tech and that which a system not prepared to deal with a pandemic taught us about how to teach music during a pandemic, and instead we need a paradigm shift based on dreaming the kind of music ed that ain’t yet, but that could be. This paradigm shift cannot be about money. Most cities will be broke after this (thanks capitalism!) and the first thing to get cut will be education. This paradigm shift also cannot be technology. The Zooms and the Googles are here for disaster capitalism. This paradigm shift has to be about people, for the people, with the people and about the people. As such, we must lean on science, on the brilliance of the community, and in participatory research and action.

“Nothing about us without us”, (Charlton,2000) is a slogan used by South African disability activists in the 1990’s and is the idea that no policies should be set forth by people who don’t experience a certain set of issues, for people who do. Paulo Freire expresses this sentiment as well in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, writing that we should not do things for people, but with people [paraphrase]. If we are transforming our view of the (music ed) world, away from what it was and towards what it can be, we must make safety as our starting point. At this point, until we have enough testing and vaccines for everyone, most kinds of music teaching and learning we’ve been engaging are most likely not safe to do in the classroom. Thus, we have to pivot, or cough cough, maybe die and kill. (pun intended again).

Over the past year, I have been thinking lots about this idea of “freedom dreaming”. Organizing with the New York Collective of Radical Educators, NYCoRE and reading adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategies have invited me to dream, to plant seeds in my own mind first, and then try to bring those ideas forth to my world(s). As we wrote on our (COVID-19 cancelled FreedomDreams 2020 conference), to “Freedom Dreaming is to lean into the resilience of our ancestors and communities; to use our collective imaginations, inside, outside and through the classroom to break free, to dream and seed a world that does not yet exist but that we yearn for.”

Our Freedom Dreams must be accessible for all, not for most or even some. If they are not accessible to the poor, to the marginalized, to the immunosuppressed, to the disabled our dreams are not about freedom. Nobody is free until everyone is free. In the same hand, dreaming requires us to yearn and to leave this reality. If we keep trying to fit our rockbands into Apps, our choirs into video editing energy/money zaps and our orchestras into videochats, we are not dreaming, we are sleeping.

All these formats and techs are dope, and we should use them! but they are not freedom dreaming. They won’t help us seed a new kind of music ed. [this is not a lowpunch commentary about what we are doing now, as right now we are not teaching, we are barely surviving]. Freedom dreaming takes time, and freedom dreaming is about localized, responsive and expansive dreams that are unique to the communities of the dreamers. So, I invite us to start thinking about how we might freedom dream ourselves INTO this new way of music education, rather than running away from it toward the safety of what we know how to do.

This protest sign is from a protest to feminicides in Mexico and I think this really applies to us. “Que se rompa lo que se tenga que romper, que se caiga lo que se tenga que caer, que arda lo que tenga que arder…”- “Let what has to be broken be broken, what should be dropped should fall, what should be burned on fire …”

Ultimately, we have to reckon with the reality that if our pedagogy and our spirit is not up for the task, it will break, and that is OK, not in the “survival of the fittest” kinda OK, but in the “change is good for eveyone”, and those who signed up to teach band and can no longer band teach and they don’t want to change, shouldn’t change and instead look for something that fulfills their dreams and their wallets. One thing is for sure, the 2020–2021 school year will most definitely require such changes and students should not get subpar education just because their teacher is unwilling or unable to meet the demands; especially if it is for the tantrum of “poor me, I can’t teach band anymore”.

I have started “freedom dreaming” my next school year! Here are thee freedom dreams of mine I will share:

1. I (still) love technology! I don’t love expensive, buzzwordy tech (unless it is free, in which case I really really love it!). Tech that affords people to make music, to learn music, to teach music, to profit from music and most importantly; to freedom dream through music, will be a big part of what my practice will offer. I have been making really short video tutorials (1 or 2 minute long videos) using my smartphone and the app TikTok. Why? a) it is free. b) it is a platform the youth understand and love. c) it is an incredibly powerful and dope video editor. YouTube has an amazing catalog of lessons to learn how to do anything. I typically check out how many views a lesson has, try my hardest to showcase content created by women, by BIPOP, LGBTQIA+, and disabled musicians. Why? Because representation matters.

2: Rejoice In Choice. I love songwriting. I love beatmaking. I love drumming, and singing and music journalism. I love musicians and I love music. Music education is not a surgical mask that “one size fits all” (pun intended again!) and it shouldn’t have to be. I aim to research, create and refine projects that can serve as “starting points” for students to engage in democratic education, exercise their agency and, you guessed it, freedom dream themsleves! Here is the assignment, “Music Making Activities for Actual Music Making In Times of Remote Learning” , where I give students choices of activities they can do on a weekly basis. Some are cycling through each assignment every week, others are repeating the same assignment. reality check: some are not doing any of the assignments, and that is OK!. If you like the assignment, donate a few bucks to my Venmo: @martinurbach , as I have been donating all the money raised through my curriculum writing and sharing with mutual aid funds in NYC: Brooklyn Shows Love Mutual Aid Fund and with the #FreeBlackMamas campaign because, (and I shouldn’t have to say it) jails are death sentences under a pandemic. Also, nobody belongs in jails.

3: I will advocate for safe and equitable return to the classrooms. This one is tricky, because as a city employee (if I want to keep my paycheck and health insurance, and I most definitely do), I have to go back to work whenever the lawmakers decide — regardless of whether or not it is safe to do so. The UFT (teachers’ union) has put forward this petition, I mostly agree with. What does social distancing in a NYC classroom look like?We are calling for classrooms of 11 students or less, staggered schedules, access to remote learning, and more. I will also work diligently to fundraise so that every student has access to their own musical instrument (so we have to share instruments as little as possible). I will have Clorox and Lysol wipes to clean instruments as much as possible (not to lick or ingest, much less inject, snort or Juul) [thanks #45]. If it is scientifically safe to do singing, maybe we do so with a mix of cloth masks and face shields, after all, drumhead companies are making them. This will also be couple with learning how the physics of singing and breath spread work, how aerosols travel and what face-masks actually do.

In conclusion, I do not yet know/what how next year will look like for my practice as a music educator. To be honest, I don’t know what two weeks from now will look like!( This week is planned tho!) Here is the plan, which is about “live Tweeting a record, a mixtape or a movie’s soundtrack”, which I adapted through something a friend shared with me! What I do know, is that before I am a music teacher, I am a teacher. Before I am a teacher, I am a human being. I cannot in good conscience teach without acknowledging and responding to this virus, even if it means the death of the orchestra, and I have to take out my tiny violin and play sad songs. [one final pun intended]

Edit 5/13/2020:

Here is 5 things for us music teachers to remember in times of #remotelearning during #covid19 in regards to why students might not be turning in work assigned.

1) Students don’t all the sudden have a personal vendetta against you.
2) Students don’t all the sudden have a personal vendetta against music.
3) Music is only “that” important” IF music is “that” important to the individual. Music for me was what saved me when my mom died, when i got bullied in school for being fat, when I moved to a new country, when my dad died, etc. We cannot drum music’s importance onto students, especially in an institutionalized format, ie: school music. For the vast majority, music is gonna be the first assignment to go, because Algebra II and Social Studies won’t. For me, it was gym and art. I never did those homeworks.
4)Learning music this way sucks more than teaching music this way. I don’t know the mathematical equation, but I assume is ten fold, at least.
5)) You, me and anyone that is now excited about teaching music production (beatmaking, HipHop, Soundtrap, Garageband, etc) and that is not part of HipHop culture; that does not listen to it, engage with it, or practice it, needs to remember and own that our “beatmaking lessons” might just not be that good (yet) and students know when we are pandering to them; EVEN if it is #PandemicPandering.
6) When we give “failing” grades (or NX/NS in NYC) for a music class, we are assessing access (to instruments, to internet, to machines, to Wifi, to a place at home where they can have privacy, to a place at home where they can have quiet, to a family life that makes it so that IF they are staying up all night playing video games because kids and teens are dis regulated because there’s is a pandemic out there, someone can do the labor of helping them co-regulate, or at least take their Nintendo switch away, and to family/community members not dying.
7) This is not online teaching/learning. IF you have taken an online class before at a university, or elsewhere, you know this. Online classes usually have been planned for a semester to a year. AND, one chooses to take it. This is not that. This is surviving, and tho we teachers are doing a great job at it most of the times, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck.
8) The most important part of musicking is the community and social aspects of music making. Not saying it cannot be done, it can! but it is not inherent to remotelearning. We have to bake the pie WITH it, cannot sprinkle it like sugar afterwards.
9) We can help students develop the ability to meet deadlines, to persevere through hardship, to adjust to new normals, to succeed WITHOUT having their grades as an “incentive” to do so. This just creates violence for the folks who cannot get it done, for X reasons. We can do all that more effectively when we say “ yo, this is music class. You already got a passing grade. Now, let’s work together so we can make music.
10) Finally, this too shall pass. It is up to us to transform how we do this for the long run. What kinds of music making and music teaching and music learning make sense for your community? As for me, I think what makes most sense (based on asking students) is a combination of focusing on individual skill gathering (like private lessons) which there are tons of online platforms to help (fender play, Yousician, etc) and so now the kicker isd fundraising so that all students have access to an instrument of their own, which they can practice and learn at home, and in class, What works for me might not work for you, and viceversa. But what definitely will work, is to ask your/our students what feels most alive in them in regards to music teaching/learning/making.

