Post 6.
 
I begin this post with a question: Do teachers have a moral obligation to isolated indigenous people?

This question follows the drone video, published this week on NBC, identifying an indigenous tribe near Brazil's border with Peru with no contact with the "outside" world. Of course, both Brazil and Peru are globalized names, not the names of the land of the many indigenous peoples that live in these places. In traditional ways, borders emerge naturally rather than being drawn by professional cartographers and computer programs. Today though, as the article points out, this group of people is threatened by farming on protected land, and other global market-driven, expansive industry (e.g., oil industry, logging interests). Our global industrial society is a threat to cultural diversity, that is, any culture that does not subsume itself to one single mobile, wasteful, destructive, capitalist way of life. What concerns me most, as a music teacher who hopes to teach for ecological literacy, is the global industrial system being such a dominant force, and as someone sitting in Pennsylvania, USA, more and more of what I do, as a music teacher, is part of the global industrial system. What obligations do I have for preserving or sustaining this culture's culture, its way of life, however its people wish to conserve it? Or can I just let it alone and ignore the news?

Perhaps its important to start with the fact that we are, through our practices, responsible for incursions into indigenous land on our economic behalf. In an important article, Attilio Lafontant Di Niscia connects indigenous concerns to the industrial harvesting of tonewoods for instrument making, and El Sistema. Lafontant opens up important space for music education to begin talking about the material of our teaching practices, the marketplace that underpins our practices, and to have "a discussion on environmental controversies within Latin American music education." So, because music educators in the Global North are linked into a capitalist system that exploits actual places in the Global South, it would seem that we have some sort of moral obligation. Let me take a strike at what this duty might be with two commonsense rules.

In normative ethics, specifically in duty ethics, "the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action." In this approach to thinking about ethical issues, we might ask ourselves what sort of rule, or duty do we have toward another. A general rule of thumb for this sort of situation might be based on the golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you): Rule 1: "Do not do anything that would destroy a culture, a way of life/language/music/food, etc.; unless that other culture is leading to planetary destruction or excessive expansion." This is a broad, and improvised/tentative deontological rule, and I'll be happy to hear others' rules by which we can act. What are this rule's weaknesses and strengths? It is, first of all, conservative. Action happens (that is, trying to destroy or change a destructive culture) only when that culture is leading to planetary destruction or excessive expansion. Its quite obvious that none of these little groups of people living their traditional ways of life are destroying the planet. There is a small degree of expansion in any culture, or any organism, but at some point that expansion becomes excessive (think the cell expansion involved in your body healing, vs. a cancer). Its certainly not clear about our global, industrial culture. Like I say, homo sapiens lived on planet earth for 150,000 years, and in 150 short years, the industrial revolution has brought Mother Earth to her knees.

Rule 2: "We have a duty to act when we see cultural and/or ecological destruction." Even if we don't identify ourselves with the global, industrial society, we still have a duty to act. Even after we use instrument construction, and student- community-composition to replace our sheet music purchase, we have a duty beyond. I think this duty begins with teaching for conscientization (I wouldn't be tentative about Freire's word if he had understood the ecological crises even a little), and what I have come to call ecological conscientization (I draw on eco-feminists and deep ecologists as well as David Orr for this). Rule 2 goes beyond Rule 1, though Rule 1 sets up the basic framework for thinking about this.

It may easily be noted that in the diversity of cultures around the globe, duty ethics is not how people think about ethical issues. As a next step, lets infuse a bit of humility: we have to recognize that there will be limitations to any way of thinking about ethical issues. The ultimate importance is, though, that we music teachers begin to think about ecological crises in our music classes, decide how to act, and ultimately to do something. Do we bring these news articles into our high school general music classes, and have students begin a songwriting campaign to raise awareness? Do we combine this with a letter-writing campaign to get our government to act? Do we make contact with music teachers and learners in the Global South to try to form cross-boundary forms of solidarity? I think that's a start. Any other ideas, add them to the comments!

Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latin-america/drone-video-amazon-captures-tribe-isolated-world-n903376
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy-Philosophy-Autoethnography/dp/0415792576/
Link: http://www.revistaeducacionmusical.org/index.php/rem1/article/view/124
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

Post 5.

"Jorginho Guajajara, a cacique, or leader, of the Guajajara people, was found dead near a river in the city of Arame, Maranhão state, at the weekend.  Members of the tribe say his death was the result of a fierce conflict provoked by the incursion of loggers into their land. Up to 80 Guajajaras have been killed in the area since 2000."

