A Teacher Educator and Social Justice Advocate - Robert C. Jordan

Robert C. Jordan Teachers College Columbia University

I became acquainted with Dr. Lisa DeLorenzo when reading Sketches in Democracy: Notes from an Urban Classroom. This book presents a riveting account of her choice to teach general music in a newly formed, urban high school during a year-long sabbatical from Montclair State University. Her compelling story encouraged me to arrange a semester-long teaching observation of her secondary general music course with periodic semistructured interviews. During the semester, DeLorenzo’s students and I reflected on three exemplar music lessons integrated with social justice themes. In doing so, DeLorenzo prepared her preservice teachers for the challenges of public-school teaching including how to apply issues of social justice to the music classroom and how to meet difficulties with compassion and creativity. This article portrays my experiences with Dr. DeLorenzo and her preservice teachers focusing on how her teaching invited us to challenge and transform our pedagogies.

Keywords: Higher education, interview, lesson planning, Montclair State University, music teacher educator, pedagogical renewal, secondary general music methods, social justice teaching, teacher observation, teacher/student power relationships, transformation

On the first day of class, Dr. Lisa DeLorenzo asked her undergraduate music education students to take a piece of paper and describe a time when a teacher used words that hurt them or shut them down. Students shared experiences of abusive applied instructors or classroom teachers who criticized their engagement and learning styles. Next, DeLorenzo directed, “Take the paper, and crumple it up! Now, throw it at this target on the dry-erase board…throw it as hard as you can!” I watched, beaming, as wads of paper whirred through the air from surprised yet enthusiastic students. “Do you feel better?” she asked, explaining the activity: “Your words as a teacher have a great deal of power.” This experience gave me an inkling of how she modeled a key theme in the course: the music classroom as a safe space.

DeLorenzo’s activity introduced her students to a semester-long pedagogical transformation centered around recognizing and interrogating teacher power. As the semester continued, I became increasingly aware that the examination of power, privilege, and justice is what educators need as we respond to unprecedented challenges. For me, this examination generalizes to COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2021 which have highlighted inequities and injustices in ways that are inescapable. Consequently, I feel obliged to reimagine my practice towards social justice. I looked to DeLorenzo for inspiration to change my pedagogy, and this article presents what I found.

I became acquainted with DeLorenzo, Professor of Music Education at Montclair State University, when reading Sketches in Democracy: Notes from an Urban Classroom (DeLorenzo, 2012). This book presents a gripping account of her yearlong sabbatical from music teacher education to teach general music in a newly formed, urban high school. Her compelling story encouraged me to reach out in hopes of arranging an observation. She felt that her secondary general music methods course would be an ideal opportunity for me to learn more about intertwining music pedagogy and social justice. “The goal of the course is to advance [my students’] thinking/practice about teaching from a social justice perspective.” She

continued using corresponding themes from Sketches: “I generally try to blend theory with practice so there is a lot of music making along with discussions about pedagogy and the adolescent learner.”

During our first class, DeLorenzo shared these thought-provoking statements: • We teach students who bring rich backgrounds to the classroom. • We are teaching students to be change agents. • The context of music—it’s historical, cultural, and social dimensions—is often considered extraneous to the music itself.

To contextualize our reflection on these statements, DeLorenzo presented two videos. The first, a documentary exposed misinformation surrounding protests led by Black students during the Soweto Uprising1. Next, we watched a video featuring Sydney Chaffee, an advocate for social justice teaching. In summation, Chaffee said,

[School] has to mean more than "I teach my subject." School has to be about teaching people to change the world for the better. If we believe that, then teaching will always be a political act. We can't be afraid of our students' power. Their power will help them make tomorrow better. But before they can do that, we have to give them chances to practice today. (TED, 2017)

Combined, these videos encouraged me (and presumably DeLorenzo’s students) to begin considering what it might mean to teach music for social justice—to look critically at pedagogy and the balance of power in our classrooms and communities.

Our first examination of teacher/student power concluded when DeLorenzo’s students discussed the assigned reading, Raywid’s (1995) “A Teacher’s Awesome Power.” They surveyed each time the word “power” was used while DeLorenzo recorded main ideas from their discussion on the dry-erase board. Students reviewed their compiled discoveries silently and reflected on the following relationships: (a) between themselves as students and their former teachers, (b) between themselves as students and DeLorenzo, and (c) between themselves as teachers and their future students. Similarly, my journaling during this silence considered my changing role

Because my teacher role was starting to look more like DeLorenzo’s, I asked how she prepares to teach for social justice. DeLorenzo described her preparation as a promise:

I promise them that I will teach them to the best of my knowledge … that I will use the most up to date teaching methods … that they will be prepared to teach general music at the secondary level and what that entails … that they will learn about the behaviors and the dispositions of middle school or high school students … that they will have concrete teaching ideas. (L. DeLorenzo, personal communication, 2020)

DeLorenzo begins her planning with the big question: What do I want my students to know at the end of this course? She considers which competencies, habits of mind, and philosophical groundings her preservice music educators need. From these, she generates five to six essential questions that will guide her in planning the overall arch of the course, e.g., “How can we use music to bring about social change?”, or “How can technology help adolescents shape and express their own complex musical ideas?”

