As I reflect on my sense of purpose as an educator, I realize that what is most alive in me as a music educator it is no longer best practices on teaching quarter notes or even complex polyrhythms. Deep into the thirteenth year of my teaching practice, I realize that my sense of purpose as a music educator is deeply rooted in the facilitation of educational environments where music becomes the catalyst for my students to find their place in the world, and thus self-actualize. In the other hand, as I reflect on the status of music education both in New York City; where I teach, and in the United States as a whole, I have a feeling that we are falling short of doing the kind of education that really matters. I notice music educators teaching “to the concert”, much like a math teacher nowadays needs to “teach to the test.”  I notice music education organizations offering professional development workshops on the same methodologies, and with the same repertoire, music teachers used thirty years ago. I notice teacher training programs delivering a “three sizes fit all” model of music education by providing vague and shallow introductions to the Orff, Kodaly and Dalcroze music education philosophies. Often times, this programs do not take into consideration that perhaps these philosophies might not only be appropriate for the populations where their teacher candidates might teach. Additionally, these teacher training programs might not have even questioned whether or not these music education philosophies and curricula were even designed for those populations.

As author bell hooks states: “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in academia….where the will of students to be self-actualized can be affirmed.”^[1] As long as the educational experiences are not designed with and for the populations that will interact with those experiences, we will continue wasting out shot at actually using out classrooms as places where students can thrive and be all of who they can truly be. In his 1943 book, A Theory of Human Motivation, psychologist Abraham Maslow writes about self-actualization being the fulfillment of potential, and the true meaning of life.

I believe one of the main ways in which the system of music education has failed its students (and thus failed itself) is that for far too long, it has centered the conversation around what I am calling the “what, how and the where” of music, but has sidestepped (purposely in many cases) the “why and the who” parts of the conversation. The “what” topics deal with the instruments and genres and composers. The “how” addresses the skills and theory needed to make music happen. The “where” deals with the geopolitical and historical contexts of the musicmaking. The “why” addresses the very meaning and purpose of what we do, study, and teach. The “who” grounds our practice, because it centers the students in our classrooms and thus the material, composers, and genres our practice should be built on. The “who” part also challenges us to think critically about whose voices we lift and whose voices we silence by maintaining or pushing against the status quo. Teaching Beethoven and Bach is not an inherently bad thing to do. However, centering a curricula solely on Eurocentric values and the works of “dead white men” is. The “who” part of music education is built on white supremacy, classism, ableism, patriarchy and xenophobia. When we the practitioners do not analyze and try to change the system, we continue the cycle of oppression that the system was designed to do. I do think that these points are worthy of being in the music education curricula but they are not below being questioned deeper than we have been. Asking ourselves and each other questions as “who are the composers worthy of studying?” or “who am I; the musician in relation to my community?” affords us the opportunity to analyze and recognize and change power imbalances and oppression, systematic racism, white supremacy, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, classism, and more. I dare say that it would be virtually impossible for our students to self-actualize, if they are being taught by teachers who do not actively question, learn and teach the very scaffolds that the people in power have set in place in order to keep the people oppressed. However, I deeply believe that the latter parts; the why and the who, are of paramount if we are to talk about self-actualization though music education.

In this essay, I share my music education praxis, and stories of how I interpreted text –  theory and research – and applied it beyond the page; to the real world in my classrooms. Furthermore, I suggest that by decentering skill and theory in favor of community and purpose, we might do a better job of helping students fall in love with music, but also we might do a better job of helping students find peace, purpose and meaning in their lives through music.

Let’s further consider what the why and the how mean in the music classroom. Questions as “Why do we play music?” or “Why do we like the sounds we like?” As an artist and musician whose life was deeply impacted by music education, I would answer that question by saying that we play and study music because music digs deep to the core of what it means to be human; we play music as a means to self-realization. I’d also say that we like the sounds that we are socialized to like, through the relationships that we form in life. I fell in love with Freddy Mercury and Queen because my older brother would not stop playing Queen records in the house. Growing up in Bolivia, I learned to love the sound of the guitar due to the thousands of “guitarreadas”; evenings where folks gathered in someone’s house to sing songs and jam with acoustic guitars. Years later, as I studies jazz composition at the Manhattan School of Music, I found myself writing jazz pieces for acoustic guitar and subconsciously wrote passages that mimicked the sounds from my childhood. If we are what we eat, then we also are what we listen to.

