Accessibility & Ableism in Music Education

For this post, we connected with another student in the PIDP 3100 course to discuss trends in our fields and in adult education in general. I was pleased to be partnered with my VCC Music colleague Dr Emily Logan, with whom I have worked closely in our home department.

For us, and indeed most departments at VCC, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and accessibility have been big topics of discussion. Last term, for example, we invited VCC Disability Services to conduct a training session for Music faculty. The meeting was well-attended, and faculty were able to ask a lot of questions pertaining specifically to the courses they teach. I found the following UDL Guidelines for curriculum development infographic to be a helpful summary of the approach:

image: https://www.algonquincollege.com/lts/udl/the-how/

But Emily and I also discussed another issue that has been coming up in our field: is musicianship (aural skills and ear training) education in music programs inherently ableist? How do we work with neurodiverse students whose auditory processing abilities may be different from their peers? Diversity in the music classroom is a perennial topic, though much of the discussion largely focusses on issues of cultural representation in the musical examples used. The Facebook group Decolonizing the Music Room (DMTR) is a helpful resource and community in this regard . Yet I have not heard a lot of discussion about the accessibility issues with music skills courses, in which all students are essentially expected to listen and hear the same way. I found several articles outlining how disability is a highly neglected topic in music education, and indeed prevents many prospective music students from accessing an education.

I also found this YouTube presentation, “Confronting Ableism in Music Education” by Brian N. Weidner and Becca Mattson, which uses Becca’s experience as a disabled music student to outline some best practices for music programs.

This is certainly an area that needs much further development, discussion, and training in our field, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with my colleagues.

Trends in Adult Education: The Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom is something I had been hearing about for years before the pandemic, but it wasn’t until 2020 that it became a reality. During the height of lockdowns, I was teaching all my courses over Zoom and recording them for students who couldn’t attend or missed a class. I ended up with a massive bank of recorded lecture content, and decided this was the ideal opportunity to try a flipped classroom. I spent hours learning iMovie and editing my 80 minute lectures down to 20-40 minutes. I was dismayed to discover that my first lecture video took about 12 hours to edit, putting in 3-4 hours per day over several days. It was brutal. I tried again, and my second video took eight hours. The next took six. I got faster and faster and less perfectionist as I went. I also got better and more efficient at using the editing tools. By the end of it, I was editing a lecture video in two hours. Now having created an entire term’s worth of lecture videos, I could finally flip my classroom.

Source: https://teaching.washington.edu/topics/engaging-students-in-learning/flipping-the-classroom/

Most of my courses meet twice a week, so I had already developed a format where I do my lecture-style “content delivery” class on Tuesdays, then assign an online discussion forum on Moodle to be completed before class on Thursdays. By assigning a video version of my Tuesday lecture, I was able to devote all of Tuesday’s class time to discussion, questions, and in-class activities related to the lecture.

The most incredible thing about this system is that it now enables me to spend the entirety of my class contact time facilitating live, verbal discussion based on the students’ forum posts and questions about the lecture videos. They have already pre-loaded their thoughts to the forum before class and thus have plenty of ideas to contribute to the discussion. This strategy also allows me to read through the forum responses before class and make note of particularly interesting points made by various students, in case I need to step in when the discussion lulls or even change the course of the conversation entirely.

Another benefit of this method is that I can ensure that everyone’s ideas are heard and we end up with a much more thorough and democratic sharing of ideas. If someone does not speak up, I may draw them into the conversation by remarking on a point I found interesting in their forum post. I have found these discussions to be stimulating, and we never run out of material because the forum posts offer so much potential for different avenues to explore. This technique has become a pillar of my classroom management style, facilitating greater engagement and participation and bringing me closer to my philosophy of student-centered learning.

Freeing up the contact time that I would normally spend on content delivery and replacing it with more interaction is something I would like to achieve in other courses. So far, I have only flipped one course, largely because of the time commitment required to edit the lecture videos. That said, I continue to record all my classes and build my archive of lecture footage. Maybe someday I’ll be able to use some professional development time to sit down and put in the extra hours required to flip another course!