If you are an educator and you use Zoom either because you already taught online or because you were made to move your classroom to it in zoom speeds, you know about “Zoombombing”. Zoombombing is a mirror that forces us to look at ourselves in the historical, social and political contexts that we live in. Humans are social, historical, political beings and since teaching is a human activity, so is Zoombombing. The expectation that all the isms — racism, misogyny, classism, xenophonia, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, anti BIPOC- would not show up in US American Zoom Classrooms (invited or uninvited) is a mirror in an of itself of our unwillingness to face the music and dance; to acknowledge that what author and philosopher bell hooks speaks of as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is baked into the cake of US American culture. Zoombombings, are violent, traumatic, and triggering. They are by en large hate crimes against BIPOC, women, LGBT+ folks and Asian folks (Thanks to 45!)

Are you a teacher that has experienced them personally? I have. Three times this past week. Two times in a colleague’s class (which I entered as a Restorative Justice Coordinator) and wait for it, yesterday during the “celebration of life” memorial for a teacher at our school that died two days ago, most likely of COVOD-19. Yes, you read it correctly. Some White boys came into a place of mourning, and talked about how they hated N words, and their D***s are huge and had porn movies playing on screens behind them. In my experience, and as Dr. Fauci reminds us, research and data cannot come from data only gathered by us on a one time basis, it has only been White teenage boys doing this. In the case of the “classroom” zoombombing, the boys were not part of our school community, BUT! they were social media friends with boys in the class. We are now looking for correlations between the zoombombers from yesterday’s memorial and my hope is that they were not connected to our community.

Does this surprise you?

Why do I mention race? Because everything about this country is about race. Whoever tells you differently is either lying, doesn’t have an understanding of racism 101, and/or is a racist of some level. ← All White people — including myself!- have been socialized under racist thoughts and idea. Ibram X. Kendi does a great job explaining this.

If Zoombombings were about folks interrupting our classes to show videos of cute puppies and kitties, or about discussing the Tiger King show, or even about just telling jokes, or playing games, I think we’d all laugh it off, and maybe even welcome the respite from trying to teach content in a dog forsaken dull platform such as zoom. Zoombombings are not about teens doing naughty things like when a kid comes in our rooms and snatches the bathroom pass. Zoombombings are raciallized disurptions aimed at disregulating a community and leaving its mark in it. You can think of Zoombombings as bombing bombings, which the USA does plenty, especially in places that are Black and Brown. Check for yourself.

It is so easy to blame this on Zoom’s lack of security, which needs to be named. Zoom is trash. Zoom is basura. Zoom is the kind of Capitalistic business that not only benefited but exploited disaster capitalism. Zoom “saw” an opportunity to position itself as the tech savior and offer everyone a free account without the 40 minute time constraint, but also without any of the security protocols needed to even attempt to have a secure meeting. That is what capitalism, and especially neoliberalism does; give the people peanuts and tell them they’re being given everything. They “zoomed” into the opportunity to “help” [themselves]. We also have to acknowledge Zoom was not built for what we are using it and not naming that is also a mirror into ourselves. We are socialized to not think critically about the tech we consume, especially if it is free. Zoom was built for *some people to use the tech in mainly higher ed institutions, corporate offices, non profits, businesses, etc. IT WAS NOT DESIGNED NOR MEANT FOR A WHOLE SYSTEM OF EDUCATION TO USE IT WITH 3 DAYS NOTICE.

The platform was never designed so teens, pre teens and much less kids to use, especially at home, and without live support by people who know what it is that they’re doing. The platform is not user friendly. Even before Zoom made their “security protocols” (quotation marks and air quotes on purpose because they are bogus) standard, accessing them took at least 3 extra steps and the fonts were small small small; very easy to miss and very hard to actually set up. Password protecting a meeting is a dope thing, BUT it is not the end all be all to safety. It is the first place to start. It also provides a huge accessibility issue and does not take into account youth culture.

Youth, especially high school students communicate either mostly or soelely through apps on social media to each other (snapchat, discord, IG, twitch, TikTok, etc) Developers and adults who don’t spend time with youth, or care to care, wouldn’t know this. There is nothing private about this communications and when kids communicate with each other, they share passwords, links et all in pictures on social media. You can password protect the ish out of a class/meeting, and if you have teens in the class, the link will leak. The password is almost as good as no password. In this case, all we can hope is that someone who wants to ZB, comes, does it once and then gets banned. Passwords are also buggy AF. Sometimes they work, others they don’t. I could share you the hundreds of emails or texts that I have from students screenshotting “password is invalid”, “host is in another meting”:, “meeting not found”, etc. The setting of “waiting room” is dope. Good luck managing a WR of 50,100+ people on your own tho…

The second step of security (not secure enough either, because this can be easily hacked) is to make students “register” for the class with their school email, and then you have to approve them. If you have a class, this is the best recommendation. IF you are hosting a one time thing, on a whim, like the memorial service I hosted yesterday, this becomes an issue of accessibility. This step takes time for both attendees and hosts and the more steps, the less likely youth will do it. We wanted to make the event accessible to kids who our comrade had taught in previous years, who did not have an email account linked to our school and we also knew that we could not manage 500+ attendees. Zoom was not set up for teaching high school. As nice as it is to be able to video conference with kids (and this has been my lifeline, as someone who is self quarantining in a tiny studio apartment and who has had no human interaction 1:1 in 3 weeks), Zoom has not, is not and will not be a place to teach as a system. I’d love to use Zoom as part of an accessibility support for students who cannot make it to the schoolhouse on a regular bases because of reasons, and tho I am grateful for this lifeline during this global pandemic, we need to name that Zoom is not school. No place is safe really, but Zoom is definitely less than not safe; it is susceptible to the threats of “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy”. Zoom does not allow us to wrap ourselves in the warm and fuzzy but fake blanket of “this is a safe space”. If someone wants to do violent things, and they know the hacking tech skills to do it, they can. I had every security protocol turned in (no ability to unmute yourself, no sharing virtual backgrounds, etc) dialed in, and yet people still could do those things. I also paid for a more robust account for the memorial service.

You know what worked to not get ZB’d for a second time in the memorial service for a teacher that just died? A combination of my co-hosts and I not letting anyone whose name we didn’t know into the meeting, plus EVERY teen (75 or so) commenting on the chat box and yelling into the mic to drown out the Zoombombers, and teachers and kids texting my co-hosts and I to kick out accounts that were sus. Have you ever seen love in action? Have you actually seen love smash hate? That is what worked. What worked yestrday to smash zoombombers and provide a 90 minute zoombombed free meeting is what always works; collective organizing. Youth, teachers, co-hosts, came together to solve a problem within 45 seconds ( time it took us to be back in a meeting with 120+ people) to continue the meeting, and then staying vigilant to protect one another.

