Music Teaching, Mending Walls, And Dismantling Barriers, Colleen Sears

Music Teaching, Mending Walls, And Dismantling Barriers

Collenn Sears The College of New Jersey colleen.sears@tcnj.edu

This summer, Disney released a new version of 1941 film, Dumbo1 . As much as I love the visual candy that is the cinematic world of Tim Burton, there was no way I was going to see that film. You see, it was the original Dumbo that broke my heart when I was a young girl, and in doing so, it taught me the meaning of empathy.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully recover from the “Baby Mine” scene in Dumbo. I remember nothing else from the film, but the image of Dumbo’s jailed mother reaching her trunk from the bars of her “mad elephant” cell to rock her baby tore my child heart to shreds. It was all that I could do to prevent the tight ball of grief and horror that had formed during this scene from escaping into an audible sob as I listened to the “Baby Mine” lullaby, and watched tears drip from Dumbo’s eyes as he relished the feel of his mother’s embrace...even if it was just from her trunk, before having to separate from her again. Even as a young girl, this scene destroyed me. It didn’t matter that I was watching a fictional, animated movie. The very notion of separation from family, connection, and the deepest kind of love was absolutely terrifying.

I find myself thinking of that scene often, especially now. Not because of this summer’s remake, but rather because that heart wrenching scene in a fictional, animated film, has become a horrifying reality for many children living in the United States. As the new school year begins, many children entering our classrooms are children who are living the fear and/or traumatic reality of separation and profound loss. When we consider fear and trauma of this scale, the idea of teaching quarter notes, preparing for festivals and competitions, or logging practice minutes seems utterly absurd. How then, can we reconcile what and how we teach, with the trauma filled world that we and our students move through each day? What power do we have as music educators in the midst of such bleak times?

In the “Baby Mine” scene, Dumbo’s mother is walled away from the world and caged in a “mad elephant” cell. Yet the “Baby Mine” lullaby and a tiny opening in the barred window allowed baby Dumbo to be comforted by his mother’s trunk. Though the physical barrier of the cell remained, the lullaby became the vehicle for tenderness and love; a temporary softening of the cruel wall that kept a mother from her baby. The thing about barriers and walls is that they can be dismantled. The thing about music and art is they can help dismantle barriers and walls.

Sounds cliche? There are countless examples of the barrier dismantling power of music and art. Check out the video of John Luther Adam’s Inuksuit, performed on both sides of the United States and Mexican border. Despite a towering physical barrier, musicians in the United States and Mexico connect with each other through sound and transcend the wall with music, performing as one ensemble. In another example, artists used the border wall as a fulcrum, installed seesaws that enable children on both sides to play together. In another recent instance, Yo-Yo Ma performed "Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites" at the border, highlighting the power of music to unite and connect despite physical barriers. After his performance, Yo-Yo Ma stated, “It’s never art just for art’s sake.”

It’s never just art for art’s sake. What might this mean for our music classrooms this year? How might we ground our content and our pedagogy in the stark reality of the world around us? How could adopting a “it’s never just art for art’s sake” philosophy help us honor student identities and dismantle barriers by situating what we perform in contemporary cultural context? What could this look like?

“It’s never art for art’s sake” looks like having the courage to engage with the messiness of truth in our teaching. We might still play “A Movement for Rosa” or

sing a carefully vetted African American spiritual with our choirs, but we owe it to our students and ourselves to approach those pieces with honesty and humility. In these cases, the art must serve as a vehicle for discussion about what we play, why we play it, and what it means to play it today. Questions like: What happened to people like Rosa Parks before they were celebrated as heroes? Who are the Rosa Parks of today? What does it mean to sing an African American spiritual now? What does it mean to perform a spiritual as a white person; as a person of color? How do we approach these works given the current racial climate in the United States?

When our pedagogy is situated in contemporary context, we honor the identities of our students and show that we can appropriately engage with the complexity of our individual histories. With this approach, we dismantle walls of fake optimism that prevent us from delving into the most complicated and painful parts of our collective history. (Look no further than the descriptions of civil rights inspired music on JW Pepper and you’ll find no shortage of happy, optimistic, and triumphant endings.) When walls of fake emotion fall, we all become more humble, more human, and we open an important pathway for connection and understanding in our classrooms.

Connection. Understanding. Like Dumbo and his mother in the “Baby Mine” scene, we have the power to use our art and our pedagogy to soften many types of barriers that exist in schools. Some barriers are easier to soften or remove than others, especially the ones we sometimes create ourselves: expensive field trips and/or pay to play fees that often don’t account for students with socioeconomic challenges, limited musical opportunities for students with special needs, or some phrases I uttered early in my career: “It doesn’t matter that you can learn by ear. You can’t read music well enough to join the band.” “Your grade just dropped because your parent didn’t sign off on your practice report.”

Then there are the insidious, toxic barriers that can’t be seen. “Go back to your country,” whispered to LatinX students; “Terrorist,” whispered to Muslim students; fears of shootings, deportations, separations, and harassment. Walls of fear and trauma that have catastrophic effects. Devastatingly, these are the walls that are most difficult to dismantle because they require legal action and sustained public resistance.

Perhaps the best we can do as music educators, is to use our art to reach through walls of fear, much like the trunk of Dumbo’s mom that reached through the bars of her cell to comfort her baby. Can we reach, just a little bit, and focus on creating gentle, empathetic, peaceful classrooms? Can we be acutely aware of the walls of fear that surround and oppress so many of our students on a daily basis and enact more compassionate pedagogy in response? Can we recognize that sometimes the most heroic action a student makes in a day is simply walking into the entrance of the school?

The opening line of Robert Frost’s poem, The Mending Wall2 is “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Let’s find as many somethings as we can in our teaching and in our music making that doesn’t love a wall. That “something” must be grounded in teaching beyond music just for music’s sake. Whether it’s having a discussion about current race issues as you are rehearsing a spiritual with a choir, or making a conscious effort to model empathy and foster human connection in your teaching; we can use the power and the time that we have in classrooms to be something or someone that doesn’t love a wall. We might not have the power to dismantle all of the barriers that break our hearts, but teaching music enables us to have some agency to reach through, and like Dumbo’s mother, “Baby Mine” lullaby, our students and their fragile hearts.

(Endnotes) 1 Dumbo. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen. 1941, Burbank, California: Walt Disney Studio Productions, 1941.

2 Frost, Robert. “The Mending Wall.” North of Boston, David Nutt, 1914.