Trends in the Field - Ecomusicology, Academic Sustainability, and Accessibility

The blog is back, as I complete my posts for PIDP 3100 - Foundations of Adult Education!

This week, we are asked to discuss some emerging trends in our field and how they impact our teaching. For this post, I decided to reflect on an emerging sub-discipline within the field of ethnomusicology: ecomusicology. I’ve been hearing this term at conferences and in conversation with colleagues quite a bit over the past few years, so I thought I’d take a look at the website for the open access, peer-reviewed journal that has sprung up, Ecomusicology Review, and read their definition of ecomusicology. As with its parent discipline of ethnomusicology, ecomusicology is an interdisciplinary field that brings together perspectives from a number of disciplines, with a specific focus on the interactions between sound, music, nature, the environment, and culture.

IMAGE: “Sustainability and Sound: Ecomusicology Inside and Outside the Academy”, by Aaron S. Allen, Jeff Todd Titon, and Denise Von Glahn (click image to visit article)

There are a few trends that come to mind when I consider these themes. First, my colleague Dr. Joe Browning, whose PhD dissertation focused on themes of nature and environment in Japanese shakuhachi music. I was struck by Joe’s ethical decision (c. 2012) at the time to not use air travel for his fieldwork, instead conducting his research online to minimize the carbon footprint of his work. This was the first time I had heard of anyone in music academia engaging with the ethical side of air travel, fieldwork, and conference attendance. Joe was certainly ahead of his time, as several years later, the pandemic changed the landscape for academic travel quite drastically. The British Forum for Ethnomusicology, along with many other academic organizations, held their conferences online during the height of pandemic restrictions. This was a success, and facilitated the participation of many people who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to attend. Since then, the BFE has pledged to hold their annual one-day conference online every two years.

I really appreciate the move to blended online/in-person formats, and have been integrating this into my own teaching so that I can make use of the best features of both face-to-face and Zoom instruction. In addition to providing further accessibility, online formats do cut down on travel costs, both financial and environmental, making it possible for more people to attend with fewer barriers, and reducing unnecessary travel emissions for conversations that can easily be held virtually. Of course, nothing can replace in-person interaction, but there are larger environmental and equality issues to consider when we insist on doing all academic meeting and learning in the flesh. Personally, I plan to continue offering blended teaching formats for their ecological sustainability and accessibility as long as my institution remains open to it.

Week 8 - Ongoing Learning, or Where Do We Go From Here?

I’m nearing the end of the PIDP, so what’s next? As a fulltime permanent faculty member at Vancouver Community College I am required to do one month of professional development each year. There has never been any shortage of things on my PD wishlist: I regularly attend and present at conferences, attend additional workshops, listen to guest speakers, and even just seek out YouTube videos or blog posts about topics of interest to me. That being said, there are a few things I can envision:

1)    Taking additional PIDP courses

I joined the program when it had a lower credit threshold and didn’t require electives. Since the program was redesigned, several interesting-looking elective courses have been added. I can envision taking an additional course here and there as an annual refresher during my PD month (which I usually take in May or June).

2)    Finding or creating a community of professional practice

I’d like to connect with other instructors more about teaching. I’m already a member of a couple of teaching-related Facebook groups, but I haven’t found them to be much use for the kind of general, day-to-day support I’m looking for. I’d love to set up an ongoing Zoom meeting with my Music colleagues at VCC, maybe a “Lunch and Learn” where we could get together to talk informally about issues, strategies, or resources of interest.

3)    Subscribing to Toolsi

Toolsi is a project developed by Nadia Chaney, a colleague of mine, over the past few years. It’s a suite of online facilitation resources including short videos, a podcast, courses, workbooks, activities, and an online community. I’ve been watching it grow with interest, and I think when I’m finished the PIDP it will be an interesting place for me to migrate to continue my professional development work. Teaching and facilitation go hand in hand, and as the years go by, I’m becoming more interested in the process and craft of teaching, not just course content or being a subject-matter expert.