Zoom’s security breach issues is a problem but it is not THE problem. The problem is that WE (the collective we) are unwilling to accept that racism and misogyny and oppression are baked into our culture and we are unwilling to do the work of undoing racism each and everyday, though every action — specifically teaching the youth. Angela Davis writes: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

Dear Music Teachers in K-12 schools,

We are living in a pandemic. I feel scared and uncertain. Do you? My students feel that too. Do yours? I get it, we all have been socialized to be as individualistic and productive as non-humanly possible. This two traits have been drummed onto to us by the systems of capitalism, neoliberalism and whiteness. Notions that work comes first, and that we are only worthy of being *if we are “productive members of society” is stopping us from remembering WHY we got into music in the first place. How and Why did you fall in love with music? For me, it was when my mom died when I was 10. Music became how I mediated the world and its complexities. I became music and music became me.

Let us STOP it with the busywork worksheets, assessments and half baked assignments that keep the status quo (teaching as if we all were in the classroom and not dealing with reality). I get it that we are worried that the kids will be bored at home (they won’t most of the time). I also get it that we are scared we’d lose our jobs or get written up*if we don’t assign projects that gives our bosses and their bosses hard data that can cover everyone's booties and that communicate to the public that we are not (only) just drinking bougie coffee and eating pan au chocolat for 5,6,7,8 weeks in a row.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I am here to remind us that ALL those worries although valid and real, might not be true, and at least the latter one, should not be true. We should collectively organize so that our admins and their admins don’t hold power moves on us that make us hold power moves on kids and that uphold a cycle of busywork, badwork and a deep hatred for musicmaking, musiclearning and musicteaching once we are on the other side of this.

No no no no no! I am not saying not give students any work and bid adieu to the kids until school is back in session. I am saying, a) let’s remember that (most) kids won’t be bored at home (most of the time), and that b) music can serve as a therapeutic social emotional support for all. As we plan projects to assign students, let us remember:

1. What matters in the big picture: safety, love and belonging.
2. What matters in the medium picture: wash your hands, social solidarity instead of social isolation.
3. What matters in the small picture: learn music skills, share them with me, I’ll share feedback and coaching, and you’ll get better at music.

As we plan remote music instruction, let us remember that online based instruction/schooling does not, should not and will not mimic/mirror school based setting experiences and that each student will get anywhere between 6–10 different Google Classrooms, Zooms, Hangouts, etc invites to keep track of.

1. Students will be inundated by both liberatory and bogus assigned work in their other classes. I dare to blanket statement my way into a hole of internet sideye by saying that most public school teachers have not been training for how to implement online instruction and so rightfully so, teachers will be scrambling and assigning work through a plethora of apps and platforms that will confuse kids to the Nth degree trying to figure out how to do each kind of specific piece of work. That is, before they even started doing the work. (shoutout to all of us making sweet delicious lemonade out of the rotten lemons the DOE and Government has and is giving us in this regards! I see you. I see me. I see us!)
2. Students, especially in middle and high school WILL be expected to do childcare and chores, especially those in economically disadvantaged homes, single parent homes, and those living with immunosupressed family members. Kids will have to go on grocery runs which will take hours, do laundry which will be longer, and go get prescription medications which will also take time.
3. Students WILL be and feel isolated. Teens especially do everything relationally. They won’t have access to their circles of trust, their BFFs, their crushes and yes, even their frenemies. In addition, they’ll have to most likely be in close contact with their parents more or less 24/7 without privacy. Do you remember how you felt in high school when you had to be for soooo long with your rents? I do. I hated it. And I loved and liked my dad. I got the dad lottery and i still did not want to be quarantined with him all day long. The worst I had were the dad jokes and the cigarette smoke; everything else was dope and fun. The struggle will be real.

COMPASSION not Computers:

So, how do we plan compassionate based lessons and projects that are musical and delivered through technology? We focus on what matters:

1. Music making is therapeutic (not therapy!) Singing, drumming, playing instruments, dancing, reflecting on lyrics, composing, creating playlists, sharing/gifting music. This article has some OK things in it, as far as the benefits of musicking for therapeutic interventions.
2. Musicking, musicteaching and musiclearning are all social activities. The moment that we forget this, we lose students and ourselves. Kids This Days no longer actually need a classroom teacher to teach them skills because they have YouTube and the Internets. What they need is someone to curate materials and flow of work, mentor them personally/interpersonally and to encourage them through the work. In times of #COVID_19, step out of Google Classroom and Zoom and step into Facetime/AndroidTime, TikTok and Instagram.
3. The “ensemble”; orchestra, choir, band, rockband, etc, are not the end all be all of music. If anything, the current tech that we have available (including bandwith and data that most students will have access to) will make for ensemble based experiences to be ugh; frustrating at best and soul crushing at worst. You know what works well? Assigning students specific work that both they would be excited to work on, and that you think would be beneficial and then having smol solo, duos or trios videochat coachings/check-ins with them. Then save the whole class checkins so that everyone can play together for comic relief, and just talk, respond to prompts, listen to music together, etc.

Read The Word And the Word: Freire.

Here is a great short 8 page article about the importance of teaching literacy (in our case music literacy-skills) while also teaching toward critical consciousness. We must take this opportunity to teach about COVID_19, in, by, and through music.

I don’t want to lesson plan for you, but needless to say, assigning work based on how virus spread, #FlattenTheCurve, the hoarding of toilet paper, social isolation, uncertainty, etc should be big parts of the context and content.

Context should always drive up content.

10 Ideas of Music Projects You Can Assign that honors where we are in this time and place in history:

1. Rejoice in Choice: Send a survey of what skills, songs, and things each student will be most excited about working. Include a list of materials that they have available or that they might need. Craft a rubric for the project based on what you think a level 0,1,2,3,4,5 (whatever) should be, and give it in a flexible timeline. Schedule weekly 1:1 video checkins if you can and make yourself available to answer questions between specific hours. *You can also upload a video (YouTube transcribes speech!) with specific instructions and of course, you should model doing the project yourself.

2. Soundtrack Of Our Lives: Assign students to build a playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, etc based on how they are feeling about this all. People in the real world are already doing this! From The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” to Britney Spears’ “Toxic”, this can be a fun yet real way of dealing with all the feels. If you want your students to dislike you even more than they currently do, include a writing portion to this assignment and mess it all up. :)

3. Social DE-Isolation: Assign small groups of students to build collaborative playlists based on songs they all love, don’t love, etc. Keep the groups small (2,3) because kids will have different schedules to adhere and nobody wants to create even more logistical issues. If you want students to NOT do the project, include a writing portion to this assignment. :) :)

4. Learn/Hone A Skill : I compiled a set of resources, mainly YouTube video tutorials so students can practice specific skills like warmups, scales, chords and improvisation for instruments like piano, guitar, bass, drums, percussion and voice. Same as #1. Create a rubric based on your specific needs. Assign a flexible timeline with specific goals. Create short 1–2 minute instructional videos and post of wherever you post. Make sure students know your class/office hours to ask questions 1:1.

5. Sampling & Chopping Found Sounds: Students basically have a recording studio or movie production set in their smartphones. Students also have heard lots of misinformation about NOT going out. Ask students to go on a walk (even meet up if they live nearby, maintaining at least 6 feet distance from each other) and use their voice memo apps to “sample” sounds they hear (ie: people talking about COVID19, people NOT talking about COVID19, cars, birds, wind, etc). Then ask students to email the files to themselves, drag and drop to desktop and ultimately save them on a Google Drive Folder. Then ask students to “chop” the sounds and build a sonic collage/quilt of sounds using Audacity (FREE!) or whatever DAW they already use (GarageBand, SoundTrap, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Logic, etc). If you want to suck the soul out of this project, include a writing portion. If you want students not to do it, tell them you’ll use a rubric to grade them. :)

6. Learn a Cover Song: Based on what instrument(s) students play; including voice, assign students to first learn a song of their choice. You can ask guiding questions like: “why do you want to learn this song?” “What specific things about this song speak to you? You can even use your DOK chart to ask questions!

