The Garden is a Graveyard 

There are lessons of life and death to learn in the garden. I think perhaps this is the reason why God set men and women to gardening (Gen 2:15). Plants put their roots into the soil, and when those plants die, the roots are fed on by various forms of life, and provide aeration for the soil, where water can feed the next season’s growth. The insects, worms, and fungi who live in the soil also die, their bodies becoming nutrients for future generations. Understood from one angle, living soil is a graveyard. Centuries upon centuries of death build the soil and make it fertile.

The Garden is a Playground 

But the garden is also a playground. Insects and birds dance among the yellow, white, purple, and red flowers, and insects wrestle below. The gardener watches this whole scene, choosing which plants to cultivate, which ones to remove. The steward. In the summer, the garden flourishes, and offers gardener and insect alike nourishment for the body and soul. But then winter comes, and the garden is covered with snow for a season. But even then, it is a place of life beneath the soil. Cover crops hold roots below the soil, where larvae wriggle and grow.

Folk who garden tend to live longer lives, with less of it in a state of end-life disability. The "Blue Zones," which are areas around the globe which have the largest number of centenarians, people who live to 100, are full of elder gardeners. Gardening improves mood, provides physical exercise, and offers healthy food. I think, also, that garden offers us a chance to confront our mortality. 

DS

Post 123.
 
In ecological news, prescribed burns, which benefit many species and reduce wildfire threats, also spread a weed named stinknet. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230523123834.htm Stinknet provides a lovely, recently well-recognized wildflower across the Southwestern United States, especially in California and the Sonoran Desert bioregion. Stinknet first appeared in Tucson in 2015, and since has consumed most of that area. Stinknet is known to cause rashes and headaches, and is especially likely to stimulate asthma attacks. See also this recent news segment: https://www.kold.com/2023/04/05/do-you-have-this-weed-your-yard-experts-say-stinknet-is-causing-major-problems/

            Stinknet was imported to the Phoenix area as a cultured desert habitat specimen, and spread to California via fill material and farming equipment. A major challenge with stinknet is that it crowds out native plants. So, what ought we do with invasive species? Experts are suggesting herbicides, aminopyralid, triclopyr, and glyphosate to control the plant before it has flowered. Among rats, aminopyralid can cause chronic toxicity, effects including enlargement of the intestines and mucous membranes. Dangers of triclopyr include acute toxicity if individuals eat, touch, or inhale residues. Breathing in glyphosate can cause eye and skin irritation. Swallowing it may increase saliva, cause burns in the mouth and throat, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. If, even if in large doses, these herbicides cause negative among humans, it is hard to know all of the ecological consequences, including dangers to specific species living in those ecosystems. For instance, glyphosate predisposes plants to diseases and modify soil microflora. Triclopyr can cause microbial degradation, and is slightly toxic to birds. And in 2020, Aminopyralid’s risks were assessed, which led to increased regulated use of this pesticide. https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OPP-2013-0749-0048

            Ultimately, like many invasives, we may have to learn to live with stinknet, whether after years of using it as an excuse to further poison our ecosystems, or without the poisonous middle-step we’ve taken for invasive flora and fauna over the last century. What is your opinion? How do you address invasive species through music in your classrooms?
 
DS

Image link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Oncosiphon_pilulifer_20D_2701.jpg/640px-Oncosiphon_pilulifer_20D_2701.jpg

Post 122.
 
In the news this week, “Vanishing glaciers threaten alpine biodiversity.”  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230504111831.htm Science Daily is a web source I check regularly to keep up on the latest scientific research on ecological concerns. Though I am no expert in biology, or ecological science, research is disseminated in a way the average literate citizen can know what scientists are working on, and what we are learning. It is the responsibility of all citizens in the 21st Century to be, to the best of their ability, ecologically literate. I was recently talking with somebody who thought there was a time (I guess in the 90s?) scientists thought plastic bags were better for the environment than paper bags at grocery stores. I explained that I requested paper throughout these decades of increased plastic use. The misperception is easily dismissed as nonsense, but this broad lack of knowledge is a danger to humanity’s (and countless other diverse interlinked species) continued survival on Mother Earth. We are choking on plastics. Plastics have never been a good idea. They’re a dirty technology and they’re replaceable in most (not all) of their modern-day uses.
 
            Back to this week’s news: Researchers at the University of Leeds studied the results of climate changed generated glacier melting, and its impact on invertebrates that live in cold meltwater rivers in the European Alps. As species lose habitat, they face further pressure from tourism, skiing and hydroelectric plants. “Writing in the paper, the researchers describe the "substantial work" that is necessary to protect the biodiversity in rivers that are being fed by retreating glaciers. The locations where glaciers still exist late in the 21st century are likely to be prioritised for hydropower dam construction and ski resort development.”