How we build our own approach to teaching is a lifelong project. I’m lucky to have amazing teachers in my life, especially my mother Linda Morgan and my dear friend Leslie Tilley, with whom I’ve spent many hours discussing instructional strategies, cool assignments, high-minded visions, and grading woes. I’m grateful for these relationships. No good teachers are made in isolation; we need communities of practice and mutual support.

That’s why after nearly 8 years, I’m still motivated to work in education. I needed a career that would never cease to challenge me and present opportunities for growth and connection. I’ve found that.

Bonus Post - More Thoughts on Marking!

Since marking is one of my biggest challenges, I thought it deserved a bonus post. Though I’ve received helpful information from PIDP courses and the Brookfield text, I realized I hadn’t yet consulted the oracle of oracles on all subjects under the sun: YouTube.

I ended up finding a helpful video, with the somewhat clickbaity title “How to Grade an Essay in 5 Minutes Max”. Well, they hooked me, and I’m glad they did. Despite being geared towards middle school teachers, some of the same principles for marking written assignments can apply at the post-secondary level. I’m a firm believer that any quality idea or resource is scalable for the setting you need it for, provided you bring some creativity to it.

The main point in this video is to use a really robust grading rubric. This is something I’ve already been doing, but some of my assignments have been lacking rubrics that go into enough detail to make marking the almost automatic, completely effortless process this video promises it can be. This is especially true for my Moodle discussion forums (which I use a lot); the rubric just isn’t fleshed out enough. This inspires me to review my rubrics and make sure they’re doing enough of the evaluation work for me.

The second point in this video is to resist the urge to write comments on the paper itself. Instead, they suggest circling or underlining things on the rubric sheet and writing 1-2 sentences of comments at the bottom. I loved the suggestion of developing a few basic grading symbols to write directly on the student’s writing, for instance using an underline to highlight something a student has done particularly well, or a circle for something problematic, or brackets for something that needs more work. Why didn’t I think of this before? It saves so much time having to write out the same comments over and over again.

The final tip is to have the students reflect on their own papers by giving them a response handout to fill out after they get their work back and read through their feedback. This is brilliant! The guided questions are things like, “Identify one area where you feel you were successful, and explain why. Now, identify one area in your assignment where improvement is needed, and explain why.” You can even ask them to choose one or two sentences to rewrite, and/or what strategies they used to make their writing stronger.

Getting students to do more self-assessment and reflection is a core part of many of the PIDP courses I’ve taken so far. I’ve gotten better at doing it as a student myself, and I do find it useful. In my early teaching days, I would spend hours marking essays, hand them back to the students, and have to way of knowing if they’d even read them or taken them to heart. Self-reflective assessments are something I’m slowly starting to incorporate more into my own courses. Each year, I try to make small improvements where I can. It never ends!

Week 7 - Giving Helpful Evaluations (Brookfield Ch. 14)

This week, I chose to comment on Brookfield’s Chapter 14: Giving Helpful Evaluations. Student evaluation and feedback is something I have struggled with throughout my career. While I have developed many methods of delivering feedback to students live in class, giving written feedback is something that I still find challenging. Nothing makes me procrastinate more than knowing I have marking to do. I will even clean my house in order to avoid marking, in a phenomenon I like to call “procrasticleaning” (and if the term’s inclusion in the Urban Dictionary is any indication, it is a pretty widespread phenomenon).  

Source: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=procrasticlean

Why the resistance? As Brookfield puts it, “For those of us who wish to build collegial, supportive relationships with students, giving evaluations in one of the most difficult, demanding, and complex tasks we face” (2015, 185). There are so many layers of complexity to giving feedback: developing clear assignment criteria and robust marking rubrics so students know exactly what your expectations are, avoiding unconscious bias and favouritism, and even just being more mentally fatigued by the time you reach the last paper than you were at the beginning of the grading session. Giving quality feedback often feels daunting and overwhelming.