6. Write a “Tell Your Truth” Song: You can use this unit template for students to write a song that “tells their story”.

7. Write a “Coming To Voice” Song: You can use this slideshow to help students compose socially conscious music based on their own views, hopes and dreams.

8. Go “Viral” (Pun Intended?): You can assign students to create YouTube video tutorials or covers for songs they love (which is an actual music industry job; people making a living at!). You can also assign them to Tik Tok videos (and post them or not, based on what makes sense for the community you serve) for songs they love with specific things you assign (parody lyrics, singing, rapping, playing an instrument while they dance, improvising, teaching theory, etc)

9. Go Hard AND Go( you already are) Home On Music Theory!: You can totes assign music theory worksheets and videos and stuff!

Cantus Firmus? Here you go!

Music Theory in Half an Hour! Video , Packet.

Music Theory Resources Compiled by Ethan Hein

Bach Chorales. Say No More.

10. Make a Podcast : Students can compose original music, record it, produce it, edit it in whatever DAW (digital audio workstation) they already use or they case use anchor.fm to create a free one! They can make podcasts about whatever topics they choose (you can even create a menu of toics you suggest) and you can use this cheat sheet of critical consciousness questions so students can think critically about what the project they will create podcasts. Here is a huge “final project” I have created, which you can use. This also includes photo and video.

10+. Go Make Music Yourself! : You and Me are also in this. Music can, and needs to be a huge part of how we get through this! Go ahead, make music! Learn a new instrument, practice your own, write songs, journal about it and post about it, so that the community (both your students and the world) can see and hear how you are using music to process and deal. If you post, her are two hashtags: #QuaranTunes #AntiViralMusicking

That is it! I now have to go set up the first assignment, for my students, which will be to pick 20'’ snippets to at least three songs they’ll wash their hands to right now.

Teachers: Remember that it is ilegal to tell kids to stay home and not go to school (even to not spread death in a pandemic). Things that are not ilegal:

1: tell them that you value and respect their ability to make choices that best impact their communities, families and themselves (yes in that order)

2: tell them that you are there for them in whatever they need, especially around navigating the feels and emotions this might be stirring up.

3: sharing your feels and emotions too if you are down for keeping it real.

4: reassuring them that you yourself will NOT lower their grades IF they decide to not attend school due to health hazard, public health or because life is too much right now, even if they don’t give you a reason.

5: walking them through every piece of HW you post, and pledging only to assign essential work that is most accessible ← not everyone has tech & data at home.

6: remind youth that they are loved, and that you care, and that as adults who care for children, we are organizing to support them as best we can, in ALL the ways.

7: email, post, & communicate multiple times a day reminding students to wash their hands good. yes, annoy the F out of them. Ping their devices every hour. Youth are known for not washing their hands. ADULTS ARE TOO SO YOU DO IT TOO.

8: remind kiddos to drink water, eat healthy foods, and to take walks (with 6 feet apart of people) and to walk to and from places as much as they can.

9: Encourage them to talk to the adults in their lives (if they can and or want to, or if that is a possibility) about their wants and needs in regards to all this.

10: MOST IMPORTANT: encourage youth to talk to one another about their ideas for the kind of school system and ultimately life they want to live and lead.

LAGNIAPPE: Remind students that very often what the government says is legal/ilegal is not what is just/unjust and fair/unfair.

White supremacy culture has always made it easy to rationalize itself as to why we should partake in it. Racist violent ideas, behaviors and policies dressed up in woke optics and disguised as “we do this because we care about you” have been baked into the dough of the cake that is the schooling system in the USA. Ever heard of Richard Henry Pratt. Here is a 7 sentence primer on him:

1:General Pratt was regarded as “a friend of the Indian” because he had experience with them since he had dealt with them in some conflicts.

2: He was also a self declared a “woke & dope” White, because he saw the Native Americans as good people and as equals to European- Americans (Whites) IF he (the USA) could “killed the Indian to save the men [in them]”.

3:General Pratt “coined” the term “racism” [sic] in 1902 to criticize racial segregation and created the Carlisle schools.

4: The Carlisle school was designed to culturally and spiritually murder (genocide) Native Americans AND to do so in the same of a favor to them; to teach them how to survive and thrive in the dominant society: Eurocentric, White “‘Murka”. This is still how schools make decisions as to what is “school appropriate” and what is not.

5: This genocidal “gift of care”, was also a physical genocide. kids were actually snatched out of their communities and prohibited to be who they were. Oftentimes, they were just plainly murdered too.

6: This dude was not like the Trump or Bloomberg of his time. To the contrary, he was a military dude who actually saw Native American’s as people ,even when nobody else did. Maybe he was like the Mayor Pete. A nice White person who can uphold racism while saying he is an anti racist.

7: The Carlisle schools was the thing that he did back then Anti-Racist ideals, to “help” the Native Americans. Assimilation into White culture is still what the machine of schooling does by en large.

Now that you know a bit about this, or that you re-read it, I ask you to consider:

Q1: If this is what your friend does, do you need enemies?

Q2: Ever wondered how Native American kids felt about it? Here is an account.

Code Switching: A White Teachers’ way of “Pratt-ing” schools.

It is important to name AND actually reflect and listen to positonality in any conversation that aims to “define” (with words) what something is.

Positionality is the social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status.

While Professor Richard Nordquist might define code switching as “the practice of moving back and forth between two languages or between two dialects or registers of the same language at one time, professor Nordquist as a White man, never has to actually code switch.

Educator Syreeta Neal defines code switching as “a survival mechanism. It’s not switching between “appropriate and inappropriate” language. It’s literally switching between AAVE (which is an actual dialect with rules and syntaxes) and standard westernized English.”

Whiteness, Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Ableism demand that we listen and trust to the words of a White man with a PhD (not dissing Dr. Nordquist, his work or his accolades). I am asking you to consider instead the definition of a Black woman who has lived “code switching” and is here to tell it. I am asking to listen to the people closest to the pain, for the solutions and for the voice. In this regard , I am asking you to most importantly, consider the voices of the young people you are policing, and slicing up through your teaching of “code switching” so that they have to do the work of presenting Frankenstein versions of only-the-parts-of-themselves-that-whiteness-allows of themselves so that all-of-the-complexities-of-yourself-are-comfortable-and-safe.

Code switching is not speaking with a southern drawl so your good ole boy grandpa can tell you how proud he is of you. That is just connecting with someone in a way that feels like connection. IF grandpa did not care about it, one would not do it. Most importantly, if grandpa didn’t have a Southern drawl, one would have no reason to use it. Healthy ways of communication must be highly localized and nuanced. Developing ways of talking and of being that are specific with and to the people we are interacting with in the moment is a beautiful pursuit as long as they are honest. In the example above, which was an actual example used by a teacher defending code switching, the key aspect of it is “connection”. The person described the interaction as using tone, nuance, language and most importantly intentionality, to create connection AND THEN NAMED THAT CODE SWITCHING. Whether or not this was an intentional misuse of the word or an actual confession of what code switching actually is, as experienced by the folks being code switched in schools everyday is beside the point. The outcome is usually the same. Policing, Silencing and erasure.

The way Code Switching shows up for most Black and Brown kids is actually a violent racist policing, silencing, and erasing of not only their culture, but their voice. The policing, silencing and erasure of their voice in time turns into kids not sharing their opinions with you and or even the answers to the questions you ask. If students can’t trust that we accept them as all-of-who-they-are, and that we won’t ask them to kipzbop themselves to us, why should they want to create connections with us? Have you ever asked a friend to go on YouTube and find a “clean” version of whatever they were excited to show you? No, you have not. And if you have, then your friends need new friends. And you do too, because most likely those relationships are not deep enough to hold you in times of needs when you’ll need them.

Do you have anyone in your life who you can truly be yourself with no matter what? Can you imagine creating and nurturing relationships like this in your school? Lucky are the ones of us who have that. I wish that upon all of us. Every student and every teacher should have that. That is a way to build a world that doesn’t yet exist but that we all deserve. That is a way towards collective liberation. Connection.

