To make music is to make community. To be in a band is to be in a community. To be a music maker is to be a community maker. Music brings communities together to celebrate, mourn, communicate hidden and literal messages, synthesize feelings and emotions,  calm down, rile up, protest, agree, make peace, make war, process,  think, not think and more. Music making allows us to be human, with each other, and experience the intentionality of being alive,together.

Why do we study music? Why do we teach music? Why do we play music?

How does music bring people together? What is the role of the music maker in a community? What is the role of music in a community?

Maslow, in the hierarchy of needs theory, argues that one cannot self actualize without first feeling a sense of connection, belonging and love.  In order for us human beings to be able to have confidence in ourselves, respect others, experience our own inner potential, be spontaneous or creative, we must first experience a sense of connection, belonging, family, fellowship, brotherhood, sisterhood, or friendship. We must feel like we belong somewhere and like we are loved. Maslow, in the pyramid design, argues that in the hierarchy, one needs to “achieve” the rungs closest to the bottom in order for the higher ones to be achieved. As an educator, there are not too many things I feel like I can do to address the first two layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I may be able to make sure that my students get some food, or water while they are under my care if they are hungry, I might be able to get them a few articles of clothing if they are not properly clothed, I might be able to let them nap for a while if they have not had a proper night’s sleep. I might even be able to help them find employment, but I don’t think I can truly make a lasting change in this regards. In my opinion, if we are to fix the issues surrounding public education, we must address the injustice that lies in human beings in 2016, in the United States of America, still going hungry, cold, sleepless, and experiencing the trauma that an unstable home life brings upon our youth.

What I think I can do as a music educator, and can do really well, is tackle that middle layer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the yellow “Love and Belonging” one, and design units of study, and physical spaces in the music  classroom that intentionally hold space for us to experience, foster and spread a sense of belonging, love and connection. I have focused on doing this for the past five or six years and have seen an amazingly positive change not only in the ways that students relate to myself and to each other, but to how much content we can learn, once our space is safe for everyone in the room to self actualize. Through scaffolding every musical skill we learn in a layer of “how can we do this in a way that gives us a better sense of belonging? How can we adapt these activities so that we can experience a better sense of friendship? How can X help Y do a better job” we make our may up Maslow’s pyramid and dare I say, maybe we even dip our toes into making the bottom rungs of the pyramid better.                                                                                                                           

In this post, I’d like to discuss five things we can do in the music classroom to Actively Boost Community, through the drum.

1. Set up in a circle and jam!

The easiest, simplest and fastest way to build community in a classroom is to make music together. Notice how I did not write, good (or bad) music, just make music without any judgments. Set up in a circle so that everybody can see one another and start a beat. It does not matter if it is steady or not, loud or soft, fast or slow. Just start together. The act of being in community will take care of the music, and the music will take care of the community in return. As the teacher, one can model artistic skills and aesthetics, but only secondary to being in community. At this point, it is more important than every member of the community feels heard and thus seen for what they already have to offer to and take from the community ; than whether she or he can play or imitate a steady 4/4 pattern. Sometimes as musicians, and especially in the music classrooms (myself included) we have a fascination for things to sound right or correct and otherwise there is no validity to what we are doing. I used to feel that until my first graders could play their pieces in steady time, while following my cues, everything was “just preparation” to the big final project. Now I see that that lens, clouds the reality of what is truly important; first graders working together in peace, doing different jobs for one same common goal, learning about themselves as individuals but also as community members, learning tangible skills such as reading music notation and playing syncopated beats, while also learning abstract concepts such as beauty, emotion, and nuance. Holding space for my students to make music in community and make community through music, never gets old. There is a kind of magic that happens when everyone partakes in this ancient tradition of being together in rhythm and connecting with each other, in a drum circle.