I wish I could say this type of story was rare. When I point out in my book that ecological issues ARE social justice issues, this week's story in the Guardian is the type of heart wrenching issue I mean. The word, issue, doesn't even begin to capture the horror of our current system of globalism. Music teachers who are even a little interested in social justice issues must not continue to ignore the ecological nature of the problem.

Here are some of the main points in the Guardian news story:

1. Guajajara’s body was dumped by a stream where previous killings connected to the logging corporations have been dumped.
2. Guajajara’s group, “Guardians of Amazon,” take direction to reduce illegal logging in the Araeibóia reserve.
3. There is an uncontacted tribe, the Awá, who live in the territory where illegal logging is currently being imposed.
4. Sônia Guajajara (a politician and activist) writes, “This was not an isolated case, but part of an ongoing genocide.”
5. In the area in question, 70% of the biome has already been destroyed by the logging industry.
6. Maranhão, Brazil has been the location for extended conflicts with indigenous people for a long time. “Many leaders are being threatened by these invaders and we urgently need to end this situation; we do not want to lose any more relatives who fight and protect our Mother Earth.”

 
As for eco-literate music teachers, the first point of order is that you are not an ecologically literate citizen if you do not know this is happening (sorry for all of the negatives in that sentence, but this is how I want to word this). Eco-literacy is not a globalized music education that is on the side of global corporations and global governmental structures that are impotent to defend local commons because they don't fall within the global capitalist structure. We need to promote a common music education, that is, one that is actively commoning (to borrow a word from Gustavo Esteva) places and culture.

In Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy (pp. 29-32), I use authors such as Chet Bowers, Gustavo Esteva, and Madhu Prakash to begin to discuss the commons in music education. And since I wrote that section (and before publication), Vincent Bates published important ideas about the commons in music education in his sociology of music curriculum integration. Bates uses the ideas of American philosopher Wendell Berry (was it Richard Rorty who called Berry the most important philosopher in the non-academy sense? I call him a philosopher in the same way; his philosophy was honed in a place, on his farm in Kentucky, working actual soil, not just theory). According to Bates, land-grabbers (commons enclosers) use privitization, displacement, standardization, stratification, and degradation.

This enclosing of the commons can be seen extensively in music education, it was part of the founding of the field Ethnomusicology, when mostly-White university folk went to often-Brown, always-poor, often-female living cultures and dissected the musics from the cultus, for analysis and aesthetic appreciation in sterile Ivory Tower classrooms. Commoning begins by not participating in privitization, displacement, standardization, stratification, and degradation. To resist these global music education impulses means to participate in what I call a philosophy of music education on soil. I get this idea of Ivan Illich, "a clear, disciplined analysis of that experience and memory of soil without which neither virtue nor some new kind of substance can be."

In this philosophy on soil, soil is not only a real thing, an actual placed pedagogy on dirt (what I call dirty work in the book), but also a metaphor for rooted cultures. These rooted cultures can never be alive in universities or other institutions of the global marketplace. There's no paradox in this. Uprooted people cannot sustain roots. Music educators need to root themselves (reroot after the uprooting experience of the institutionalization of university education) in actual communities, humbly, like beings living in the soil. That's a start, but maybe not enough to resist in a world where global interests will kill those who want to conserve their local ways of being. I leave with this question that I have tried to find an answer for, but for which I would love to hear other solutions.

How can music educators build soil, rather than causing more soil erosion?


Link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/16/brazil-jorginho-guajajara-amazon-indigenous-leader
Link: https://www.routledge.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy/Shevock/p/book/9780415792578
Link: http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Bates15_3.pdf
Link: http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1990_declaraion_soil.PDF

Post 4.