Code Switching in the music classroom:

If it exists in the world, it is school appropriate. Schooling must mirror the outside world. Everything can be contextualized under pedagogical and theoretical frameworks. Music is a reflection of society and violence, misogyny, drugs, sexism, homophobia, sex, drugs, and all topics are windows and mirrors into their communities, and not the other way around. I understand it’s hard and I also understand there are some things that are not age appropriate developmentally. Kids are listening to music that exists in their communities and we as their teachers should help them build a context for the songs and the artists as social historical and cultural beings.

To live in under a neo-colonialist militaristic white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (as defined by bell hooks) is to live in a world that is tricky, painful and unjust to explain, especially to kids. We must not look the other way and “code switch” back to a song from Music K-8. It is time we stop Kidzbopping our way out of talking about anti Blackness, anti Browness, and anti Youth culture.

For example, most White music teachers nixed “Old Town Road” because the word booty, even-though this was the flagship song and story of youth culture and popular culture, including race/racism. The song was a number one for 19 weeks, breaking records. White teachers sidestepped the conversations of race/racism and the possibilities of connecting with kids with and through something not only that they liked, but that they could see themselves through. White music teachers and administrators lose their marbles when a teacher or God-forbid a kid suggests Lizzo’s “good as hell”. How can we have kids singing about hell? To be fair, white teachers and admins have lost many a marble with John Lennon’s use of the word “hell” in the anti-war song “Imagine”, but to perhaps a lesser degree. You know what is the problem with hell? That our kids of colors’ lives are designed to be a hell by racism, by the war on drugs, by red lining, by poverty, by stop and frisk, by Donald Trump, by the DNC, RNC, by the KKK, by lead in the water in Flint, by the FEMA in New Orleans and in Puerto Rico, and by this.

Lizzo’s or Lennon’s use of the word hell is not inappropriate for school. White silence is.

And just for shits and giggles, white music teachers and administrators have endorsed this racist songs as appropriate as recent as today.

There are many scholars who talk about this. I won’t cite their work here but you can look them up. Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Christopher Emdin, Bettina Love, Jamila Lyiscott, to name a few speak and write about it from the heart. Anything they’ve written is worth listening to, especially on matters of education, and racial justice. There are more, of course.

Finally, a reminder to myself, and a call to my fellow White educators, and non White educators too: Let us stop buzzwording our praxis with medals and pins we don’t actually understand. Let us keep the emphasis on creating connections in, out and through the classroom. Let us not let the machine of neo-colonial, militaristic, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks) drill inhumanity onto us. Let us teach in ways that we ourselves wish we were taught in.

Martin Urbach

Who designs curriculum? Is it principals? Is it teachers? Is it perhaps lawmakers and/or influential politicians on school boards who decide and legislate the key educational decisions about what students study in school? More importantly; who decides what students do not study in school? I start with the premise that it is not students who make any of these decisions and with the urgent wake-up call that it should be. It must be, if we aim to truly live by the words that W.E.B. Du Bois professed: “Education must not simply teach work-it must teach life.” (Du Bois, 1903, p.75) If we truly aim to teach life to students, we must center their voices, experiences and interests. We must teach them to read the(ir) worlds as well as the words. (Freire,1970)

It is important that conversations about education in The United States of America are rooted in a critical understanding of race and racism across historical timelines. Since its inception, The United States has granted and denied access to education and thus voice to different groups of people based on race. (Kendi, 2016). To position this post in a historical context, we must not forget that slavery was practiced in the United States since early British colonial days, and that at the time of the declaration of independence in 1776 slavery was legal in all 13 colonies. Although slavery ostensibly “ended” in 1865 via the Thirteenth amendment (it did not) schools remained “legally” segregated for much longer than that, thanks to the 1896 Plessy Vs. Ferguson case which ruled segregation “separate but equal”. School segregation was finally legally abolished through Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 though schools in the state of Mississippi remaining segregated during the late 60’s and even as late as 2016 (Rios, Flanagan, 2016). A study from Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analyses shows that public schools are more racially segregated today than they were in the 1990’s. Keeping this timeline in mind as we discuss the beginnings of public schooling in the USA in 1635 helps us contextualize who gets access to education and who does not.

What’s The Problem?

Curriculum is the organized system and path that students are taken through in their schooling. Since schools do not exist in vacuums, this path and system are intrinsically connected to not only the expertise but also the biases of the path makers, those in charge. Race and Racism, classism, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and all other “isms” will always be connected to curriculum design and implementation in schools, and thus can be used as tools to silence oppressed youth. I propose Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as curriculum design and praxis as a way for students to engage in conscientization, transgression, and liberation; the set of theories and actions known as critical pedagogy. (Bell, McLaren, Freire, hooks, et all) Taking a Foucaultian approach, I agree that schools, much like prisons, serve as institutions/systems of reproduction that define, classify, control and regulate people. If schools are designed for this, it would make sense that the system would not want to allow “the inmates to run the prison”. If schools represent systems of imprisonment, I argue that the curricula designed by the folks in charge is the panopticon; the structure where those in power can observe and control all which students learn, without students realizing they are being observed, much less controlled. If schools are the prison state and curriculum is the panopticon, I would like to position YPAR as curriculum design and praxis as the way in which the people (students) organize, learn from one another, dissent, revolt, and get free.

New York City congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted words that embody this sentiment: “Those closest to the pain should be closest to the power.” (Ocasio-Cortez, 6/26/2018 tweet)

One Way To Engage in YPAR as Curriculum Design For The First Time:

I propose a paradigm shift when creating curriculum. What would happen if students became co-researchers and co-developers of said curriculum? Instead of creating ALL curriculum, I suggest starting with a skeleton of “non-negotiables” for what it is that you teach. In a music class, that might be scales, pop songs, vocal warmups, improvisation and/or beatmaking.

YPAR and PAR typically involve different stages of planning, action, reflection and evaluation (Pain, Whitman, Milledge, Rivers Trust). Although (in my opinion) this stages should not be prescribed by the facilitator, it is paramount to keep in mind that YPAR and PAR work is the work of building, fostering and cherishing non transactional relationships among all participants/stakeholders thus it is imperative that the beginning stage of any YPAR project is committed to establishing relationships and identifying common agendas as well as as creating a set of collective norms that will guide the work together. In my experience, this part is always present and evolving.

A second “stage” involves deciding on issues/curricula collaboratively. This stage can be time consuming and where participants can begin to work together to find out what the community wants to learn together and then decide what to focus on and how to do it. Audre Lorde’s “There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions” as well as the Combahee River Statement are two great resources that can help stakeholders keep an intersectional lens as they identify issues that affect the collective. During this “stage”, stakeholders identify individual roles and responsibilities as well as tools and protocols for how we will stay accountable to one another. As the group identifies possible individual group roles, it is important that adult facilitators do not dictate who does what, but most importantly that this work is done though a strengths based model, rather than a deficit based mode. When facilitators view and thus treat youth as resourceful and resilient; especially in the topics that affect them, we afford the community as a whole the possibility of self determination and healing. (McAshen, 2005).

During the stage where the group is conducting the research, facilitators and youth are in dialogue about what must be in the curriculum. This is a process of “conscious power sharing” more than of “erasing the power dynamics” that cannot indeed be erased. As an educator with two masters degrees and 2/3’s of a doctorate in music education, I know some things about music education and it would be unfair if I didn’t bring those into the table. As a drummer, composer and performer of 25+ years, I know a few things about musicking, and it would be also unfair if I didn’t bring those things into the curriculum writing sessions. The key question is how we as adults can center the wants/needs/likes/hopes/dreams of the youth we are working with in a way that those are “baked into the cake” rather than “sprinkled in like dust in an afterthought for optics’ sake.”

As a final stage, YPAR participants can begin the process of “feeding” back the findings to all stakeholders and together evaluate the process as a whole and proposing a curriculum. I suggest doing this first with one short unit, for example a two week study of Puerto Rican Bomba Y Plena music. If the community finds the process valuable, then you’d have the blueprint for how to create larger units, and ultimately how to create semester long, or yearly courses.

Theoretical Frameworks; We stand on the shoulders of #OG iants!