Shifting my practice from music education to music education towards self-actualization allowed me as an educator to see my students’ humanities in deeper ways that I ever thought possible and in doing so, it allowed me to also see my own in such light. Critical pedagogy has been an invaluable framework for how to begin doing the why and who work within the constraints of a music classroom.  In “Pedagogy of The Oppressed,” educator and philosopher Paulo Freire describes the process as follows:

1 – Students develop consciousness of freedom.

2 – Students recognize authoritarian tendencies.

3 – Students connect knowledge to power.

4 – Students gain the ability to take constructive action.^[2]

This process aims to empower students to think critically about their world through their own education. Ever since adapting my teaching practice to be more in line with this process, I have noticed a huge spike in engagement in my classroom. This spike in engagement comes from the fact that my students feel like their classroom belongs to them and the work we do in our classroom is aimed at connecting the experiences they already have to new ones. Our work together is based on coming together as a team to learn from one another in the process of living life as a community, both as a musical community and as a lived community beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Sure, I am their teacher and they are my students, but also; I am their student and they are my teachers. We come together to question assumed authority, to talk about whose voices are we listening and whose voices are we silencing. We come together to take action to solve problems that we feel passionate about solving.

1 – Students develop consciousness of freedom:

Education is the practice of freedom. Questions such as “Why do we play music together,” or “How do musicians become the voice of the people?” allow us to first and foremost engage students in critical consciousness and self-reflection, but also allow us to tear down the walls of the schoolhouse and make learning come alive by linking it with real life possibilities.

There is a long lineage of musician freedom fighters. In the last century, musicians such Louis Armstrong, Pete Seeger, John Lennon, Woody Guthrie, Mercedes Sosa, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Tupac Shakur and Common, have shaped the sound of resistance across geopolitical lines. Mahalia Jackson was a huge inspiration for Dr. Martin Luther King[3]. Woody Guthrie was instrumental in providing the soundtrack for liberation in the fight towards civil rights in the USA[4]. All of these musicians are masters of their craft and they are freedom fighters, using music as their weapon against injustices. 

2 – Students recognize authoritarian tendencies.

To quote bell hooks in Teaching Critical Thinking, “…white supremacy is the dominant and dominator culture. Education as a tool of colonization that serves to teach students allegiance to the status quo has been so much the accepted norm….educators teach the way they were taught” ^[5] Just like our students, oppression was passed down onto us as an act of violence. It makes sense that we teach in ways that uphold authoritarian tendencies because that is how we were taught. We have been socialized to do things the way they’ve always been done and for those of us who teach in public schools, we teach in an educational system that values folks who don’t “ruffle any feathers” and who don’t “rock any boats”, at least not to the point that we need to if we are to teach in a way that makes self-actualization possible. We can either keep education as the tool to teach students conformity to the dominant culture, or we can make education be the practice of freedom but we cannot do both. I argue that as a system, music education has been doing a better job of the former than the latter. It is time to “flip the switch.”

Opportunities for teachers and students to unpack and discuss such authoritarian tendencies must be baked into the music education curricula and its dissemination with intention and care. Why do we study (and value) European classical music as the end- all, be-all of music making rather than other musical cultures? Who said it should be so and who didn’t agree with it but stayed silent? If we as educators do not do our own work in hopes of decolonizing our own minds and practice, if we do not examine how we fit within the oppressive system or how we further it, if we educators do not do the work of critiquing that which we love, then we cannot expect our students to do the same.  In her article “You gotta fight the power”, Gloria Ladson-Billings suggests that Culturally Responsive Pedagogy requires teachers to help students engage in critical consciousness — an ability to decipher the meaning of what is obvious and what is missing. ^[6]

3 – Students connect knowledge to power.