In addition to making my assignment criteria and marking rubrics more clear over the years (still a work in progress, I must admit), I really like Brookfield’s suggestion of providing specific examples of what you expect from students. For certain assignments, I have uploaded example papers from students who received a high mark in previous years. But I can see the utility of doing this for all my assignments, including weekly discussion forums. As a student myself, I always find that something clicks into place mentally if I’m able to see an example assignment. I’ve noticed that this is a widely used practice with the instructors in the Provincial Instructors Diploma Program, and it has certainly set me up for successful completion of assignments. As I learned in the Curriculum Development course, instructor transparency with students about course expectations is paramount to avoiding confusion, conflict, and even issues of fairness and equity.

So, I think I’ll put down the cleaning supplies and spend some time digging through old assignments to make sure my students know what I consider to be a strong example for each of my assignments. It’s a relatively small step that can make a huge difference to students’ experience and assignment outcomes. And who knows, it might even make giving feedback more enjoyable!

References

Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (Third Edition). Jossey-Bass.

Week 6 - This Time, It's Personal

The next blog post in the Professional Practice series asks us where we would like to be in five years. All of my blog posts have felt personal, due to their reflective nature, but this one really gets into where I’m headed next in my career.

#1 Finish the Provincial Instructors Diploma Program!

This is more of a short-term goal, as I’m trying to finish the program within the next six months. However, all the work I’m doing in these courses is having an impact on my work as an instructor and an assistant department head. Having greater understanding of curriculum design, instructional strategies, feedback mechanisms, and reflective practices not only feeds into my own courses, but also administrative work for my department, like program and systems renewal. I feel I will come away from this experience with greater depth, breadth, and professionalism in post-secondary adult education.

#2 Writing and Publishing

While I am employed at a teaching institution that does not require me to publish, I love writing and it has long been a goal of mine to publish both academically and creatively. I’d like to have a couple of books published within the next five years. One is already in progress; I currently have a book under contract with Routledge, co-written with my colleague Owen Coggins, entitled Jew’s Harps and Metal Music: Folk Traditions in Global Modernity.  I’m also considering writing a book specifically about jew’s harp, possibly for a trade publisher rather than an academic one, to broaden the audience for my research and make it more accessible to the general public. Finally, I’m planning on doing some personal writing over the next five years, resulting in either a non-fiction book, memoir, or a volume of poetry.

#3 Research Fellowship

As this is my eighth year of teaching, I’d like to take at least one leave in the next five years to refresh myself in my field. I’d like to apply for a one-year post-doctoral fellowship to conduct a research project of some sort, linked to one of the publication outcomes above. Before my teaching career, much of my time and identity was wrapped up in research and ethnographic fieldwork, which I love. I was travelling, going to festivals, and spending time with musicians and artists, and I miss being in that environment of constant discovery. I get a lot of mental stimulation from teaching as well, but there’s something about fieldwork and going out there to get answers that motivates me in a different way. I miss meeting people, conducting interviews, examining objects in museums, speaking with archivists and curators—the works. And the more I renew my energy in my field, the better my teaching will be.

All these goals are interconnected, and none really stands alone. Everything that I do to develop my teaching practice furthers my professionalism, and everything I do to develop my research and writing enhances my work, perspective, and resources as an instructor.

Week 5 - Understanding Students’ Resistance to Learning (Brookfield Ch. 16)

The title of this chapter intrigued me, because on the whole I feel I have not encountered much resistance to learning in my teaching career. This may be because I work at a community college, where the median student age is 32, and returning to school is a conscious choice. Though these students are balancing jobs, families, and other commitments, they are highly motivated learners. The smaller class sizes at community college also facilitate greater insight into individual students’ learning styles, and more face time with which to address them. That being said, I probably encounter at least one or two students displaying signs of resistance every year.

