Teaching Music for Social Justice Frank Abrahams Associate Dean and Professor or Music Education Westminster Choir College of Rider University Lawrenceville, New Jersey
The Dean at my University always begins his greetings to new students with “Everyone has a story.” He then tells his story and encourages the participants to share their autobiographies. I often begin my account during the 1960s. I attended high school and college when the country was in an unpopular war, when there were sit-ins and other protests throughout the country. This period of history was when songs of protest such as Bob Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind” and Peter Paul, and Mary's “If I Had a Hammer” filled the airwaves, LP collections, and school choral folders. Pete Seeger wrote “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “This Land is Your Land” during this time. These were songs everyone knew and sang; they have since become standards and part of our American folk music history. Now, times are not so different. Like Americans in the 1960s, people are again in the streets of cities across America. They are again protesting injustice, though this time in more focused ways. Today, we champion the Black Lives Matter movement, abhor police violence, and bring into focus the fact that Black people’s ability to walk the streets is compromised for fear police will kill them. Music Education and Social Justice How should music education respond to such issues of social justice? While we have an ethical responsibility to address social justice issues, social justice is not a unit in the music curriculum or a stand-alone assignment for a single class. Music education for social justice is a philosophical perspective that should permeate the entire program in classroom lessons, ensemble concerts, and class assignments. Might students in our music classes be writing protest songs? What musics should we include for listening lessons? Some of the popular songs that children listen to outside of school address issues of social TEMPO
justice. What idiomatic and non-idiomatic musics by Black composers might we include? There are many definitions of social justice. While various definitions address unique aspects of the work of social justice, one that I like is from the literature on relational justice. Pompeu Casanovas and Marta Problet (2008) define relational justice as "the justice produced through cooperative behavior, agreement, negotiation, or dialogue among actors in a post-conflict situation" (abstract, para. 1). The authors embrace identity, diversity, justice, and action. These descriptors are cornerstones of good teaching and consistent with 21st-century cooperation, critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills (Battelle for kids, 2019). Such acts of “negotiation” also nurture the cognitive processes of musical imagination, musical intellect, musical creativity, and music-making through performance (Abrahams & John, 2017), which is consistent with the anchor standards and domains addressed in tolerance.org materials. Nonetheless, we need to ensure that music teaching and learning remain the core of how we engage with social justice issues within our music classrooms. After all, we are music teachers and have a responsibility to teach music. Our lessons still need to be grounded in musicspecific objectives and rich in engagements with music. Our task, then, is to uncover the abundant opportunities our subject matter offers to engage with concepts of identity, diversity, justice, and action. How does one teach with a social justice philosophy? Parker Palmer (2017) writes that we teach who we are. To train for social justice, teachers must come to terms with their own understandings of racism, equity, diversity, inclusivity, and democracy. What are their strengths? What are their biases? How can they assure students that their preferences will not disadvantage them? By whose authority can teachers decide what the goals of socially 38
JANUARY 2021