As a music educator, I am very much interested in teaching my students the skills necessary for them to play different musical instruments, the history behind different musical cultures and styles, the literacy skills necessary for them to document and decipher music as well as the aesthetic skills necessary to appreciate music as an art-form. As a music educator, I am also interested in teaching my students how to question why things are the way they are, what processes allowed for them to be that way, and most importantly how they can move towards actionable change.

I argue that the road towards happiness, peace and freedom will come from the kind of education that allows the learners to gain agency through knowledge; and thus recognize their own power of being change makers.

4 – Students gain the ability to take constructive action.

Political activist and scholar Angela Davis reminds us: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”^[7] There is a misconception about what the word radical means. Angela Davis refers to the word radical as “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.”

Once students have built musical skills; whether they are beginners or advanced, and once they become well versed in thinking about music and musicianship critically by system of music education, as well as their own peers the “who” and “why” questions I mentioned above, students can begin living up to Ms. Davis’ quote.

Musician, actress and activist Janelle Monaé does a beautiful job as such in her song “Hell You Talmbout[8]”, a song protesting police brutality. In it, she fuses syncopated West African rhythms, minor pentatonic blues melodies and the names of people of color killed by police, to create a powerful statement. The song ends with the following quote: “Silence is our enemy; sound is our weapon.” Mr. Monaé’s composition is a great example of the power that asking the right “who” questions can have in music, and music education. Who do we play music for? Whose stories do we tell? Who are we, the musicians, in society?

In response to the slow response by the U.S. government providing help to its citizens affected by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, composer and actor Lin Manuel Miranda composed, recorded, produced and released the track “Almost Like Praying” as both a homage to his native Puerto Rico and to raise funds for hurricane relief. Mr. Miranda beautifully connected his musical knowledge to his sense of power and agency to take constructive action. By doing so, Mr. Miranda embodied the true meaning of the “why” we make music.

Stories such as these, drive and anchor my teaching. What will follow are three different stories from my classroom, aimed at showcasing the power that critical pedagogy, youth activism and music education have upon the world when combined with love and care.

Planting Seeds of Activism (K-5)

“What didn’t you do to bury me

but you forgot that I was a seed”

Dinos Christianopoulos

Many years ago, I was teaching the concept of steady beat to a group of kindergarden students whom I had been working with for a few months. By that time, we had already done the work of building community and trusting one another by partaking in peace circles, dance parties, giggle fest and what we called “the 100% land”: a time in the lesson when we all gave 100% of our attention to a specific topic.  As a learning activity, I created a project based learning unit based on steady beat, rhythmic/syllables decoding and activism. We began with inquiry around rhythms and beats and then named each rhythm we learned by a specific fruit; grapes for quarter notes, apples for two eighth notes together, watermelons for four sixteenth notes together and so forth. We danced, drummed, and sang the rhythms until they became part of our musical selves. Then we attached the sounds to the fruit icons, and in no time, we attached the sound and fruit icons to the traditional notation. For the composition part of the lesson, I asked them to work in groups and compose one measure of fruit rhythms. Then we performed those rhythms on top of a simple “stomp-clap-stomp-stomp-clap” rhythmic vamp.

Next, we all sat down in a circle and went to our “100% land” and I framed the discussion with this question: What is a problem that you’d like to solve in our community? The task was to create an original song using percussion instruments and our voices to voice our opinions peacefully and that we’d have to make sure we learn how to keep a steady beat to do so. We brainstormed and came up with ideas from their own lives. Some ideas were: “My mommy doesn’t let me eat ice cream before dinner and I would like to”, “We cannot use the playground on days that snow and we don’t think that is fair”, and “There is too much doggie doo-doo on the streets in our neighborhood and we don’t like that”. All the options were great because they were all problems that they felt excited about solving because they felt affected by them. We ended up picking the dog waste problem and it was extremely powerful. We came up with a list of sentences that had one and two syllable words so that we could chant them in quarter and eighth note rhythms. (q=quarter note, e= eight note, r= quarter note rest)

q   q      e   e    r    e           e   e    e      e    e    q         e   e     e   e     e      e  q     