Brookfield’s honest assessment of his own experiences as a resistant learner made me reflect on where I myself have been a resistant student. I have taken several language courses over the years, and have often marveled at how much the teacher’s personality has set the tone for how easy I find the language. I have felt motivated by one teacher who was funny, high-energy, and positive, and resistant towards another who was sullen and didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves at all.

As Brookfield explains, “[r]esistance is a multilayered and complex phenomenon in which several factors intersect” (2015, 219). I agree that there are many different flavours of resistance that teachers may encounter. All are valid, and have nothing to do with the oft-repeated adage that “people just don’t have attention spans these days”. As I mentioned in the previous blog post about teaching in diverse classrooms, I am currently taking steps to minimize the “disjunction of learning and teaching styles” (220) by using a variety of different methods that appeal to a broader range of learners. But the style that stood out the most to me from Brookfield’s list was “cultural suicide”, wherein students belonging to specific identity groups can experience a sense of betrayal from their community through the act of going to school and being exposed to contradictory ideas (223).

Here is Brookfield’s quote in full:

“I have seen this dynamic with working class students for whom taking education seriously (i.e., demonstrating interest in ideas for their own sake rather than as a source of future income) is taken by some of their peers as a betrayal of solid, unpretentious working class values. I have seen it in fundamentalist groups for whom a member’s consenting exposure to new ideas is regarded as tantamount to blasphemy. I have also seen it in racial groups in which a commitment to study is seen as indicating that people have joined the dominant White supremacist culture. In all these situations students’ resistance to learning springs from the fear of committing cultural suicide.” (223)

“Cultural suicide” was not a term I was very familiar with, at least not in the pedagogical sense. It is, however, a term that I have heard used by white supremacist groups to bemoan their governments supporting immigration. I had always considered it to be a conservative or far-right concept of cultural purity and protectionism, inextricably linked to ideas about the sanctity of a dominant white race. News articles like this confirm the reality and prevalence of this narrative in Canadian society. Seeing it used in Brookfield’s sense, to highlight the betrayal, cognitive dissonance, and very real and devastating consequences of possible social and even familial exclusion, brought another dimension to the term for me.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cultural-betrayal-trauma-theory-reprinted-with-permission_fig3_326385780

Further research revealed that this concept is closely related to Cultural Betrayal Trauma Theory from the field of psychology. I found the above diagram, from Gómez and Johnson-Freyd (2018) very useful in fleshing this out further. Understanding that for some students, learning is simply broadening their horizons, while for others, it is requiring them to confront intense in-group pressures, is a crucial thing for educators to keep in mind when encountering resistance to their teaching. It may be about something much bigger than we realize, and compassion and sensitivity are necessary to navigate these situations.

References

Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (Third Edition). Jossey-Bass.

Gómez, Jennifer & Freyd, Jennifer. (2018). Psychological Outcomes of Within-Group Sexual Violence: Evidence of Cultural Betrayal. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. 20. 10.1007/s10903-017-0687-0.

Week 4 - Teaching in Diverse Classrooms (Brookfield Ch. 8)

One of the biggest challenges facing educators is managing multiple forms of diversity in the classroom. How do we even assess diversity? Brookfield mentioned The Myers-Briggs Personality Type Inventory, but I find this test problematic and it is not something I would feel comfortable asking my students to do. There are so many other social, cultural, and cognitive factors that create diversity amongst learners, that go way beyond the parameter of “personality”.

Brookfield also mentioned Kolb’s (1984) cycle of experiential learning, which sounded more relevant to educational settings, so I decided to look it up.

McLeod (2017) delineates the two parts of Kolb’s theory using a variety of helpful diagrams. The first is the Experiential Learning Cycle, a fairly straightforward model of how learning works, which tracks well with my own experience:

Image: www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html

The second part of Kolb’s model is the four Learning Styles, which are based on the above cycle: diverging, assimilating, converging, and accommodating. The bottom line is that “educators should ensure that activities are designed and carried out in ways that offer each learner the change to engage in the manner that suits them best” (McLeod 2017). By cycling through different approaches, assignments, activities, and ways of presenting material, we have the greatest chance of hitting every learner’s strong and weak points more equally.