These (and more) questions steered the design of three exemplar music composition lessons that formed the heart of the course. DeLorenzo presented these lessons through the social justice lens of climate change guided by this essential question: “What is the connection between nature and music?” To get us started, DeLorenzo distributed graphs2 presenting climate change data: melting ice, rising sea levels, increased wildfire activity, habitat destruction, and unusual weather patterns. She invited us to consider climate change’s disproportionate effect on minoritized people and explore how this awareness might be expressed through music. She asked, “How could you assign pitches to the highs and lows of the graph?” Using a mobile phone piano app, students selected pitches, chromatically centered, and created a “data” melody.

Because students had previously created diatonic data melodies, DeLorenzo began the next lesson by lis-

tening to several post-tonal compositions. This activity and resulting discussion sensitized students’ ears to the many compositional choices available. DeLorenzo asked students to record their data melodies using GarageBand and develop their compositions using contrasting timbres and digital audio loops. After students shared their compositions, DeLorenzo posed the following question: “In what ways could we use these pieces to acknowledge the ravages of climate change to the public? Otherwise we can’t become change agents.” Students discussed an increased awareness of their agency in reversing the effects of climate change and helping those most affected. DeLorenzo revealed her planning process to her students and modeled how they might similarly design lessons.

In an after-class discussion with me, DeLorenzo acknowledged that sometimes her students struggle to grasp the abstract concepts at play when teaching music through social justice lenses, especially the socio-cultural implications of teaching music history. To help, she places “emphasis on the depth of teaching [in] a social justice context. Those are the tools of my trade. It really doesn’t matter what I would be teaching. Any strategy would have some of those elements.” She thought for a moment, then said, “It looks like I’m teaching only one thing, but I’m really teaching many things.”

Like DeLorenzo, it may have looked like I was teaching only one thing in my secondary ensembles, but I was teaching many, i.e., critical reflection and democratic methods for student-led repertoire selection and rehearsal design. When I shared these tools of my trade with DeLorenzo, our mutual interest in teacher education reform emerged in a cascade of questions: “How do we introduce unfamiliar methodologies to our preservice teachers without being considered ivory-towered?” I continued, “How will our students innovate if they don’t see their mentors innovate first?” DeLorenzo responded with more questions: “Do I prepare my students to assimilate into a public-school system, or do I prepare them to have problems with material they teach?” She clarified that her students’ methodologies may not synchronize with administrator or parent expectations. Distilling these questions, I asked, “How do music teacher educators prepare preservice teachers to meet reasonable public-school expectations and respond to problems with grace, empathy, and innovation?” According to DeLorenzo, teacher educators are responsible for sharing high-quality, innovative content and pedagogies with students. Some content will be unfamiliar, but generally, music teacher educators present content that students understand or will learn in a comprehensive musicianship course. “I'm not teaching them music,” she explained, “I’m teaching them pedagogy.” Teacher educators should model how to plan music making experiences that invite practical application of content, e.g., when DeLorenzo’s students developed their climate change data melodies with digital audio loops.

DeLorenzo’s course culminates with an intensive project: student pairs co-design three sequential music composition lessons through one social justice lens (e.g., poverty, ecology, war, protest, or spirituality). Her students show growth when they collaborate and ask critical, thought-provoking questions. She evaluates student work carefully: “I don't ever want to give them a grade without saying why, what I liked, how much I appreciated the work they did.” She emphasizes written comments saying, “I feel if they put their time and effort into it, that's what they deserve.”

DeLorenzo evaluated the 20-year trajectory of her general music methods courses and acknowledged that inquiry- and project-based methods were always central, but when she first began her university teaching, the themes for units were more traditional, e.g., composers, historical periods, and compositional techniques. She credits her colleague Dr. Marissa Silverman for the transition to social justice themes in the methods courses. She hopes that her students embrace the idea that history classrooms are not the only spaces for social justice themes. She finished saying, “Musicians are a huge part of the social justice movement [on] many different issues. I think that is fascinating, and I would think they would find that fascinating too.”

At the end of the semester, the students had created a brilliant collection of lesson plans intertwined with social justice. DeLorenzo inspired me to infuse my practice with inclusive, culturally responsive methods including thoughtful selection of materials, teaching partners, and

authentic problem-based projects, and I hope to allow space in my curricula for student choice of content and experiences. DeLorenzo’s students and I left her classroom committed to reimagining our teaching towards social justice using the new tools of our trade.

1 Beginning on June 16, 1976, Sowetan students challenged the introduction of Afrikaans as an instructional language in South Africa. Upwards of 20,000 student protestors were met with severe police brutality. Mortality estimates run as high as 700 students.

2 The graphs in question can be found at https://nca2018. globalchange.gov/chapter/1/#fig-1-2

DeLorenzo, L. C. (2019). Teaching music: The urban experience. Routledge.

DeLorenzo, L. C. (2016). Giving voice to democracy in music education: Diversity in social justice. Routledge.

DeLorenzo, L. C. (2012). Sketches in democracy: Notes from an urban classroom. Rowan and Littlefield Education.

DeLorenzo, L. C. (2012). Sketches in democracy: Notes from an urban classroom. R&L Education.

Raywid, M. A. (1995). A teacher’s awesome power. In Ayers. W. (Ed.), To become a teacher: Making a difference in children’s lives (pp. 79-85). Teachers College Press.

TED. (2017, November). Sydney Chaffee: How teachers can help kids find their political voices [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/sydney_ chaffee_how_teachers_can_help_kids_find_their_political_voices/transcript?language=en

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