“No mo’ doodoo”, Please pick up your doggie poop”, “I don’t wanna step on it”,

 q    q        q          q           q   q     q     q      e      e     e   e   e      e      q

 “Ew, ew, Yucky Yuck!”, “Not fair, Not fair, take care of your neighborhood”

Then, I edited their lyrics with their help to flow with the rhythm.  Here is part of our song:

q     q        e     e r  e    e     e        e    e    e    q

“No more doo doo, we don’t wan’t to step on it

                           e       e   q     e    e   q       e         e    e    e    e    e     q

Clean it up, clean it good cause this is our neighborhood

                                e   e    q    e  e q      e  e   e      e      e      e    q

Pick it up, in a bag, it will make your dog tail’s wag

                           Q    e   e   e  e  q          e  e     e    e      e    e      e   q     

Ew Just do it today,  the bell will ring, we want to play”

We learn to march in a steady beat in a quarter note beat, then we learn how to do it in an eighth note beat, then we learned how to combine the two of them. We learned how to notate the rhythms using traditional and nontraditional notation. We learned how to step/stomp in quarter notes while clapping in eighths. We learned how to play and lead “call and response” rhythms in our claves and tambourines not because that is what was on a set of standards or rubric that the students themselves had no connection with, but we learned them because we needed those skills to solve a problem for our ourselves and for our neighborhood. We learned how to combine syllables to rhythms and learned that music does not happen in a vacuum, it happens in real life.

I designed and facilitated a learning unit that explored many of the important building blocks of music making; skills such as chanting while drumming, playing rhythms in steady beat and orchestrating different parts with different instruments. However, the students took what they learned, and connected their knowledge to power. It was them who recognized their agency and who made a conscious and collective decision to use their voices to be the change they wish to see in the world. Then they challenged me to keep going when they demanded we create artwork around our song and laminated them and hang them outside our school. So we did – because when kindergartners demand art making, one can only say yes! We then made a film about it, which the students shot and helped edit. They interviewed shop owners and random people in the street with questions about how the neighborhood feels about the dog doo doo problem. I created the sentence starter strips, but when it came down to go on the streets and shoot the video, they asked their own questions.

The most important thing the kindergartners and I did was not to ideate, create and document an anti-dog waste direct action protest in Upper Manhattan. It was that we co-created a culture of activism through music making inside the schoolhouse.

   Liberation Drum Circles (Grades 7-8)

“Drumming is the simplest thing that we can do to bring us together.”

Babatunde Olatunji

In 2014, I taught a summer school percussion club class to a group of 7th graders who were assigned summer school because the amount of absences they had through the year. Percussion club was the incentive for them after a whole morning of academics.  We came together to learn polyrhythms, rhyming and world music through body percussion and bucket drumming. The summer of 2014 was very traumatic for kids in NYC because of the Eric Garner’s killing, at the hands of the New York Police Department I found myself fielding questions about it, and about stop & frisk^[9] almost weekly. The students not only wanted to learn more; they needed to learn more. The Eric Garner story, along with the Trayvon Martin story stirred up the necessity to have space in the classroom to unpack, process and respond to these themes of oppression. I am a firm believer that context dictates content. What students study must be rooted in their lives experiences and must an honest representation of what life was before them, what life is now, and what life can be because of them. Although I didn’t originally set out to teach this specific group of students a unit on police brutality, it so happened that the context of the times in which I was teaching them a samba reggae unit; which happens to be music of resistance and social justice, was that the Eric Garner story was very present in the minds and hearts of my students. As an educator who believes in social justice and who uses critical pedagogy as his framework, I connected my own knowledge to my own sense of power in order to take constructive action. This action was to co-compose a homage to Eric Garner through Afro Brazilian drumming and chanting.  One of the young men, who at the time was not yet thirteen years old, opened up to the whole class that he had been stopped and frisked more times than the years he’d been alive. Then he asked, “How many of you have had the same experience.” Every single child in the room had a story of their own, of being harassed, profiled, intimidated and even abused at the hands of a police officer due to the color of their skin. One by one they began talking to each other about pain, and about trauma, and about hopes and about dreams and affirming one another. I then asked the following two questions:

What is the role of an artist (musician) in society?

