Waiving Through A Window: A New Vision For The Music Curriculum Frank Abrahams, Ed. D

Frank Abrahams, Ed. D. Associate Dean and Professor of Music Education Westminster Choir College Princeton, New Jersey

In the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen1 , teenager Evan suffers from a social anxiety disorder. His psychiatrist suggests that he write letters to himself that will help focus and calm him. Intending that Evan’s messages are positive, the doctor recommends a writing prompt that begins “Dear Evan Hansen, Today is going to be an amazing day, and here’s why.” However, for many music teachers, and the students in their classes, many days are not so fulfilling. Imagine Evan Hansen as the music teacher writing a letter. It might go like this: Dear Evan Hansen: Today is not a particularly good day. I haven’t slept all night. My lesson plan is flawed because I could not align the content that I felt compelled to teach, to the prescribed and approved curriculum. I am trying to meet my students where they are, honor their individuality, and illustrate global themes of social justice, diversity, and ethical practice.

I want to engage their musical imaginations, intellects, and creativity in ways that are transformational and meaningful to them. But, my curriculum calendar says that today I must teach the evils of the augmented fourth. I feel that if I do not do that, the music education police will find me and then remove me from my students, strip away my license, and banish me to hall and bus duty forever.

Sound ridiculous? Well, not really. The hegemonic practices that frame public schooling and particularly music education curricula in schools delimit access, inclusivity, diversity, and equity. They are often prescriptive and do not address essential questions like “Why teach this?” and “What does my teaching of the content in the curriculum have to do with the students in my care?” Instead, these practices challenge the very essence of an education that should foster democratic ideals, a feeling of well-being, happiness, and result in music students who find experiences with music in school to be fulfilling. Instead, they reproduce a historic western pedagogic tradition that many students find boring and a waste of time. Many students believe that their teachers do not connect to their realities and that the prescribed music curriculum does not honor or value their heritages, identities, tastes, or values.

Any discussion of access, inclusivity, diversity, or equity in music education (or any school subject) begins with the curriculum. In this essay, I propose a view of curriculum that fosters inclusion through collaboration (i.e., teachers with students) and promotes meaningfulness in ways that contribute to feelings of well-being. The curriculum is not a collection of lesson plans stored in a large loose-leaf binder and summarized in a small daily plan book. Nor is it the enactment of a Eurocentric music methodology. Instead, a curriculum should be organic and result from the collaboration of teachers and their students working together within a context of social capital. I define curriculum as the interaction of teachers and students in authentic and meaningful experiences, which both teachers and their students acknowledge as important. The purpose of the curriculum is to enrich and change the knowings, understandings, and perceptions that students and teachers have as individuals and as members of a sub‐set in society. The curriculum is content that results in an enlightened vision of what is important and what adds value to the world within

the context of each person’s place inside and outside of that reality.

Music as a fine art is not a subject unto itself. It is part of who we are as human beings.

Howard Gardner suggested that it is an intelligence. The fact is that once we make music a subject, like all other school subjects, we make music into something it is not. There are aspects of music that can be learned and therefore taught. Those aspects expand musical intellect and provide the scaffolds for various kinds of musicing such as playing an instrument, composing a cover to a popular song, scribing an original musical composition into notation and the like. However, music is a phenomenon unlike any other that students would “study” formally in school. Music lives inside each of us, not in a music classroom. Music promotes what Aristotle called eudaimonia—happiness or well- being, human flourishing, and prosperity.

Peter Webster noted that we do not engage with music the same way we did in the past, and asked, “Why do we still teach the same way?” Dewey said something similar when he wrote: “If we teach today’s children as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”2 We can no longer prepare students for a musical life in the past. Instead, we must prepare them for the now and future.

Good teachers can develop and choose those experiences that are relevant and meaningful to and appropriate for the populations they teach. As a result, not every child comes away from musical experiences in school or the community the same. What is the same, and unifies the outcome, is the desire on the part of the teacher and the students to engage in musical experiences that stimulate musical imagination, enhance musical intellect, nurture creativity, and celebrate music making through performance. These are the engagements that can be meaningful and significant, whatever that might be for each particular student.