An article published this week in the Guardian, "Heat: The Next Big Inequality Issue," provides opportunities to cultivate eco-literacy, and in particular how ecological concerns are at the root of social class in the 21st Century. I found "The Next Big Inequality Issue" to be a deceptive title though, because heat waves have been dangerous for poor people for a long time; at least since the dawning of the "development era." On to the article. Here are some important points:

1. In a recent heat wave in Montreal, Quebec, the economic disparities between how people experience climate change became apparent. People with the economic means to access air conditioning stayed inside; people without died. “It was the poor and isolated who quietly suffered the most in the heat—a situation echoed in overheated cities across the world.”
2. Because of climate change, researchers project that “the share of the world’s population exposed to deadly heat for at least 20 days a year will increase from 30% now to 74% by 2100.” If we make “drastic reductions,” we can cut that number to 48%.
3. Cities (called “urban heat islands” in the article) are hotter than less-populated areas.
4. By 2030, 60% of people will live in cities.
5. High-rises (in places such as Egypt) have decreased green spaces, and electricity costs keep many poor in unbearable heat.
6. Homeless people and prisoners suffer more in many places.
7. The refugee crisis (itself a climate crisis, displaced farmers due to unprecedented drying in the Levant) is exacerbated during extreme heat waves.
8. Finding potable water is a major challenge due to these intersecting crises.

Solutions discussed in the article:

1. “Treating cities as a whole, ghettos and all, is a more effective way to tackle extreme urban heat.” (e.g., more trees, light-colored surface painting)
2. Decreasing social isolation
3. Special action during heat waves: e.g., in India officials unlock the public parks, distribute free water, paint the roofs in slum communities white. (Montreal has a similar “heat action plan,” but still suffered many heat-wave deaths)

“Across the board, lack of equity has been found to feed the urban furnaces.” What an important statement for us music educators to reflect on. And I've heard few people, e.g., Vincent Bates, and Joe Abramo, talk about class in recent music education conferences. Where is social class in music education? This question is consistent with a question I asked at a 2015 conference, "Where is the eco- in music education?" Its time to take our heads out of the sand, and wake up to our responsibilities.

In general, I felt the solutions suggested in the article were insufficient. Perhaps this is because the authors were trying to remain in the realm of what is already being done with our current globalized, capitalist, big-government, uprooting social system. What I found interesting was the discussion of traditional ways of life (what I call rooted culture in my book) that have been cultivated for centuries and millennia to keep people safe during the summer without air conditioning. Air conditioning is, and will remain, out of reach for most of the world, and exacerbates the ecological crises. (No, I don't feel particularly good sitting in my air-conditioned house this summer. I am, and if you're reading this blog, maybe you too, implicated in my work. I hope it motivates us to look for better ways to cool our homes during these increasingly hot summers). The "Heat" article uses the example of Egyptian towns that have traditionally “built low buildings close together, forming dense networks of shaded alleyways where people could keep cool during summer.” However, development means Egypt’s poor now live in the same type of sweltering high rises as the rest of the world, which were developed in the US in the mid-20th Century. “Development,” an idea rooted in centralized, big-government, multi-national corporations, globalized systems, is seldom even a little place-conscious.

To understand why I see these suggestions as insufficient, I suggest reading the chapter in “The Development Dictionary” by Gustavo Esteva, which traces the history of underdevelopment to the end of World War II. Redefined as underdeveloped, places, such as Egypt in the article, feel the need to develop in a certain way modeled after the US (in this case, unsafe, community-killing, and uprooting high-rises to replace traditional housing and familial ties). US President Harry Truman coined the word “underdevelopment” in 1949. Esteva writes, “Never before had a word been universally accepted on the very day of its political coinage. A new perception of one’s own self, and of the other, was suddenly created. Two hundred years of social construction of the historical—political meaning of the term ‘development’ were successfully usurped and transmogrified. A political and philosophical proposition of Marx, packaged American-style as struggle against communism and at the service of the hegemonic design of the United States, succeeded in permeating both the popular and the intellectual mind for the rest of the century.”

And Esteva continues, “Today, for two-thirds of the peoples of the world, underdevelopment is a threat that has already been carried out; a life experience of subordination and of being led astray, of discrimination and subjugation.” Without an understanding of the history of underdevelopment, attempts at fixing the current ecological disasters, including heat waves, caused by development, will only be, in the long run, more damaging to more people in more of the world, as fewer sit oblivious in air conditioned mansions.

All of this seems to take us pretty far away from music teaching and learning, and this is a pedagogical blog. So, lets return home. What does all of this mean for the music teacher who wants to teach for eco-literacy? The first thing we can do is open spaces for our students to understand the climate crisis and the dangers of heat waves, especially to the poor. Unless we're truly privileged teachers in super rich suburbs, and maybe even then since "development" failed for the US as well as the rest of the world, its likely many of our students already suffer during summer heat waves! So, songwriting activities (especially in rock, hip-hop, and other popular genres) can give students a voice to express their own experience, their own pain and suffering. And when the students' experience is different, to empathize with those who are suffering. Giving voice to pain not only helps alleviate suffering, but it can help re-connect those social bonds (what I call rerooting) that have been severed in a mobilized industrial-global society.