How do musicians become the voice of the people?

Students wrote in flashcards, and in their journals. One student said that artists are the megaphones of the neighborhood. Another one shared that musicians are the glue that keeps people together and joyous in times of celebration. Students also said that musicians (should) use their platform to amplify messages; especially famous ones. Out of the processing of pain and trauma, which I facilitated and held space for, came our project. We decided to look for an exemplar in pop music for how to protest police brutality though popular music. Hip Hop artist J Cole had just released his song “Be Free” set around the same topic. We studied the song and ultimately decided that we wanted to have something more percussive and more “in your face” rather than “sad.”

Then I remembered the wonderful collaboration between the Afro Brazilian community music ensemble Olodum and the prince of pop; Michael Jackson on “They Don’t Really Care About Us”. I brought it to the students and asked them for their thoughts. They of course love “MJ”, and they also loved the Samba Reggae drumming. Some of them knew the lyrics, but had never analyzed them, although it was then when a 7th grader introduced me to the website genius.com, where students can find annotated song lyrics and draw connections to their own lives. We traced lines across timelines and learned about Emmett Till and went as far back as learning about the slave patrols and the beginnings of policing in the USA. We also learned about Samba Reggae, and the kind of syncopation that happens when you fit different rhythms like lego/puzzle pieces together. We had to learn how to play buzz strokes, and accents, and how to create rhythms out of different sticking combinations. e.g.: RLLR LLRL LLRL RLLL for our snare drum samba pattern. We also had to learn different calls and responses, lead by one master drummer who cues the band by blowing a three-tone whistle and uses various hand signals as opposed to the verbal cues we are used to in the classroom. We then had to learn how to march along with playing the beats. Finally, we had to learn how to chant, along with marching and drumming. Students wrote the following chant in a 90-minute session:

“I am strong, I am brave, I am smart and I am educated

I hear screams, destroying our dreams.

I see’nequaity based on our skins

I feel pain. I feel shame. I feel frightened.

I feel the love that we never have gained.

I feel the love that we never have gained.

I feel the love that we never have gained.

Stop Stop & Frisk

You’re tearing my community, ruining my opportunity stealing my liberty,

and giving it away, and giving it away, and giving it away”

We made a video of the performance and we submitted it to a middle school arts festival, where the students performed their piece for over one thousand other middle school youth in New York City. In reflection, I realize that the most powerful thing about this project was not creating the protest piece itself. It was engaging in a process, together as community, that showed the students and the school community that knowledge is freedom, education is power and it is our duty to bring those elements together to take constructive action towards justice. Using the framework introduced in part 1, the students and I, as a community of musicians and learners co-created a transformative experience that integrated samba reggae drumming skills with social justice activism.

Opening up the music classroom to hold space for processing such life experiences while facilitating educational experiences that make learning meaningful by creating artistic responses (protests) to social injustices was instrumental (pun intended) in the development of this particular group of youth.

   Creators Vs. Makers: Music Tech for Social Justice  (Grades 9-12)

“Makers show off their skills, creators express emotions, craft experiences, and communicate ideas. Creating requires a mix of knowledge, inspiration, empathy, the freedom to take risks, explore, discover and share.  Are you a creator or are you a maker?”