The symbiosis between music education and the theoretical frameworks of Critical Pedagogy, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, and Critical Race Theory is instrumental if we aim to decolonize the ways students are currently taught, and the way we teach them going forward. The aforementioned theoretical frameworks serve to disrupt and challenge the status quo (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994,2000, Freire,1970, Ladson-Billings, 1995, hooks, 1994). Doing research with teenagers grounded on a critical-ideological paradigm will afford the community (but especially the teens) an opportunity to unpack how power dynamics and relationships affect them and how that power has been wielded across social historical timelines, creating intergenerational access or lack thereof to wealth, power, voice and more. (Ponterotto, 2004) Furthermore, in her book “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples”, Linda Tuhiwa Smith writes that “research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism”(Smith, 1999, p1)

Community engagement FTW!

In an effort to co-create an intergenerational, inter-racial, and truly diverse learning spaces, YPAR affords us opportunities to invite members of the community such as elder (families, elders, parents, etc) whom we can learn alongside by tapping into their cultural capital and immigrant/ indigenous epistemologies (Yasso,2005).

Redefining who is allowed to create curriculum, who is prevented from creating/disseminating knowledge and who has been silenced and prevented of doing so is an act of undoing the miseducation of the people by the system in power, and thus, worthy of pursuit in the struggle towards collective liberation in educational settings.

I recently shared a link as a conversation starter on the Kodaly Educators Facebook page. This article was highlighting the racist history behind songs like Jimmy Crack Corn, and Eeny Meeny Miny Moe and others. The thread quickly became lively and heated.

This group has just over 7000 members and seems to be majority White. ← emphasis on “seems” as I scrolled around about 700 members and could find only a handful of non white passing members. Recognizing that this is a flawed way of collecting data, yet it is not a wild assumption as most of the music teaching profession is White. To be precise, nearly 9 out of 10 pre service music teachers are White.

As I write this, there are 360+ comments, written in a few days since I first posted the link: 12 childhood nursery rhymes you didn’t know were racist”. You can find the article here.

You can find the post, in the Kodaly Educators Public Page here.

As in every Facebook music educators group conversation, I expected to find a range of opinions and was (and still am!) excited to have an insight into what/how/why the “system” of music education across the country might feel about this. As one might expect, there were folks who agreed, who were not sure and who disagree with the article. One thing that is evident from the post, is the feeling of fear that White teachers have when it comes to discussing issues that have been racialized and that have racist tones, like these songs. White teachers are scared that they themselves might be called racists for teaching songs like this, but I think even more importantly, they are afraid of the “silence” they think will wash upon us once “we’re done taking out all the racist songs”. How fitting of White supremacy culture that White teachers perceive that once we get rid the racist songs, there won’t be any songs left to sing. This of course could not be further from the truth.

Whiteness thrives on fear and when we are afraid, we get defensive. It is human nature. This defensiveness in turn, turns a conversation about systems into personal attacks and defensive strikes that go from #notallwhiteteachers to “I don’t do this” to “It is not my fault” to “What about my love for song X which is how I learned how to count”. Pivoting away from discussing systems and toward discussing individuals robs everyone of opportunities to dissect the problem radically; meaning at the root. At the core, what needs to be addressed is the system of white supremacy which allowed for minstrel songs and other racist songs to make it into the songbooks the teacher training programs we teachers pay thousands of dollars to learn from to be normalized and accepted as “the norm.”

In one hand, I deeply understand the feeling of fear of walking on eggshells and not knowing whether or not we are doing right by our students. I empathize with it, and commend all teachers that are guided by the tenet of “Do No Harm.” Although it is not possible to guarantee that we won’t ever do harm, yearning for it is honorable, and should also be the bases for how we discuss and process another tenet of teaching; to err is to be human. We. Will. Make. Mistakes. To this, we White teachers WILL make mistakes around the curricula we teach to our students when it comes to race, because we have been denied (by White Supremacy Culture) the opportunities, spaces, guidance and skills to discuss race/racism. We literally do not know how to do it or see it. The best we have been socialized to do is to say: “I see no race”, and to actually believe it.

On the other hand, I feel angered and deeply disturbed by the idea that White teachers fear that “there won’t be any songs left to sing/teach if we continue with this witch hunt” because we call on them/us to dissect our curriculum and repertoire critically and with a lens on race. There are literally hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of songs written in the whole history of music. People have been writing songs since people have been people. This fear of silence prohibits the afraid to peel the onion, find whats at the core, and hold one another close as they untangle the ugly together and plant new seeds to harvest.

This fear then is followed by massive resistance and even anger that this call is even on the table. On their 2015 essay “Decentering Whiteness”, Hitchcock and Flynt describe one of the experiences of centrality as: “Not open to contradiction: The center of a culture tends to defend its values and to place negative sanctions upon people who question them. White culture is antagonistic to people of color who contradict its values, or who take espoused values of white culture and demonstrate that white culture has not lived up to them.

I remind myself that for every racist song like “five little monkeys” that is used to teach kids to count, there are hundreds, if not thousands of songs that could serve the same purpose. If what we aim is to teach kids to sing “Sol-La-Mi”, we surely can find songs that won’t bring violence and or trauma upon our students.

Understanding Systems

It is instrumental to understand these issues as “systematic”, meaning, it is less about pointing our fingers of “performative wokeness” at individual teachers teaching racists songs and more about unpacking, naming, undoing and interrupting these systems. Critical Race Theory positions racism as baked into the fabric and system of American society. CRT challenges us to view not past but beyond the individual racist and look at racism as an institution that is pervasive in the dominant culture; whiteness. CRT pushes us to analyze power structures, white privilege and white supremacy, that perpetuate marginalization of people of color. Moreover, CRT rejects the notions of neutrality and color blindness, when it comes to everything, from curriculum and teaching in our case, to laws. You can learn more about CRT here.

Context-less Education

Whiteness thrives on the erasure of painful and violent histories and on revising the histories to tell “clean up” , white washed stories. Whiteness also thrives on telling other people’s stories, rather that our own (though through the White lens). It is common for music educators to teach songs a) just because they are “great” songs, b) because those are the songs we’ve been taught and c) because they are “part of the tradition of great American songs” and kids should learn them. Judith Katz speaks this as “Background”.

“The culture itself is not a point of discussion, focus, or examination. Rather, things different from the culture become the objects of attention. White people, for instance, overwhelmingly concentrate on discussing and studying other racial groups. Whiteness and white people as a racial group are not discussed or studied. Taboos are present in white culture against bringing the discussion and study of whiteness into the foreground.” (Katz, 1978)

Some of the worries/fears this post highlighted was that “if we don’t teach this history, then how will the kids know about racism?

Though such concerns might be coming from a place of inquiry, they don’t account for the trauma and violence that learning racist songs can bring upon a student of color. This is even more problematic when it is White teachers who advocate this, as if the music classroom is the one and only place where kids will ever learn about racism. I argue that our students of color are born knowing about it, and even in the early grades have already experienced it first hand. I also have a hard time believing that teachers arguing this point as for the validity to teach a racist nursery rhyme. Truthfully, how many teachers are using Eenie Meanie Miney Mo in the early elementary grades to teach 1st graders or kindergartners that actually the word tiger wasn’t the original word, and thus the sentence “catch a T(N)ig(G)er by his toe” actually means catch a Black man so there can be a lynching. I dare to bet that almost nobody. Even if a few did, why? At what cost and whose cost? Most importantly: Why do this?

I am not advocating we erase this songs from US American culture. To the contrary, I am reminding us all that they exist and that they are dangerous. Just like confederate statues don’t belong in city streets where they are constant reminders of such violence, and especially violent toward Black folks, racist songs don’t have any room or business in our classrooms as repertoire items. If what we want to do is to teach the racist history of a song like “five little monkeys”, then we can teach the racist history behind the song without making our students learn to count by chanting the song. If we are looking for a nursery rhyme to teach our students how to count, AND if we know that our song choice is racist, then we must change songs. Remember: “Do No Harm”. We don’t actually have to use materials that traumatize our students, and that are oppressive to them because of our own comfort. The onus is on us to go out of our way to learn better materials and unlearn bad material. Hitchcock & Flint write about this as:“The way everyone does it.”