I chose Critical Pedagogy for Music Education as the philosophical framework for curriculum because critical pedagogy centers on each child as an individual, it recognizes that all education, including music education, is political and that those in power limit access for all. A critical pedagogy perspective honors diversity and advocates resisting the hegemony that causes the angst of teachers like the one in the opening vignette. The philosophy advocates for the marginalized, and desires to un-silence every musical voice. Advocates of Critical Pedagogy for Music Education ask four questions: Who am I? Who are my students? What might they become? What might we become together? Answers to these questions guide curricular decisions, lesson planning, and music making. It is an umbrella that encompasses issues of artistic citizenship, social justice, cultural relevancy, popular music pedagogy, informal music learning, and more.

While a critical pedagogue would see nothing wrong with setting standards, they would resist standardization and the notion that one size fits all. What follows are some learning outcomes to guide curricular decisions for music education. For the children it serves, a music education: 1. Develops habits of mind that promote meaningful, enriching, and significant engagements with music at all levels of child development and all stages of adult life. 2. Promotes pathways to musical understanding for the student that develops musical independence and a critical consciousness.3 3. Fosters connections among and between music and the various subjects taught in school (especially STEM4) such that students and their teachers see, acknowledge and appreciate the relationships and what each subject has to offer the other. 4. Applies the principles of constructivist and connectionist learning theories to the making of music in ways that generate the depth of understanding and foster well-being now and in the future. 5. Develops musical literacies beyond the ability to decode

Western notation. 6. Engages musical imagination, intellect, creativity, and music making through performance in ways that help children to transfer

these constructs to solve problems in music and all areas of life. 7. Nurtures the development of musical agency. 8. Fosters eudaimonia through intrapersonal connections that nourish physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. 9. Promotes, through engagements with music, a commitment to ethical behavior, social justice, and artistic citizenship. 10. Embraces fun experiencing music in all of its genres and forms, and connects to a student’s musical heritage.

While no single method is useful for every student in every context, achieving the outcomes above empowers children to seek out learning on their own. It extends the knowledge the teacher can provide. Further, such independent student explorations foster the cognitive constructs that are the pillars (imagination, intellect, creativity, and performance) of music teaching and music learning.

Remembering that teaching and learning is a partnership, students and teachers together, enacting the curriculum described herein may foster a feeling of well-being and fulfillment for the teacher as well. Returning to our music teacher who now wrote: Dear Evan Hansen: In my students’ eyes, I saw a bright and shining glow when they performed their original musical compositions for the class and me. One child said, “I felt like someone was listening and cared about my musical ideas.” They didn’t know about the augmented fourth, but they did know the feelings of happiness and of being fulfilled when they had the space to express themselves musically. I felt the same. It seemed like together, we were no longer waving through a window from the outside looking in. Instead, we were all on the other side. Today was an amazing day.

Abrahams, F. (2014). Starbucks doesn’t sell hot cross buns:

Embracing new priorities for pre-service music teacher preparation programs. In M.

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Promising practices in 21st century music education (pp. 41-60). New York: Oxford

Planning instruction in music:

Writing objectives, assessments, and lesson plans to engage artistic processes. Chicago: GIA. Abrahams, F. & John, R. (2017).

Becoming musical. Chicago:

Macmillan Company. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences (3rd ed.). New York:

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1. Dear Evan Hansen is a Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and book by Steven Levenson. In 2019 it won six Tony awards, including Best Musical, Best Score, Best Actor, and Best Featured Actress in a Musical. “Waving Through A Window” is a musical number from the production. At the time of this essay, the musical was still running in New York and on National Tour. 2. John Dewey. Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan Company, 1944, p. 167 3. Paulo Freire, 1973 in Education for critical consciousness coined the term to mean the ability to “intervene in reality in order to change it.” 4. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.