Dr.  Kate Stone ^[10]

This year, I teach a science and music technology course to high school sophomores and seniors where we study the history behind digital musical instruments and then we recreate or build our own using the MaKey MaKey micro controller, the Scratch coding language developed at MIT and recycled materials such as tinfoil, cardboard and more. In the class, we look at synthesizers, and keytars and drum machines and finally we study the Akai Music Production Controller, the MPC2000.  We use the scientific method as well as concepts from design thinking to recreate these instruments or to invent new ones. Before they begin working, I give them a set of criteria that they must follow. This is it:

• At every step of the process, they must reflect on Dr. Kate Stone’s quote (above) and let their findings drive their creations.
• All connections must have a purpose and be functional.
• The instrument must feature a variety of sound sources; from coded melodies or drumbeats, to sampled analog sounds, to samples they download and/or process digitally.
• The sounds and connections must interact with one another musically; to create a cohesive artistic statement.

I set up of this 8-week course in a variety of “weekly design challenge” format. There are three one-week long individual design challenges, one one-week long small group design challenge and finally a one four-week long “final project” design challenge. The first three weeks are aimed at helping students build technological and scientific skills. In this weekly design challenges, students learn how to “draw” conductive circuits with conductive and nonconductive materials for their physical design, as well as creating code strips in Scratch that give sounds to their projects. They typically build pianos using black and white paint, tin foil and nails. They also usually build guitars using electricity conductive rubber bands or thread. They code simple songs like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and they code simple “boom tap boom boom tap” kinds of drumbeats. Some of the students also code little funny cartoons to go along with their instruments while others sample their favorite hip hop tracks from their smartphones. These beginning three weeks are where students, unbeknownst to them, begin gathering the “tools” to transform their “maker” projects into digital musical instruments with purpose.

During the “middle”, one week-long design challenge, students must work in small groups to create a large scale musical instrument, and where they need to divide the work by consensus. This part of the class, asks students to create “some kind of musical machine” that they wish they had when they were young. Working together students have come up with a bird sanctuary sound board that had samples of different kinds of bird calls as well as information about each bird and a song that include bird calls, while others created a twister board that played original 8-bit video game style. Other group of students hacked a guitar and a djembe to make them play guitar and djembe heavy music respectively. Another group of students created a “traveler’s helper”; a Rosetta Stone-esque soundboard that had many words in different languages. Each language – English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and French – featured a distinct set of instrumental songs as background music. All these projects were as diverse as the student population, and all of them served a purpose larger than “design a musical instrument that functions”.

Finally, in the four week long “final project” students work individually to create a digital musical instrument that showcases a social justice issue, and that is used as a tool for social change. The first week is an exploration week, the second week is all about creating version 1.0 of their physical and digital designs as well as doing a round of UX (user experience) testing. During the third week, they apply the data they learned the week prior and optimize their projects in a version 2.0 as well as doing another round of UX testing. The fourth and final week is for project presentation and reflection.