It makes sense to employ a range of learning modalities, as suggested by Kolb’s model above. To this end, I found some of Brookfield’s suggestions in this chapter useful. Some techniques I am already using:

Team Teaching

I agree that team teaching can be helpful for exposing learners to instructors with different backgrounds and styles, and I make use of regular guest instructors in my courses for this reason.

Mixing Student Groups

When I put students in breakout rooms on Zoom, I try to mix up the pairings so that students are working with different people and aren’t always with their friends. These are great opportunities for students to connect with people they don’t normally interact with outside of class.

A new technique that I will try:

Incorporating Silence

I loved Brookfield’s suggestion of incorporating periods of silence into discussion-based activities! Instead of letting the usual voices jump in immediately after asking a question, I will give 30-60 seconds of silence for students to write down their responses first.

http://www.cgpgrey.com, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

References

Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (Third Edition). Jossey-Bass.

McLeod, S. A. (2017, October 24). Kolb - learning styles. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html

Week 3 - The Core Assumptions of Skillful Teaching (Brookfield Ch.2)

For this course, our main text is The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom (3rd Edition) by Stephen D. Brookfield. This week’s blog assignment prompts us to comment on Brookfield Chapter 2, “The Core Assumptions of Skillful Teaching”. I have excerpted a quote from each of these four core assumptions to respond to.

1.     Skillful teaching is whatever helps students learn

“If we simply mimic whatever teaching behaviours we endured as students (I suffered through it so now it’s your turn!) this won’t produce the results we want” (20).

I take it that here Brookfield is referring to the negative teaching behaviours we experienced as learners. This is certainly something I have observed in academia: the notion of paying dues, “rites of passage”, and literally cycles of violence in teaching. There can be a tendency to replicate a negative or even traumatic style because it was done to us and we believe this to be the only way to survive the system. just because an instructor is extremely knowledgeable about a subject and highly intelligent, does not mean that this knowledge and skill necessarily translates when it comes to engaging others.

2.     Skillful teachers adopt a critically reflexive stance toward their practice

A quote in this section is the antidote to the above: “Finally, reviewing our personal autobiographies as learners”… “helps us gain a better understanding of the pleasures and terrors our own students are experiencing” (20).

I think viewing our own autobiographies is helpful to a point, but as a teacher it’s also  important to acknowledge the limitations of our own experiences. If I look at my own experience as a learner, I see someone who has felt largely confident and at ease in most educational settings. I have usually been able to build rapport with my instructors and fellow students, share my thoughts or ask questions in class (even if I felt a bit nervous, I could always push myself to do it), and complete work that met or exceeded the instructor’s expectations. There have even been times when I have felt comfortable taking initiative and asking instructors to modify an assignment so that it would be more interesting or challenging for me! I realize this is not the profile of a lot of learners. This is the profile of a lifelong nerd who knew from a young age that they wanted to work in education. I know that how I learn best and my own attitudes towards learning and education are not necessarily the same for all my students.

I try to model my own preference for instructors with a sense of humour and an openness towards creativity, while keeping in mind that not everyone learns like me and I may have to do things differently if my approach isn’t working.

3. Teachers need a constant awareness of how students are experiencing their learning and perceiving teachers’ actions

I agree with Brookfield that mechanisms for anonymous student feedback should be provided fairly early in the course. I teach 12-13 week courses, and I’ve done fairly basic anonymous surveys around Week 5 in the past. The questions I used were a) What about this course has been most useful to you so far? B) What about this course, if anything, could be improved? and c) Are there ways that you, the other students, or the instructor could make this course more effective? I would like to bring this practice back, but perhaps with different questions. I’m looking forward to reading about Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionaire in the next chapter, an instrument which he says provides information about the “submerged dynamics and tensions that are either inhibiting or enhancing learning in [his] classes” (23).

