In the fall of 2022, I was a fellow with the “Transformative Learning in the Humanities” initiative. Concluding the fellowship, I collaborated with two brilliant CUNY faculty members, Victoria Bond (English, John Jay College) and Hosu Kim (Sociology, Anthropology, Critical Social Psychology, and WGS, The College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center) to create a Public Knowledge Project. Our project, “From Dilemma to Decolonization: Higher Public Education as a Site of Repair,” engaged our CUNY campuses, classrooms, and curricula as critical, fertile sites for interrogating underlying principles of academic excellence and rigor as vehicles for racism and social inequality. Specifically, my portion of the project identified musical traditions sourced from students in my music appreciation courses, considering their cultural knowledge as a valid contribution to the sonic space of the classroom.
Before my experience in the TLH fellowship, I continually felt haunted by the number of canonical works included on my syllabus that reflected a history of Euro-centric whiteness. This language of haunting is inspired by Avery F. Gordon, who writes, “haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life.” While countless initiatives aim to diversify the music history canon, from switching out musical examples by Wagner to those by women, I still experienced a disconnect between these initiatives and the musical experiences of my students. Endeavors to diversify canonical works taught in the music history classroom often work to insert marginalized composers (or as Marcia Citron writes, “add and stir” them) into the canon, rather than implement antiracist and decolonial pedagogy. While including works such as Florence Price’s First Symphony expand the orchestral canon and give Price much-deserved attention, my students continue to stare blankly at her apparition, disconnected from the sounds emanating from the classroom speakers.
As an act of repair, I identified varying musical traditions gleaned from students in my music appreciation courses and built them into my lesson plans. Specifically, the four students I interviewed in the fall of 2022 shared musical traditions including Jewish Acapella, Peruvian Psychedelic Cumbia, Karaoke, and Desi Music. All four students mentioned that learning about these musical traditions would make them feel represented in the sonic space of the Music Appreciation classroom (as long as the traditions were not misrepresented). Each semester as my student roster changes, so do the musical traditions I cover. This semester, for example, a student has expressed interest in learning more about the history of Salsa. While I am not an expert on Salsa (nor will I pretend to be), I look forward to doing more research and figuring out how to fit influential Salsa pieces into my course schedule and student learning goals.
I see my project and continued commitment to it as one potential way instructors can begin implementing antiracist and decolonial pedagogy, but there are, of course, many other paths. I encourage fellow instructors to explore Tara Yosso’s community cultural wealth theory where she encourages us educators to embrace students’ cultural capital to empower students beyond white narratives, speaking to how the wisdom, stories, and traditions of family members can and should be considered a positive resource for the classroom.
Madison Schindele is a PhD candidate in musicology at the Graduate Center where she is also pursuing a certificate in Women and Gender Studies. Her research centers on disability in opera, specifically, representations of infertility in German operas of the early 20th century. Madison is an adjunct lecturer at Queens College, teaching non-major introduction to music coursework. Contact her at [email protected].
