Critical Dispositions in Practice

Educators in various fields have found ways to use content-specific skills to investigate, interrogate, and act upon the realities of their world. Eric Gutstein’s (2006) work in mathematics provides an example of functional and critical literacies working in concert with one another. His experiences with middle schoolers in Chicago highlight the need for curricula to be viewed as complex engagements bound by socio-political realities. Rather than placing functional literacy as the primary purpose of the curriculum, with criticality relegated to a distant second, critical literacies are at the heart of his educational interactions with students. In his class, students use their personal experiences to “investigate and critique injustice” through mathematics (p. 4).

Mathematics is seen not as a discrete subject, but as an opportunity to understand the world in order to “become active participants in changing society” (p. 4). The work of educators Eli Tucker- Raymond and Maria Rosario (2017) with middle school students is similarly structured. They developed a curriculum that is grounded in community experience. In this class, students drew upon personal experiences, political realities, and the complexities of living in a diverse environment in their dialogical and written work. As a result, they developed skills in language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science through curricular activities that directly connected to their everyday experiences. In both of these examples, educators provided curricular engagements that encouraged students to develop content-specific skills through a critical analysis of their local realities, thus sending a message that functional skills can be developed alongside critical thought.

There are various possibilities for the actualization of a framework that prioritizes critical artistic dispositions through composition in a general music classroom. I offer here three vignettes as examples of how such ideas might be applied in a manner that aligns with the work presented in both Gutstein (2006) and Tucker-Raymond and Rosario’s (2017) studies. Though each vignette is imagined, elements of these stories are based on real interactions with music educators and demonstrate practical examples of criticality through composition. In each vignette, students employ both critical and functional skills simultaneously as they artistically and musically actualize ideas drawn from the cultural, civic/political, social, economic, racial, and interpersonal structures in their worlds. These examples are not meant to be reproducible lesson plans, but they are meant to be entry points for thinking and discussion.

Vignette 1. Inspired by a district-wide initiative for increased awareness and action toward climate change, Terrell, an elementary school music educator, has decided to use this topic as a theme for fifth grade music class. He elects to begin with listening and curates a playlist of songs to spark conversation about musicians and artists engaging in activist work.

The playlist includes songs that speak to environmental concerns, such as Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” as well as songs which engage in activism on a broader scale. The playlist prompts reactions from students, and Terrell invites them to make a list of the topics and ideas that are generated as they listen. The fifth-graders are inspired to explore further and begin an online search for other activism-driven musical movements. In the process, they begin drawing connections to the recent increase in flooding in their own community and they consider the possible human and non-human causes of these environmental changes. The students express a desire to create their own song that speaks to their community about the environment.

Recognizing that this could be an opportunity for district-wide partnership, Terrell reaches out to the high school music teacher, asking if the students in her songwriting class would consider collaborating with the fifth graders in Terrell’s music class on a songwriting project. The result is a series of collaborative interactions (both in person and online) wherein students from both classes make music and dialogue together. They approach the flooding in their community with a critical eye, utilizing their composition not as a memorization tool but as a way to think through an underlying phenomenon together from multiple vantage points. The high schoolers bring their experience to help the fifth graders choose and learn chords, a melody line, and a strum pattern for guitar and ukulele. The fifth graders share what they have learned to help the high schoolers write lyrics that create an artistic statement. They are excited by their final product and decide to record their song and post it to the school’s website where it can be viewed by classmates, teachers, families, and community members.

Vignette 2. Elizabeth, a middle school music educator, wants to help the students in her general music class think critically about diversity, difference, and living in a plural society. Rather than use “traditional” musical instruments, Elizabeth asks students to work independently to develop a list of sounds that represent their unique experiences in the world. They then gather or create recordings that mimic each of these sounds as they develop sound compositions that represent their experiences using Soundtrap, a collaborative music and recording studio where they will use their sounds to mix a track that represents their unique experiences. The students immediately begin experimenting with editing and layering, and Elizabeth works with students independently and in small groups, occasionally interjecting for a full class lesson on concepts such as timing and foregrounding/backgrounding.

Once students feel as though their compositions are ready, they share them anonymously with the class through their online learning classroom. As students listen to each other’s songs, they hear compositions that represent experiences with bullying, immigration, searching for one’s identity, friendship, and a host of other topics. Elizabeth asks questions as they listen, such as “What do you notice?” and “What is this composition prompting you to think about? And why?” They then utilize the compositions as catalysts for thoughtfully discussing and debating issues of structural inequity, displacement, and taken-for-granted assumptions. As conversations continue, students begin to discuss the role of artists who use their music to illuminate issues and ideas, provoking dialogue and, eventually, action. Several students from the class decide to revisit their sound compositions, making changes and edits to their work so that they can share it with community members at a local Fine Arts Night at their school. The students, now adept at leading conversation and engaging in dialogue, host a listening session with their families, friends, and community members, encouraging a community-wide discussion about some of the issues that arose from their compositions.

Vignette 3. Nia, a high school music educator, wants to develop a project that utilizes the community in which their school is located as a compositional prompt to help students analyze the ways in which urban spaces change over time. Nia hopes that engaging through music will help students develop a critical eye that considers how and why these neighborhoods have changed, encouraging them to approach ideas skeptically, consider who has benefited from these changes, and find relationships between ideas. Nia invites the students to work in small groups to choose a neighborhood in their community. Over the course of a term, students work on their projects once a week. Nia encourages them to visit these neighborhoods, research their histories, and utilize the changing landscape as inspiration for a musical composition.