“One of the most important indicators they mention that convinces them they are being treated respectfully is the teacher attempting to discover, and address seriously, students’ concerns and difficulties” (24)

4. College students of any age should be treated as adults

“[Students] often feel in limbo, sensing that adulthood means leaving old ideas, capacities, and conceptions of self behind as they learn new knowledge, skills, and perspectives. Sometimes it feels as if learning is calling on them to leave their own identities in the past.” (25)

I really like the emphasis on the impact of learning on identity. There can be a real crisis in learning, where we get stretched in new ways to the point of discomfort. Learning can bring up emotional responses. And of course, we’re never the same once we have been exposed to a new way of looking at something, or ourselves. But this is part of the process, and our balancing act as teachers is to provide a safe space for exploration while not coddling students to the point that they experience no discomfort at all.

Week 2 - Teaching Autobiography & Values

A Bit About Me

I am a scholar and performer of the jew’s harp, an ancient, mouth-resonated musical instrument found in many cultures around the world. I have studied the instrument since 2005, speaking, performing, and conducting award-winning research in over a dozen countries. I serve as a core mentor with EmergenceBC, where I bring a wealth of experience in various aspects of the music business. I honed my skills as a non-profit arts administrator with top music organizations including the Chan Centre, Vancouver International Song Festival, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, and music intima, and served as the Executive Director of the North American Jew’s Harp Festival. As a performer, I have appeared on local and international stages of all sizes as a soloist, collaborator, and ensemble member. Now a fulltime professor in the VCC Music department, I work with emerging artists and teach courses in ethnomusicology, pop music history, and social media for musicians. 

Personal and Professional Values

I am currently entering my eighth year of teaching Music at VCC. In my first year of teaching, I remember feeling pressure to be an authoritative expert on all the topics I was teaching. This certainly created a feeling of imposter syndrome, as described by Stephen Brookfield in The Skillful Teacher. As I gained more experience, I realized that I did not have to be an expert on everything, and that I could be more of a facilitator than an authority. While I may have a greater breadth and depth of knowledge and experience about my course topics than the students do, I present myself as an enthusiastic lifelong learner who is discovering and exploring alongside them, rather than an authority who is transmitting information to them from the top down. I see my role as largely about creating a safe classroom space in which to discuss difficult topics like racism, inequality, and oppression. The safety to speak, participate in discussion and dialogue, ask questions, and test ideas is crucial.

According to the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, my highest values are Developmental, Nurturing, and Social reform. This makes sense as I do believe in the power of education to change society, and I believe that is part of my responsibility as an educator with a platform. I scored low on Transmission; indeed I have very little interest in transmitting facts in order to prepare students for exams. In fact, I don’t even use quantitative assessments anymore. Instead, I “test” students’ progress and understanding using the same mechanisms I use in class: discussion forums and reflective writing assignments. I am also very aligned with VCC’s ethos as a developmental institution, meeting learners where they’re at and acknowledging the individuality of everyone’s journey. I am very aware of the need for accessibility, accommodations, and flexibility when working with adult learners with busy lives and many responsibilities.

I scored 22 on the Classroom Vignettes survey, which puts me in the Reformed/Student-Centered category. However, I feel that I still have more work to do to get my practice as student-centered as it could be. This relates to a core truth of my teaching: that I will never totally be satisfied with my work as a teacher, and will always be looking for ways to improve. I suppose this relates to an overarching tendency towards perfectionism (which often hinders more than it helps), but I also believe it is the result of a sincere interest in teaching and pedagogy. I feel that I am always a student of teaching and can always improve on what I’m doing. I also think it’s important to model this growth mindset as an educator to show students that it never really ends, we never really finish learning, and this can be an exciting and motivational truth rather than a defeating one.

The “teaching truth” that I most agree with Brookfield on is “the regular use of examples, anecdotes, and autobiographical illustrations in explaining difficult concepts is strongly appreciated by students”. I have found that the more honest and transparent I am with students about my own process and relationship to the subject matter, and my personal experiences and background relating to it, the more I’m able to communicate a higher-level understanding of the topics.