Once you’ve started working on establishing a sense of community, then you can start working on whatever lessons you want. I have used this methodology for introducing my students to Ensemble 1 from World Music Drumming, for learning Gahu from the Ewe tribe in Ghana, for learning a “Descarga” from Puerto Rico, and for learning drum line cadences. Learning how to play a polyrhythm is a finite skill, learning how to play polyrhythms as an artistic community gives us infinite possibilities.

2) Project: “Homework” about community.

A few years ago I read “To Teach,” Bill Ayer’s amazing book and in it, he speaks about this homework that he would give all his students; from preK to graduate school. The “homework” is something along the lines of a “History of my name” research project. I adapted his work and began giving it to all my students, as a way for them to a) find out about the history of their names through interviewing the elders in their community, and b) to find out (and spread joy) through the acknowledgment of the similarities and of our differences as a classroom community. In this piece of homework, I included opportunities for students to make a self portrait and paint themselves how they feel on the inside instead of how they look on the outside. In this piece of homework, I also emphasized the importance of asking different people in the family and friends of the family. I asked questions such as, who gave you your name and why? What does your name mean? If you could pick your own name, what would it be? If you were born a different gender, what name would you pick for yourself? In this project I included video selfies with students telling their stories, and I also used polaroid  pictures. We then, as as a community, built Venn diagrams about us and we made connections. If there was something we did not understand, we asked. That is how we learned how to sing songs in Lingala, and we learned what Tostones are (and what they taste like), and we learned how to beat box and more. 

3) Build Classroom Musical Playlists with students

Another simple tool in creating community is building musical playlists with classes. This is not only fun, but it is an amazing way to do student-centered projects, and project based learning units. It is also a great way to teach students to have an open mind. At the begging of last year I remember having a conversation with  a student  because she didn’t want to hear Frozen’s “Let It Go” when the time to play that song came. What a great opportunity to talk about musical hierarchies and about honoring our differences. What a great time to talk about how Frozen’s “Let It Go” and Rhianna’s “Work” are equally as important to our classroom because the two folks who picked the songs, are equally as important to our community. When we learn to be patient and hold space to listen to a song we don’t want to, not as a chore, but as a sign of respect, acceptance and inclusiveness, we learn to do those things in disagreements beyond the music classroom. Building classroom playlists is a fun and simple way for every single student to feel seen and heard in the classroom. Building classroom playlists also helps me know and understand my students better, which then helps me better connect with them as human beings, which in turn helps me be a better teacher to them. Last year I had a student who wanted nothing to do with me and/or music (and or most people to be honest). One day I noticed that he was listening to Drake and so I began singing “Hotline Bling”. He looked at me-throwing shade too- and said: “That song is all right. But you should check out “Controlla” and tomorrow tell me what you think of it, OK? That is my favorite song”

I added his song to his classroom playlist and the next day, I told him how I enjoyed the hook of the song and how I liked the video. His eyes lit up and we established a connection. For our end of year performance, he slung the electric guitar (without a cable to an amp) and played it like it was the last day of his life, and sand and rapped and danced and hyped the audience along with his classmates. Most of this student’s music class, was spent on his phone, doing his own thing, and not showing interest) What he needed, was to feel seen and heard by his teacher before he could learn anything, and how foolish of me to not be able to see and hear him until late in the school year. But now we have that bond, and nobody can take that away. It might have taken 8 months, but now that we have it, I have a sense that there is no limit to what we can learn from each other and what we can teach each other too.

Making this activity into a routine, allows for students to be in community in focusing time at the beginning of class, a master work inquiry study during the lesson, a listening break in the middle, a dance party at the end or

4) Do what friends do.

One of my favorite questions to ask students is: How can you help your comrade do their job better? Another versions of this is: What do friends do for each other?