By far, the Akai MPC is the number one design that most students pick. It is a joyous time when students get to understand that the beats they hear in their favorite Migos or Cardi B track, follow a long tradition of musicians sampling, chopping and scratching analog musical sounds. I love introducing them to musicians like J Dilla, and going backwards even further; Grandmaster Flash, who in different ways defined the sound of hip hop through musicianship, music technology and purpose. However, I have found that the more the students brainstorm and ideate based on Dr. Stone’s quote, the farther away from “traditional musical instruments” they get. Students begin pushing boundaries of what is, what can be, and who says so. That begin asking themselves and each other:  What is a musical instrument? What is music? Why do we make? Why do we create?  If the course focused solely on recreating the Akai MPC, we’d have low quality “things” that would be chucked after their grades are posted. By making their final project assignment into a “Socially Conscious Digital Musical Instrument”, I accomplish two things: a) I blur the line between who gets to be a rule maker, a rule follower, or a rule breaker, because students get to decide what kind of instrument they will (re)invent and b) students get to experience being agents of change in their own communities by bluing the lines between their musically adventurous, academically savvy and socially conscious selves. Following the criteria and constraints that I set upon them, some students have come up with amazing renditions of Prince’s Keytar which plays a homage to the artist and includes quotes about being an innovator, while others recreated an MPC that plays Wu Tang Clan songs sampled in martial arts movies and that build awareness that hip hop is worthy of being mainstream. One student made a “hanging” piano that appealed to someone on the autism spectrum by including buttons made with different kinds of textures and colors, different amounts of pressure points to close the electricity circuits and soothing sounds. This latter students’ project was inspired by his younger sibling and their combined love for “all things weird.” One student created a “Composer’s Radio” of sorts that played songs highlighting violence against women, and sexual assault. She made a radio that not only played snippets of songs with a social justice message, but in her design, she embedded facts about campus rape; which she recorded, sampled and rapped along to a drumbeat that she herself coded on Scratch. Another student made a very powerful “Black Lives Matter” MPC sampler shaped like a black power fist, and in each finger, he put a song protesting police brutality, while in the palm of the hand, he set up a pentatonic scale to improvise solos with distorted electric guitar sounds; which he sampled from a real electric guitar and distortion pedal. He also sampled himself and his 30 classmates proudly and loudly chanting “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” One final example of how my students used music technology to address social issues is how one 11th grade young woman built a sampler that looks like an earth, and every time one touches a continent, the instrument triggers a song from that culture, while educates the player and audience about a social justice topic currently occurring in that continent. The instrument works like an Akai MPC, but it functions as a musical tool for liberation.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, hip hop recording artist and Disk Jockey, Joseph Saddler, better known as “Grandmaster Flash” sampled, chopped, scratched and effected sounds from a previous generation of soul, R&B and jazz musicians and too, designed and defined the sound of early hip hop. In the 1990’s, Detroit producer James Dewitt Yancey; better known by his stage name; J Dilla, used the Akai MPC to change and (re)define the sound of hip hop. J Dilla took the work of Grandmaster Flash, and made something new with it by sampling, chopping and effecting sounds he recorded onto the MPC. I am proud and humbled to say that by following the critical pedagogy framework I previously described, my students became part of the long lineage of musicians who used music technology make new and original artistic statements about their experiences. I have a feeling that both Grandmaster Flash and J Dilla would be proud of my students’ work.

Conclusion

“A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own”

Maxine Greene^[11]

The words of professor Greene resonate deeply and strongly in my being. I met Dr. Greene very early in my career, at a time where perhaps I was too young to understand the magic and truth that she spoke of. Ten years later, I realize her philosophy has had a defining impact on who I am, not only as an educator but as a human being. I recognize that radical, loving and critical education are the ways in which I search for my own freedom. Engaging youth in social justice activism through musicing has been the connecting thread in my teaching practice; whether teaching kindergarten, middle school, high school or graduate school. I stand committed to doing the work of critical pedagogy through love, care and patience. I stand committed to walking and talking and drumming and marching along my students in our struggle for collective liberation. I remind myself to always be willing to hold space for students, to continuing learning how to be the best facilitator I can be, and to be present physically, mentally and emotionally present while teaching and learning along my students. I remind myself to always be grounded on the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Maxine Greene; among others to continuing teaching and learning radically, honestly and lovingly.

The music classroom should be a place where education leads to their (our) freedom. It should be a place where students desire for self-actualization can be affirmed. The music classroom should be the place where every student has the possibility of using music as a means to change their world and to leave this place better than they found it.

Citations

^[1] hooks, bell. “Teaching to Transgress” p12-18.

^[2] Freire, Paulo. “Pedagogy Of The Oppressed.” 30th anniversary edition

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/opinion/mahalia-jackson-and-kings-rhetorical-improvisation.html

[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/your-soundtrack-for-the-resistance-movement_us_58b38c7de4b0e5fdf6197454

^[5] hooks, bell. “Teaching Critical Thinking” p23-28

^[6] Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “You Gotta Fight The Power” p415. The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education.

^[7] Davis, Angela, Talk At Southern Illinois University Carbondale

[8] https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2015/08/18/385202798/janelle-mon-e-releases-visceral-protest-song-hell-you-talmbout

^[9] https://www.nyclu.org/en/issues/racial-justice/stop-and-frisk-practices

^[10] Stone, Kate. “The creator’s Manifesto”

^[11] Greene, Maxine. 1988