“The way everyone does it: Cultures will only permit one set of values, rather than competing sets. Part of the function of culture is to let everyone interact through some shared basis of meaning and understanding. Within a culture, “everybody” does tend to do things the same way — to use the same language, celebrate the same events, etc. In white culture this is sometimes expressed as a belief that people of color must automatically know how “people” do things, i.e. how white people do things.”

I recognize that we teach racist songs because those are the songs that are suggested on the books we buy on Teachers Pay Teachers or on our books on Amazon. It is the comfortable thing to do. We already know these songs. Yet, we can do better. We must do the work to first be “not racists”, preferably, becoming “anti-racists”. We do this with action. Being a non racist requires nothing (granted we don’t teach racist songs to begin with). Becoming an anti racist, involves taking action steps. Not a single White music educator on the thread of over one hundred teachers offered to do any labor toward creating a database of problematic songs, or even researching ones. I did not see a White teacher stepping up and saying: “ I volunteer to make a list of songs” or “Here is a spreadsheet I made with the background information for how this song is indeed not racist.” I wonder what kind of list we would have now with over 300 hundred songs collectively researched instead of a Facebook thread of over 300 hundred comments of White folks disagreeing with teachers of color on whether or not these (and other) songs are racist. I wonder what kind of lists we could have that are “anti racist nursery rhymes” instead of hundreds of posts made in White Fragility space.

I originally screenshot the whole conversation and copy/pasted quotes that I found telling/problematic with the intention of including them here as “vignettes”. As I finish writing this article and listen to my emotions and brain, I realize they don’t belong here. If folks want to read the thread, the thread is hyperlinked at the top of the post. What I think is the point I try to convey with this post, is that as a field and as a system, the field of music education is at best “not racist” and at worst “racist”. I deeply believe it is time for us to do the work of transforming, and becoming anti-racists, through though + action + reflection.

Here is a spreadsheet of “CrowdSourced Anti Racist Songs” I created. Feel free to use it, and spread it as much as possible.

I conclude with the yearning for the kind of self/community reflection that we as White music educators have to do the work of being more anti racist and less racist. We must fix what our teachers got wrong so that our students don’t have to fix as much and can focus on teaching. We must break the cycle of racist curriculum. If we don’t do it, the labor will have to be on people of color. White people created the social construct we call racism, and we must do the work of abolishing it.

In this wee post, I’d like to share the intersections and connections that have crystalized for me, in regards to my practice as a radical (music) educator who is more concerned these days with facilitating liberated, emergent and healing spaces where students, teachers, and administrators can blossom and self realize, instead of merely survive (at best)

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.” — Bruce Lee

As facilitators, as holders of space, as designers of environments, and whether we like it or not; as “the state”, rule makers and gate keepers, we teachers are in the powerful position of defining “the bottle” and thus having a deciding impact on “the water.” This is an honor and responsibility is one that I don’t take for granted and that I strive to serve in kind, loving, just and honest ways. Here are some principles from Emergent Strategies that I will be rooting my practice on, and I hope they serve you as well!

1- Small is good, small is all. (The Large is a reflection of the small)

This capitalistic, neoliberal society i live in, tells me everyday that I need bigger, louder, stronger, more expensive things. I recognize that I am socialized to put more emphasis on bigger things rather than smaller. Reminding myself that “Small is good, small is all. (The Large is a reflection of the small)” has become an act of resistance and I am looking forward to applying that lens into my life as an educator, activist, partner and friend. In this, making sure that small activities are intentional and loving, and small interactions, like passing students in the hallway (whether they are walking to class, or cutting class) I plan to honor the smallness and powerfullness of it all. If I can make a small ice breaker or a hello+go to class please feel like liberation, then I can make anything feel like liberation. I hope. I dream. I think. I wish. I aim. I can.

2- Change Is Constant — “Be Like Water.”

We are conditioned and socialized to live “by the book”, to regurgitate curriculum given to us (but also, ugh, ain’t never enough time to lesson plan, triple ugh, so no shade for doing this!). We are expected to be rigid in the ways in which we uphold classroom rules, in ways that either worked for us in previous years, in ways that we read on books, but mostly in ways that folks who have never taught in the classroom have said we should. If we are to facilitate liberation though educaton, we must embrace change; a change that is rooted in honoring (not just responsive to) every aspect of every one who is in the room. This kind of embrace of change, makes it so that curriculum honors the experiences and voices of the humans who we are sharing curriculum with, and changing it based on who these humans are (students and teachers), where we are at in this given time we are together (emotionally), and where we are in physical space (spatially.) This kind of embrace of change, makes it so that we transition from “classroom rules” to “procedures”and/or “frameworks” for how are we going to achieve together our “hopes & dreams.” These changes, need to be rooted in the principle that change is constant and that being open to as opposed to reactionary to change is paramount. Co-creating these frameworks and upholding each other to them, practicing them, making room for people to err, embodying them and changing them when they need to evolve.

3- There is always enough time for the right work.

IMHO one way in which the “system” keeps us teachers drained, fearful and thus oppressed is in having overworked, underpaid and overwhelmed. “The system” gives us way too many things to teach (that are not even that important really) and never enough time to teach them, let alone even planning them. We must keep in timelines with unit plans, scopes and sequences and assessments and data collection or we get bad observation “grades”, a talking to, or a pink slip. I’d like to take this time to remind myself, and you if this is your jam, to jam with me in this point. “There is always enough time for the right work. There is always enough time for the right work. There is always enough time for the right work.” What is the right work? TO BE HAPPY. TO BE IN COMMUNITY. TO BE FREE. How do we do this work? Well, that is a journey for each of us to decide. We don’t have to know where the path ends, we can be in that journey, searching together. For me, this journey looks like this:

a) Center Community Over Skill: As a music maker, and music educator, I remind myself that any judgements of how “good” or “bad” my drum circles or rockbands sound, is just a judgment based on the way my own mind has been colonized by an Eurocentric system of musicing and music educationing. So, I remind myself that what is most important, is that the community be in community, together in sound, in breath, in rhythm, in connection, in unity first, and the skills will come with time and effort.

b) The “Right” work for me, and the community I serve, is to facilitate conversations, and of course plan curricula:) about identity, intersectionality, community, multi/inter culturalism, oppression, liberation, privilege, queerness, race, religion, youth power/powerless, love, heartbreak, ability dis/ability, food, sex, sex education, healthy and unhealthy relationships, connection, voice, activism, black lives matter, whiteness, immigration, hip hop, improvisation, popular music, technology, among others. For me, every single minute that I am spending engaging the youth I serve in any of these topics (or others that they bring up) is time well spent on doing the right work. “There is always enough time for the right work.” Part of the developing of my craft as a radical educator, is to backwards design how I fit in this work in the oppressive framework of public schooling. Getting real good about writing lesson plans, contexts for learning, objectives, unit plans, and assessments that are rooted in this work within the constraints of my title as a “music educator” is part of doing “the right work.” Learning everything I can about critical theory, critical pedagogy, wellness, indigenous forms of healing and education, and western neuroscience is what “doing the right work” looks like for me. What does it look like for you? How do you know what you are doing is what you WANT to be doing? I invite you to explore that, and once you know, find ways to room your practice in it.

4- There is a conversation in the room that only this people at this moment can have. Find it. — Taj James

Being open to listening and hearing the babies. To truly listen from the heart is to allow everyone to have space to explore what freedom is. Owning that I have a hard time with this myself, I am saying that I am committing to being better at this today that I was yesterday, and that as a work in progress, I make space for growing, and for reflecting critically. Now, I am not saying this principle calls for “letting students chit chat away during class.” But, I am saying that (may) be part of it. Speaking literally througgh this conversations, if we are listening from the heart, and if we develop strong and healthy relationships with the youth we teach, we might be lucky enough to be “invited in” into their spaces, and thus “finding what the conversation is about. It has been my personal experience that most of what “the right work” is, has come from such conversations.

If we unpack this principle in a non literal way, we must find what “the conversation” is that we wanna be having, need to be having and/or should be having. All three of these are incredibly important. We must be intentional on how/when/where/why we have them, carefully designing how we will be holding space, facilitating the journey and linking it to the work we are doing together (in my case, music education.)