            The 21st Century has been described as the century of the Sixth Great Mass Extinction. We are facing loss of an addition 1/3 of all species by the end of the century. Previous mass extinctions have occurred because of asteroids, ocean acidification, and volcanic activity. https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions Today, a mass extinction is being driven by anthropocentrism--placing human wants above all other species needs, which includes use of cheap oil, plastics, and other polluting consumer products that hurts impoverished humans and non-human beings. It is the responsibility of music teachers and students to keep alive the songs of species (including metaphorical songs for non-vocal plants, fungi, and animals) that our industries have placed in danger.

            How might a music educator approach ecological literacy in this case?

Students can be directed to write songs for specific at-risk species, requiring student research of the species, how they live and survive, and challenges to the species; to cultivate public empathy (e.g., producing an informance/performance concert), and, ultimately, form plans of action to conserve species and ecosystems.

DS
 
 Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Mont_Blanc_oct_2004.JPG/640px-Mont_Blanc_oct_2004.JPG

Post 121.
 
In education, during the late 20th Century (and in music education scholarship, beginning in the early 21st Century) an explicit place-conscious, also called place-based, teaching emerged in scholarship. However it was already a part of teaching practice before this body of scholarship emerged. For instance, the Foxfire educational movement emerged in the 1960s as a way for students to learn about natural and cultural history of Appalachia, and taking students outdoors. https://www.foxfire.org/education/

            Outdoor education programs, such as Foxfire, provided one major precursor for place-conscious education. Other educators working on problems within democratic education, indigenous education, environmental education, and critical pedagogy constructed place-conscious educational theory as a critical approach to education in specifics. This is, I think most readers would agree, inherently radical in today’s educational climate, where students spend so many hours linked to educational technology’s screens, and high-stakes standardized testing to support national government policies and corporate profit margins.

            In music education (and likely in education in general), two strains of place-conscious education arose. Stauffer’s place-conscious music education centers the social aspects of place. https://hugoribeiro.com.br/area-restrita/Regelski_Gates-Music_education_for_changing_times.pdf#page=190 This approach emphasizes the narratives people make within places, and sees places as socially constructed. Socially speaking, this approach looks not only at schools as places of meaning-making, but also local meanings and stories that include various ways people make, curate, learn, and hear music. In contrast, Bates’s place-conscious music education considers the social, but also the aspects of “land” that are included in much outdoor and indigenous place-conscious theory beyond music education scholarship. http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Bates12_2.pdf Bates argues that music educators begin “knowing and caring for the ground we live on, re-discovering a sense of place, and reclaiming and cultivating sustainable and sustaining values, dispositions, and behaviors.”

            Both of these perspectives have influenced my own pedagogy; but Bates’s ideas have been more influential for cultivating eco-literate music pedagogy. http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Shevock19_1.pdf I also draw on 1920’s-40s music educator and philosopher Satis Coleman, whose environmental philosophy for music education emphasized the spiritual elements of nature, non-human musics, repurposing materials to make instruments in the classroom, challenging efficiency narratives, connecting to non-Western musics and storytelling, and considering evolutionary theory’s insights into teaching and learning music. Through this, I believe, we can draw together the social and ecological perspectives on place-consciousness, and offer our students a holistic, locally meaningful, grounded, and inspiring music education.
 
DS
 
 Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Corn_garden.jpg/640px-Corn_garden.jpg

Post 120.

In the news this week. Coastal marine invertebrates have colonized the open waters, thanks to plastic debris humans have dumped in the oceans. On the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, more than 70 percent of the plastic debris is covered by diverse coastal species of invertebrates. This research suggests that past boundaries between species are breaking down. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230417142539.htm) This is consistent with human activity, especially since our era of global industrialization.

            Through purposeful and accidental introduction of new flora and fauna species, we have for centuries been causing what ecologist Mark van Kleunen calls a new Pangaea. “These effects [of invasive flora species] are now evident in the most remote corners of the world. … Unless more effective protective measures are taken to counter the ongoing spread and naturalization of alien plants in the future, they will continue to destroy the uniqueness of our ecosystems—making the world a less diverse place.” (https://www.sciencealert.com/we-re-losing-unique-flowers-around-the-world-as-invasive-plants-take-over)

            It is hard to truly know the fullness of our impact on deep ocean species; but rejecting plastics in our music classroom materials is a good first step teachers can make.  We can also teach music in such a way to make students aware of these challenges, and brainstorm ways to act—to counter our impact and begin to remediate both the causes and effects of that impact. It seems to me we got into the problem through individualization, standardization, industrialization, consumerism, and technologism. We can get out of this only through seemingly radical and conservative acts such as community, slowing down, buying less,  and singing, dancing, and playing more. 
 