The students interview residents, community musicians, and city historians, inquiring about the political, cultural, musical, and economic shifts that have resulted in neighborhood change. One group in Nias class chooses to focus on the changing architecture, developing a composition that juxtaposes two ideas: one that uses the strong, harsh lines of newly built skyscrapers as inspiration and a second that is modeled after the smaller, older neighborhood homes and apartment buildings that they find in old photos. As they work, this group uses changes in rhythm and tempo to create these two contrasting musical themes that chase one another through the piece. Another group focuses on shifts in culture, tracing the musical history of one particular neighborhood through the music of the Irish, Polish, and eventually Venezuelan communities that have called this place home.

The students link these cultures together in a composition that draws upon unique characteristics and timbres of musical works from each community, developing a piece that demonstrates change over time. The students share their work in a performance in which they invite the community musicians, historians, and neighborhood residents to participate, utilizing music to make an artistic statement about the spaces and places in which they live.

In these examples, Terrell, Elizabeth, and Nia frame compositional endeavors as part of a larger purpose in which students develop musical skills through critical practice. Students create artistic works through which they approach ideas and understandings with skepticism and ask critical questions through music. In order to do so, they develop skills in songwriting, chord progression, and digital editing and composition by navigating rhythmic and melodic patterns, timbre, and musical structures. In each case, the educator helps establish a frame for critical compositional engagement and supports student inquiry, but students maintain control over the musical pathway they choose to pursue.

These educators are seizing moments that already exist, drawing from current social realities, while also deliberately creating opportunities for critical dialogue, listening, problematizing, and relational development. Students’ worlds have become more than an inspiration for a musical work, they have a become fully embedded part of the compositional process.

In the elementary/high school collaboration in Vignette 1, Terrell sets out a plan for connecting the lessons in fifth-grade general music to an overarching district-wide theme of climate change, but he also leaves space for flexibility and exploration. This approach invites students to reflect on an issue through historical (through the listening playlist), global (through the online exploration), and local (through the composition) lenses. Listening, performing, and composing are then pathways to critically consider an idea. Terrell’s invitation to the high school students serves at least two goals: students engage in a collaborative, relational music-making experience and they learn from one another, building upon their various skills. Composition, therefore, is not utilized as a tool for assessing a functional skill, but as a way of exploring and expressing ideas related to an underlying phenomenon.

Similarly, in the middle school vignette, composition is again a catalyst to engage with local and global realities. In this example, problematization and inquiry around student experience is central to the compositional experience, creating opportunities for students to make artistic statements that demonstrate their own personal reflection. The decision to use digital audio workstations and other modalities of electronic composition is not inherently critical, as engagements with technology can fall prey to a primary focus on functionality. Here, however, the digital audio workstation is utilized to invite students to embed audio files and remix recordings for the purpose of grappling with knowledge and experience through musical creation.

Nia deliberately plans an engagement with local neighborhoods in the third vignette. Students are invited to not only recognize shifts in the community but to critically investigate the changing cityscape through music. By inviting students to meet with stakeholders beyond the school setting, Nia helps students draw a tangible connection between in-school and out-of-school experience. In spreading the project out over the term, curricular opportunities are created for students to utilize and embed the compositional and musical skills they learn in class over time. In this way, functional skills are still a necessary element of the musical experience, but they are not the only purpose or goal. Students are thinking critically and gaining skills simultaneously, potentially disrupting a linear hierarchy in favor of a more open understanding of the purpose of composition and music education more broadly.

The role of presentation and performance is foundational in these vignettes. In each example, students are developing a composition for a purpose that incorporates but also extends beyond classroom presentation. In Vignette 2, for example, students’ sound compositions are presented and performed both in class and at the school’s Fine Arts Night. In both cases they are not only seen as artistic works to be shared but as musical catalysts that spark dialogue and conversation about issues of community concern. Similarly, in Vignette 1, the process of creating cultivates dialogue and relationships between elementary and high school students, inviting them to think and make music together. Teachers and students require practice in a form of listening that prioritizes hearing one another through musical and dialogical experience. Each vignette highlights an opportunity for the dialogue to move beyond a functional determination of what a composition is about or how it is formed and toward composition as an opportunity to both affirm and interrogate experience and to engage with unpredictability and moments of meeting where music is felt as something more than an exercise.

These vignettes also require the inclusion of planned, deliberate, purposefully designed reflection. Rather than designing reflective practices that ask students to think about what they have learned or how they might do differently next time, critically reflective practices can help students draw connections between their compositional processes and larger socio-political and cultural-historic issues. Reflections can ground such endeavors in the realities of the worlds in which students live and learn, potentially inspiring them to engage in civic action beyond the confines of the project itself.

The examples offered in these vignettes are extended projects, but the dispositional shifts that may manifest as a result can also be supported on an everyday level. Such practice requires a constant return to questions of why and for whom as compositional experiences within (and beyond) the general music classroom are planned. Utilizing these questions as a guide for thinking and planning not only determines the what and how of composition, but also helps cultivate relational experiences and critical thought in and through musical practice.

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