Asking such broad questions, allows me to guide the experience of learning for my students, while holding space for them to learn from each other. If we are playing a groove that is complicated, I could just say “hey, look at each other when playing” and they would. But having students think about what friends do when they help each other, challenges them to look inward to make connections with their own sense of selves and how they fit the bill of “friend” or “helper”. I have most likely asked my students this question thousands of times in the past few years and there weren’t that many times in which they didn’t say “Look at each other” “use your words to help out” “Tell them how to do it” “Show they how do it” “First do it with her, then let her do it”, “Let’s go google it together. I encourage to run your own inquiry sessions in the matter. Ask your students. Talk to them.  Get to know about what they consider friends do for each other. I assure you that you’ll learn a lot about them, about yourself and about how to teach them and be friends to them. Peer to peer coaching and modeling is an invaluable tool in education, as it puts the teaching and learning on the hands of the learners. Also, kids listen to kids way more and better than they listen to adults. They understand each other better. To do this, we need to teach students to do collaborative critiquing, modeling, using descriptive and respectful language. We in turn, need to become real good at being amazing guardians of the experience by making sure that we have taught, modeled, practiced and re practiced the critiquing norms and expectations. Peer to peer coaching can strengthen communities of learners and keep the channel open so students navigate being friends while they are learners, together.

5) Community Partnerships: In and Out.

Music has a role in the community. Music helps us get through life. Jazz drummer Art Blakey used to tell his audiences that “Music washes away the dust of everyday life” I deeply believe that. And so it makes sense that we in the music classroom make connections between the inside of our classrooms and the outside world. These connections can look very differently depending on the level of involvement of a school community, and even the level of funding. Because my work as traditionally taken place in Title 1 schools in NYC, I have always found free opportunities for community partnerships between my students and their communities.

One of my favorite ways to start such projects is to ask my students what is a problem in the community that they’d like to fix. When I taught Kindergartnen in Washington Heights, NYC, my students decided to make PSA videos and flyers calling the neighborhood to clean the dog doodoo. So, we wrote songs, chants, and we took to the streets chanting and drumming. We also made artwork and tied it around the tree trunks. We also put on gloves and cleaned our sidewalk. Why? Because we care and because we set out to fix the problem. Did we completely fix the problem? Nope. We. Did. Not. However, did we do what we said we would? Yes! We went out to the community and for months, our PSAs stayed in the streets. Then the kindergartners told their families about it. And that is how we each become emissaries for change. When I taught middle school percussion club in the Upper West Side on Saturday mornings, we created a drum/chant music video protesting the racially based NYPD practice of “Stop & Frisk”. We then sent the video for a city wide film festival and became finalists. Some of those students told stories of being stopped and frisked by the police over 10 times, and they were thirteen and fourteen years old at the time. I did not come to the school with that topic in mind. I simply asked them “What is an injustice that you would like to study, and tackle as a community?”

When I taught elementary school in Harlem at a school with a large African population, I hosted “family nights” in which parents came to the school and taught me songs that I could teach their offspring. I also sent letters home asking families that if they had a musical talent, they would sign up for a sing along or musical skill leading session. Turns out one of the 3rd grade girl’s grandfathers used to play percussion with the Fania All Stars. I have collaborated with different district schools and music teachers so that 7th graders came to my 1st grade classes and demonstrated the families of musical instruments. I have asked my community of music teacher friends from around the world to do Skype phone calls into my class and answer questions. One of my favorite times ever, was when I was teaching my kindergartners about Gahu drumming from Ghana, and I Skyped my friends in Ghana (who taught me about Gahu) and my kiddos drummed and sang for the Ghanaian communities and one of the elders of the village got to take my students on a “harvest tour of the corn fields”.

I know some folks who are great at doing pen pal projects, and hear great things about them, although I have never done a project like that myself.

Music has a very important role in a community. Music educators have a very important role in a community. Someone taught Pete Seeger how to play the banjo. Someone showed Violeta Parra how to sing. Someone spent thousands of hours teaching Max Roach how to play the drums. A music teacher taught Zakir Hussein how to marvel and see beauty in music enough to dedicate his life to it. This folks are all pillars of their communities. And through my work as a music teacher, I want my students to also be all they can be as community members and as citizens of the world.