A Song for the Earth, music and lyrics by Joel Settler & Jim Scott (https://youtu.be/DbbWcAbfbr4)
The tainted river struggles to the open sea
Defiled is the mountain’s majesty
All of life is a chain
When one is hurt we all feel the pain

DS 
 
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Stages_of_marine_plastic_biodegradation.jpg/640px-Stages_of_marine_plastic_biodegradation.jpg

Post 119.
 
Spring is springing. New life emerges everywhere. After a winter of cold reflection, Spring seems like a time of growth. The dandelions and daffodils are out in force. The cherry blossoms have already turned dark red and falling. The apple trees are blossoming too. The tulips haven’t come to bloom yet, but they are budding. And my 5th and 6th grade general music classes are singing De colores, a Mexican-American song celebrating the colors of Springtime.
            While I learned De colores in the 1990s (Pete Seeger/NAfME) music ed. collection, Get American Singing… Again, this song is also in the basal textbook at the Middle School where I teach, Music Connections (pp. 12-3). The book expands on pedagogy in the teacher’s edition, under Literature/Language Arts/Writing/Social Studies: “Visitors to Mexico are often dazzled by colors. Even in Mexico City, brilliant flowers spill out of window boxes and form bright patterns in parks. In rural villages, the rough orange, salmon red, or aqua stucco walls of houses shimmer in the sun. Invite students to plan a trip to Mexico. Have them use books such as the ones cited above (Mexico: Modern Life in an Ancient Land, L. B. Casagrande; Enchantment of the World: Mexico, R. C. Stein), atlases, travel guides, magazine articles, and tour brochures to learn what they might see and do. Then invite small groups to plan an itinerary for a two-week trip. Have them decide what parts of the country they would like to visit, what sights they would like to see, and how many days they will stay at each place. … Which itineraries are the most practical/ Which ones would be the most fun?”
            I have students sing this song in Spanish, and it becomes the first foreign language song we work on—We also seen the Mexican song Adelita, but an English translation. We learn key Spanish words for colors, Spring, birds, rainbows, and love. It can offer students an opportunity to consider the ecology of North and Central American flora and fauna, including various flowers people use to decorate their homes, and birds that reside in the region. The suggested approach, however, promotes tourism, which has potential for both good and bad—as much of our ecological crises are exacerbated by air travel—especially as tourism can be good for local economies or, alternatively, exploitive of culture, reducing complex local cultures to products to be consumed.
            What ideas do you have for teaching eco-literacy through the song De colores?

DS

Post 118.

An Ecoliterate Philosophy for Life

Today’s blog post is a little different. I’m not sure I’ve thought about these things the whole way through yet, and so I am just going to allow the words to wrest themselves form my mind, as imperfect as they are, and see what comes of them. What I am thinking about today is eco-literacy as more than a philosophy for schools, more than a philosophy for teaching and learning, but also as a philosophy for life. That is, I suspect ecoliteracy can give us insight into all aspects of living. And so today I’m thinking about our culture, or our society, and it’s guiding message to people. That message is that we, each “individual self,” is, in various ways and to varied extents, worthless, irrelevant, and not needed. Every teacher and every student receives this message—as well as every cashier, carpenter, lawyer, truck driver, doctor, salesperson, stay-at-home parent, and out-of-work or homeless person. Everybody, regardless of what they are doing, how successful or unsuccessful, how much they’re paid, gets this message through the structure of our work, our government, our media. And if you are told over and over that you are worthless, irrelevant, not needed, eventually you will begin to accept that message.

            Can ecoliteracy as a guiding philosophy for teaching, learning, and, more importantly, living, counteract that message that I and so many people receive? With all things experienced psychologically, cause and effect are often difficult to disentangle. Ecoliteracy seems to place emphasis on descriptive, rather than predictive, analysis. Do we feel worthless, irrelevant, not needed because we have been explicitly told that message? Because we have failed to accomplish in our culture, at work, in our families, what we hoped? Or do we feel this way and then later fail to succeed? Do we lose confidence, experience depression and angry, feel detached and discarded because our work and family lives, and everything we see on television and social media steals our confidence, makes us depressed and angry, detached and discarded; or do we feel these things and then only see television and social media that reinforces our ineffectiveness? Do so many of us abuse drugs to numb this message, or do we use drugs, and then this message leads to our suffering? Does order of operation really matter? From an ecoliterate perspective, it doesn’t. Both are happening. We experience both.