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” — June Jordan

5- “Never a failure, always a lesson” — Rihanna

Another way of showing resistance (and self care!) for me, is to reframe failures as lessons, first for myself, and then to model that lens for my students. I recently transitioned from a 9 year partnership from a human I still very much love, care for and am bound to. How we are transitioning (not breaking up) how we are separating, is designing the world I want to live in. Acknowledging the pain of things, the complexity of things, the fuckedupness of things, the unfairness of things, while not destroying the things we build (individually and together) not disposing of one another, not abandoning one another because we no longer smash bits together, is teaching me about challenging what winning and what failing is. I don’t yet know what that is, but I am enegaged in this lesson.

On a lighter note, yet still as important, last year I spent a long time and effort designing and teaching a course I named “Percussion + Activism”.The class was for 9th and 10th graders, and it met for 45 minutes everyday after lunch. If you ever taught school, you know the period after lunch is akin to time spent at the DMV or at the dentist, BUT WORST.

It was/IS a dope course. There is a ton of greatness in it, both from the study of amazing drumming cultures of the African and Latinx diaspora, and from the study and practice of musicians doing activism through music. AND THE STUDENTS UNANIMOUSLY said they did not like the course. This lead to many conversations about why. Most students felt that they didn’t like feeling “cornered” into having to do activism all the time. Some said that they didn’t care about it that much. Others said that they loved it as a unit, or for some of the time, but that it because too much for all the time. Most students said that they just wanted to play some fucking drums, and feel good and relax, and chill, and have fun. So, I began to reshape what activism means to me, and how I teach activism and social justice to youth. So, we began doing more things that make space for wellness, inter-connectedness, fun, meditation, and just jamming. What we do together is not therapy but it for sure is therapeutic. The shift in the class was dope and transformative. Out of that lesson, I am now rewriting the course to be about wellness and self care. And while doing that, it is still a Percussion + Activism course.

6- Trust the people. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.) — Inversion of a quote by Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, by Stephen Mitchell.

How can we do anything (of depth)together if we don’t trust each other? What can we do to make people “trust us”?

“There is no liberation without community” — Audrey Lorde

“But love is really more of an interactive process.It’s about what we do, not just about what we feel.It’s a verb, not just a noun. — bell hooks

I think trust is the most important thing we can develop, both inside the schoolhouse and outside. Trust needs love, compassion, kindness, openess, and time. Trust needs consistency and freedom.

7- Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass. Build the resilience by building the relationships. — Mervyn Marcano’s remix of Stephen Covey’s “speed of trust” concept.

So much of my life as an educator is rushing. So much is about upholding expectations that just because I did a community building drum circle or a theater game once, or even for the whole year, that the kids should just “hurry up and be in community already”. Move at the speed of trust is brilliant. It allows for ALL the other previous principles. It allows for people to be where they are at at the time they are at in the space they are at. It holds space for growing together, to pushing each other to take scary steps and know that if someone falls, we’ll catch them. Move at the speed of trust assures folks what truly “no child will be left behind”. We are where we are, and we are there together.

8- Less prep, more presence.

“Can I hear it louder for the people in the back”? I can’t tell you how many years I spent prepping multi page lesson plans and staying up until 3am doing so, to then be in the classroom, totally dialing it in, not present with myself, much less with my students. Sound familiar? :) Again, I am not advocating, nor I thing Adrienne Marie Brown is saying “wing it” for what we do, but I think this means to make space for the unknown, for folks in the room to be together in “not knowing” and challenged to find out. After all, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire teaches us that students are not empty vessels, and that the banking model of education is oppressive. Being present with students, and making space for presence, “baking” it into our practice, our lessons and our demeanor, is liberatory. Can we transform our practice into grounds that are fertile and present? Can presence be in our rubrics, in our planning time, in our agendas? Can we behave like it? Can we embody (and thus model) being present the way we embody preparedness? Making space to be together, is a strategy of emergence.

9- What you pay attention to grows.

This. This. This. This. This a million times. If there is one principle that flexed my brain around and made me little wee more “woke” after reading the book, is that whatever we pay attention to grows. What we focus on, what we water, what we care for, what we tend, is what grows. What do we want to grow in our garden? What do want to contribute to the land?

To paraphrase Dr. Christopher Emdin, a hiphop educator I love, “Critiquing is love in action.” Critiquing and being critical (not nagging, complaining and or destroying) of things help us those things be all they can be and as good as they can be. We critique them because we love them and we expect better.

In Emergent Strategy, Adrienne Marie Brown writes “We like to throw glitter, not shade”

What we pay attention to grows. Building requires imagining things differently, and then doing the work toward making that view of the world a reality. Finding and plugging in to a group of people doing the work — together, tending the garden together, coming in unity to make community around the things we want to pay attention to and thus grow them is where I believe it is at.

I have lots more to say about this, but for the time being, I’d like to close with this metaphor that came to me at a cultural organizers retreat I went to last week, hosted in a farm, among some marshes and nature.

“Fertile ground is often muddy. Fertile ground has shit in it. “ Fertile ground is messy.” These times are fertile times. Schoolhouses are fertile grounds. “What we pay attention to grows”

Tomorrow I begin year 13 of teaching music in public schools in New York City. Here are 10 things I will remind myself, so when the going gets tough, I know I have solid anchoring and a sense of purpose.

1. I love making music. I love teaching youth. I love teaching music to youth. This is the main reason I am a music teacher, and as hard as they try (and they will!) nobody- NOBODY, can take that away from me. If they try, I will not let them. That belongs to me, just as much as the air I breathe.
2. I have done the work of identifying 10 things I am passionate about teaching music. I have built a program and designed educational experiences based on those. That will make life more fun for myself, and thus, for my students.
3. Within the first week or two of school, I will find 10 things that my students would be passionate about learning. I will center those, in my program and will design educational experiences based on them. That will make life more fun for students, and thus, for myself.
4. “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” — bell hooks. Teaching is Love. Love Takes Trust. Trust Takes Time. I must remember that love takes all the things bell hooks speaks of, and be patient; with ourselves and with our students.
5. To Discipline Means To Teach. Yes, really. A few years ago, I heard this and didn’t believe it. I even googled the definition of “Discipline.” Hint: *it comes from the word “disciple.” I will remember that I cannot teach a student who is not there (because I expelled/kicked out/suspended them)
6. I will focus on teaching fair and clear norms and expectations, and will invite students to design how thy will embody the procedures. When I taught elementary school, I successfully and positively transformed classroom management by teaching my students the following three norms/expectations: 1) In the Music Room We Keep Our Hearts Safe. 2) In the Music Room We Keep Our Bodies Safe. 3) In the Music Room We Keep Our Things Safe. Now that I teach high school, and that my school does have amazing school-wide norms, I will teach it to them. 1) “We Are Committed To Peace. 2) “We Are Committed To Diversity. 3) “We Are Committed To Growth.
7. The Year of The P’s. (from Mitch Resnick’s Lifelong Kindergarten Book) Projects, Passion, Peers & Play. Also, this will be the year where I focus more on building transformative relationships with students, rather than transactional relationships.
8. Music and Music education don’t happen inside a vacuum. To make music is to be human. Here are the essential questions that will anchor my practice: How do musicians become the “voice” of the people?

• What is the role of the arts in society?
• How does rhythm affect us emotionally, physically, and mentally?
• How does music help us to understand and communicate better with others?
• Why do we play music?
• What is a life worth living?
• How do music tell stories? Whose stories do we tell? Whose stories do we silence?

9. Teaching is by default political. There is no such thing as an apolitical teacher. Education is not written into the constitution of the United States of America, therefore anything we do, is resistance. This is a great honor and a great responsibility. We must always strive to be honest, thorough and fair, The search for collective liberation cannot end when the schoolbell rings.

10. I LOVE LOVE LOVE teaching music to youth. It is my life’s work. It is my life’s mission. It is my life’s purpose. There will be days where this will be ver alive and there will be days where I can’t see how this could be possible. For that reason, I write and share it in the internets, where it will live forever as it keeps me honest and grounded.