Making Music in a Pandemic
Education Popularis Vol. 2, No. 1
Hello and welcome to the new format of Education Popularis! This is now a monthly newsletter with more, shorter, sections featuring the latest education news, research, and discourse from around the world. It will still feature the voices and experiences of education professionals, as well as education researchers and leaders.
Teaching Notes
The narrative around education during the 2020-2021 school year seemed to center mostly around ‘learning loss’ and a ‘lost’ academic year. Not only is this a false narrative, but it also diminishes the incredible and difficult work that education professionals were doing all around the world. (I have written on these narratives in previous EdPop issues.) One group of teachers that have been largely overlooked during the pandemic school years were music educators, who were still teaching all year long and doing incredible work in the most difficult of circumstances.
I spoke with two music educators that work in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area of Minnesota: Tark Katzenmeyer (Band Director, Woodbury High School) and Steve Schmitz (Band Director, St. Louis Park High School).1 Both are band directors working at the secondary level and work for different school districts.
Music classes in Minnesota schools were conducted mostly online at first, via a platform like Zoom or Google Meet. By the end of the 2020-2021 school year, there was more of a transition to a hybrid model, although many students still remained at a distance. Music is a very collective and in-person activity, and performance-led music pedagogy had to be significantly altered when in-person learning was stopped. Both music educators had to significantly adapt and work incredibly hard to change what music classes were.
Being in a music ensemble such as a wind band or choir were also even more risky than other modes of education when it came to COVID-19. In the music education world, there are some well-known studies in regards to the significant amount of aerosol droplets that are spread in music ensembles – a study out of the University of Colorado, and another out of the University of Minnesota, for example. When meeting in person, band students needed to stay 6-feet apart when in an ensemble. In a large music ensemble, this of course requires a lot of space. Both music educators I spoke to were able to obtain PPE such as bell-covers and playing masks through federal government support via the CARES act.
In terms of teaching music remotely, during much of the 2020-2021 academic year, music educators had to be creative and find practices that worked. Both teachers I spoke to invested more into SmartMusic, Logic, FinalCutPro, and other electronic and online music education tools. Besides trying to play together via computer screens, there was a lot of independent music projects, listening assignments, composing, sound mixing and music production assignments. One particular quirk for an in-person hybrid “A-day/B-day” model of learning (which was the case for most schools around the United States) is that this altered the instrumentation for ensembles and band directors had to adjust their repertoire to fit what instruments they might have on an ‘A-day’ or on a ‘B-day.’ Tark told me that the way the students were sorted, this meant that one of the band ensembles ended up with zero trumpets – a definite problem for any wind ensemble.
Unfortunately, the challenges resulting from the pandemic will continue next year. Both music educators I spoke to reported a significant dip in the number of student enrolled in music classes, and have heard similar stories from their colleagues and friends around the country. Music teachers spend years building up music programs in schools, and now they are facing a whole new era of rebuilding once again. School districts are facing budget shortfalls that will result in cuts to the music programs (usually the arts are the first programs to be cut in schools). One of the music educators I spoke to reported that he had a music colleague that had his position already cut for next year and will reduce what music opportunities his school can offer.2
There are numerous benefits that result from schools having music programs, and mostly they are aspects that are not easily quantifiable. These are benefits such as building community, listening to others, social emotional learning, promoting inclusivity and so on and so on (here is a list of 19 reasons why music education benefits children).
Like anything, there were a few silver linings as a result of the pandemic. Music educators, especially band directors at the secondary level, have to work a significant number of hours outside of the school day on things like rehearsals, performances, lessons, travel, music competitions, and pep bands at sporting events. The pandemic did reduce these outside-of-work requirements and gave the music educators a bit more work-life balance. Even though teaching online was difficult, it did allow for more one-on-one time with students – to get to know them more personally, to foster student leaders, and also to assess and give individual feedback more effectively. It also led to more creative assignments that could incorporate visual arts and other elements. These are things that both music educators hope to see continue post-pandemic.
Moving forward, the two music educators I spoke to had this to say in summary:
“Education was designed to work for white, upper and middle-class learners. And largely that is who it works for. I hope that moving forward we address this problem – especially in music classes. We also need more flexibility to be inclusive.”
“School districts need to look at a five-year plan, they need to staff now coming out of the pandemic for what they want their schools to look like in five years. Yes, a program is going to be decimated right now – that’s just how it went with distance learning, a lot of kids didn’t see the point of being in an ensemble online. My numbers are down a lot … but in five years it’s not going to be that way. It’s going to be programs building back and the infrastructure needs to be there now.”
New or Interesting Education Research
In looking through several research indexes and databases, there has been a fair amount already published on music teaching and learning during the pandemic. I am sure that more will be coming out in the years to come, as we begin to reflect on the experience and the results of living through a global pandemic rather than being in the middle of it.
Here are few interesting research articles that I discovered (and I will always only recommend articles that are open-access and publicly available);
“Equity in Music Education: Access to Learning during the Pandemic and Beyond” by Bryan E. Nichols, Music Educators Journal. Not original empirical research, but makes a persuasive case that online distance education, particular music education, was a significantly inequitable experience and that we must build a better system in the future.
“Creative Pedagogies in the Time of Pandemic: A Case Study with Conservatory Students” by Andrea Schiavio, Michele Biasutti, and Roberta Antonini Philippe, Music Education Research. Empirical research on distance music education in Italy, that features the challenges and promising, effective, practices in music teaching as a result of the pandemic.
“Music Education at a Distance” by Linda Thornton, Journal of Music Teacher Education. A fun article, more of an editorial, written in the style of a letter to a future music teacher educator. This article is positive, and focused on the incredible resilience and creativity that resulted in response to the adversity of the pandemic.
Education Blog Post Recommendation
“The time has come to stop assigning letter and number grades” by H. Richard Milner IV.
As a teacher with experience at all levels of education for the past 15 years, I have long had a negative view of grading. I intensely dislike the feeling of reducing student work to a number or a letter, especially with no opportunity for revision, and do not see the pedagogical or real-world skills building value in doing so. Vanderbilt professor Rich Milner makes a succinct, yet effective case, for the reasons that grading is both ineffective and harmful, and offers some ways forward. I agree with Rich that competency-based assessment, on-going narrative feedback, and portfolio assessments are very promising practices. These are practices that music educators have been using for years.
Multimedia Recommendation
The podcast Odessa from the New York Times.
In keeping with the music education during the pandemic theme this month, I highly recommend the Odessa podcast. It features the voices and experiences of students and staff in an Odessa high school during the worst months of the pandemic, and particularly features stories from the Odessa marching band – a big deal in Texas which loves its high school football. There are a lot of themes to unpack in this series, and the podcast is complex, multilayered, and does not have any simplistic conclusions. This podcast is another example of the blurred line between good, in-depth reporting and good ethnography.
Both Steve and Tark were friends and peers of mine when I also studied to be a music educator at the University of Minnesota (several careers ago, it seems). I am proud to share that both Steve and Tark were semi-finalists for ‘Minnesota Teacher of the Year’ in 2019.