            I tend to think about ecoliteracy as more than a philosophy for just schools, and more of a philosophy for life. Rather than focusing on the individual as a detached thing that can be dissected, measured, and fully reduced to yet-to-be-determined laws of physics (the traditional scientific process), ecoliteracy draws our attention to ecology and literacy—that is the “web of life” (ecology) and then analyzing, understanding, and loving (a different sort of literacy than most reductionists would agree with, I suppose) ourselves and our interdependence with others and nature, the web of life of which we can be a sustainable member.

            You are not worthless. You are not irrelevant. You are needed. So am I. An ecoliterate philosophy of life may open our eyes and ears, our skin and noses to the largest and smallest lifeforms, each with unique ways contributing to a living Mother Earth. If the worm’s contribution is different than the whale’s; the sunflower’s different than the snake; and the rose bush’s different than the redwood’s; the river’s different than the rainstorm, that is to be expected and celebrated—each diverse system expressing its diversity with kindness and respect for difference.

            Even while using terms like “respect” and “kindness” more than ever, schools seem to have moved further away from cultivating respect and kindness, because both require teaching and learning and ongoing effort to cultivate both. Both require the rejection of simple reduction, of technologized fixes, and of answers that can be offered using multiple-choice. It begins by respecting everybody as having worth, relevance, and being needed. It requires holding people to supporting each other’s worth, relevance, and being needed. And it requires opening the sphere of worth, relevance, and being needed to all non-human creation. But schools cannot accomplish this without grassroots effort—community-specific effort to hold schools accountable for supporting students who are worthy, relevant, and needed; respectful and kind. Without the grassroots effort of a local community, respect and kindness are reduced in schools to something horrible, standardized, technologized, and neither respectful nor kind to the web of life, including the people in the school building, the community, and non-human animal life and bioregions in which teaching and learning take place. Because schools are always talked to by the government, by curricular industry. The only possible counterbalance to that influence, which is too general to be respectful or kind, is local pressure.

What do you think? Am I on or off with this line of thinking?

DS

Post 117.

Elementary General Music: An Ecological Approach

This week I’m substitute teaching elementary general music at a school where I subbed two months ago. I began today's lesson with a song I taught the children last time, as an intro—Sarah Pirtle’s “My Roots Go Down,” in which students choose plants and their ‘nature’ to make up verses. Examples students created today include, “oak tree, tall and strong,” “sunflower, bending with the sun,” “rose bush, I have thorns,” and “palm tree, relaxing on the beach.” These student-generated verses are probably one of the students’ favorite parts of singing this song, and we then talked about what plants they were most like. Some people are tall and strong, and others bend with the sun. Still others a beautiful but have thorns, and others are chill, relaxing as if on a beach.

            I followed this song with another, David Mellet's "The Garden Song," which is a folk song about gardening, reflecting on crows, rain, dreams, and praying for the magical growth that all gardeners experience each year. After talking with students about plants, I play piano in a Dalcroze-inspired dance based on the growth of a seed. Students begin by being a seed, safe beneath the autumn leaves, and the ice and snow not touching the warmth below. When the March rains begin, they sprout, slowly and cautiously; grow leaves and eventually a bud, which flowers. I ask them to imagine the pedals without saying the color—yellow or orange, a light blue or dark purple, a deep red or a gentle pink. Any color really; and then their neighbors can guess the pedal colors. They can correct their friend, and then the students dance as flowers in the summer sun. But every year summer ends, and as chilly autumn winds come, the flowers drop one pedal at a time, and eventually drops seeds, which are covered by autumn leaves beneath the winter chill, windy snows and warmer weeks. This is where the song began. I go through two years so students have an opportunity to grow twice; and to choose two different colors for their pedals.

            After this, we did a song called “The Willow,” which is in the old MacMillan book, The Spectrum of Music (I'm singing this one because I cannot find it on the internet). It’s written by Daisy Ward-Steinman. The Willow has a haunting melody with descending, chromatics echoing the shape of a willow tree’s branches. Rather than representing what it’s like to be a willow, which we experienced in “My Roots Go Down” and in the improvised seed dance, The Willow invites students to reflect on a relationship between a specific willow and the human singer resting beneath it on a summer day.
            “I love the weeping willow where I spend my summer days.
            Its thirsty roots my pillow. Its roof a leafy maze.
            With feathery arms entwining, it bends to touch its toes.
            A moving picture tracing on the carpet where it grows.”
I love doing this song in January because it helps students who are like me and have challenges with seasonal affective disorder, seasonal melancholy; and benefit from imagining themselves in warmer, brighter, less-test-focused, summery days.

ds

Link to the image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Willow.jpg/640px-Willow.jpg

Post 116.
 
Place-conscious educational theory made its way into music education scholarship through the work of Sandy Stauffer and Vince Bates. Both draw extensively form Gruenewald’s critical place-conscious scholarship, but both have meaningful differences from one another. These differences might emerge in what is emphasized by each, and what is de-emphasized or even ignored. Stauffer’s place-conscious theory focuses the social, highlighting especially aspects of human narrative. Places become places through storytelling. This is true.

            In contrast, Bates’s place theory emphasizes land. Places are both social and geographical. This also is true. This line of thinking has opened space for more ecological discourse in music education scholarship, including my own—listening for not just human stories, but also the experiences of non-human animals, as well as non-biogenic elements of place, such as weather, land-formations, and waterways.

            Gruenewald’s seminal theory isn’t the first word on place-conscious education. It drew on a large body of scholarship emerging in various fields; scholars that were already analyzing “place,” including those identifying with various scholarly fields: democratic education, outdoor education, indigenous knowledge systems, environmental education, and critical pedagogy. It is easy to see how Stauffer’s emphasis on storytelling synchronizes well with the traditions of democratic education, indigenous knowledge systems, and critical pedagogy. In comparison, Bates’s emphasis on land synchronizes well with outdoor education, indigenous knowledge system, and environmental education. Some fields, like critical pedagogy, have historically been resistant to ecological elements; but have done better in recent years. For instance, “A People’s Curriculum for the Earth” draws on indigenous knowledge system scholars like Vandana Shiva and others to present a ecological-critical pedagogy. These fields aren’t naturally separated into boxes. Disciplines are social constructions, made for our ease of use. Not natural. But in the 1980s, 90s (and early 2000s) when indigenous scholars called on Paulo Friere to recognize the ecological elements of oppression, he may not have done so, but some of his disciplines, students and students’ students have.

            So, what does this mean for music educators and music education scholars? For me, it means that both storytelling and land need to emphasized in critical place-conscious teaching and learning. For instance, both can be used as ways to cross the school-community border, inviting elders of local cultures into the classroom, inviting in the musics of non-human life, taking students to natural areas, and dealing with the real oppressions experienced today—many of which have ecological implications and roots.

Both/and, and not either/or.
 
ds

Image

Post 115.
Trees talk. Trees sing.

            What I mean when I say is that trees, in some way, converse with one another. The German forester, Peter Wohlleben, wrote a successful book (“Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate”) on the interconnected lives of trees living in a woodland. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/) “Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated—and even intelligent—than we thought.” Using evocative language, Wohlleben discusses “two massive beech trees growing next to each other. … ‘These two are old friends,’ he says. ‘They are very considerate in sharing the sunlight, and their root systems are closely connected. In cases like this, when one dies, the other usually dies soon afterward, because they are dependent on each other.’”

            Trees are communal, forming alliances with plants of the same and different species, evolving interdependently, and communicating through what some call “the Wood-Wide-Web,” using chemical and hormonal signals sent through networks of mycorrhizal fungi belowground; sending distress signals, using the network to “suckle their young” growing nearby, and sharing nutrients, and are even (observing a huge stump felled at least 4 centuries beforehand, green with chlorophyll) “reluctant to abandon their dead, especially when it’s a big, old, revered matriarch.”

            Trees also communicate through air, using pheromones, such as when, in the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa, the wide-crowned umbrella thorn acacia sends out ethylene gas to notify nearby trees of feeding giraffes. And giraffes in some way know the trees are talking to one another, sensing the wind to decide which direction to walk, and how far, before grazing on another acacia.

            The natural world is brilliant. Non-human life is brilliant.

            A music lesson idea:
After learning how trees communicate, direct students to close their eyes and imagine they’re using an under-earth network of fungi, or the winds in the air to communicate with one another. Invite them to sing pitches—a wordless song of a tree—communicating wellbeing, or distress, communicating nourishment, concern, and/or love. Record the song and play it back for students. They may choose to learn some of the parts they improvised, or create new drones, melodies and harmonies on additional attempts at improvising the woodland. After doing a series of these improvisations, a composition might emerge, and students can be directed to add movement. How would a forest dance? They can take this prompt literally or take creative license. What visual art might the class create? Would they create backdrops? Masks and costumes? Would they create a poem or a narrative? A play?

Perform their composition of a living, communicating woodland for the community, making them aware of the fullness of tree-life, and challenging development projects that needlessly fell trees.

            There are several such projects going on in my own community now.

DS
 
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giraffe_koure_niger_2006.jpg