The Nation published a list, the "Top Ten Songs About Class," many of which can be used (modified for appropriateness, or re-arranged: how many of you are old enough to remember when half of the band music in our high school library was arranged by the band teacher? I do!), and can open room for conversation. For an example of conversation used in eco-literate music pedagogy see pp. 37-8; and on page 113 I connect the word conversation with conserving and the old Christian idea of converting (self-change). "In conversation, I convert to sense what to conserve. I want to conserve musical traditions that cannot and should not be ossified and petrified in universities. I want to conserve places and music that industry does not. I want to leave a viable, diverse, healthy planet for my child." This leads me back to the idea of a rooted music education pedagogy. That is, place-conscious and recommoning.

I cultivated my idea of rooted pedagogy using a number of music education thinkers who have been writing about place-conscious and place-based teaching for years: Vincent Bates, Sandra Stauffer, Anita Prest, and some others. Their participation in the MayDay Group is one reason I am active in that music education community. When I align their work with an educational philosopher who influenced me greatly at Penn State, Madhu Suri Prakash, (she discusses her Philosophy of Education course that influenced me so much in Yes! Magazine) I come to my idea of a rooted pedagogy. In rooted pedagogy, music teachers actively help students to reroot, that is rediscover their place, their histories, their traditions, their culture (not culture in a large sense, such as is corrupted in such modernist ideas as "Western Culture," "Global Culture," or "Youth Culture" ... there is no cultus that connects that big a body of people) and how it has allowed them to be where they are--to live well on the planet. Every person is part of a culture that has lived on this planet for 150,000 years. However, in our participation in the Industrial Revolution, which has wasted the planet in a short 150 years, we uproot ourselves, becoming mobile individuals rather than rooted community-members. A music teacher can begin by opening conversations with students, their family members, and other community elders, to start to break down the walls of this hyper-Industrial structure, the school. We have unique opportunities for it, since musics are such an important part of local culture. Maybe we can begin by asking our students to go to a village elder, a grandma or auntie, and asking her to teach a song from her childhood. Old songs often embed ways of living well in place.

References
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/aug/13/heat-next-big-inequality-issue-heatwaves-world   
Link: http://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/wolfgang-sachs-the-development-dictionary-n-a-guide-to-knowledge-as-power-2nd-ed-2010-1.pdf
Link: https://www.routledge.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy/Shevock/p/book/9780415792578
Link: https://www.thenation.com/article/top-ten-songs-about-class/
Link: http://maydaygroup.org/
Link: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/learn-as-you-go/soil-seeds-salt-education-brought-down-to-earth
Link: https://www.economist.com/international/2013/01/05/no-sweat

Post 3.

In this post I will recommend a spiritual praxis for music teachers. That is, I will suggest that, just as music can be understood as sound and silence, we need both metaphorical sound and silence in our daily teaching routine. Finding silence is a benefit to our psychological and spiritual wellbeing, which in a service profession like music teaching is essential for serving well and being good to ourselves.

A recent New Hampshire Public Radio program discusses "silence." In the first part, they talk to a hiker, Denis Fallensbee, who goes into the "quietest" place in New Hampshire, the White Mountains. By silence, Fallensbee means "nature sounds; not people sounds." Though this seems like an anthropocentric (overly human-centered) definition to me, its not an entirely useless one, since absolute silence is nearly unattainable in reality. However, music studios, concert halls, and scientific labs go through a lot of effort to try to find some version of silence (side note, when I was a student at Penn State, Linda Thornton took the music psychology students on a field trip to the university's anechoic chamber; If you ever have a chance to check it out, its neat!).  Fallensbee and his fellow hikers compare mountains to decide which are quietest. On his recent hike into the White Mountains, there was a motor cycle event, so finding silence was impossible. They conclude that nowhere in New Hampshire is entirely quiet. If you listen to the whole program, they talk to composer Robin Parmer about noise complains historically, which is also quite interesting.

I talk about "silence" as part of a spiritual music teaching praxis in Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy (pp. 101-2). I draw spiritual insights from my own Catholic tradition, from Buddhism, and from the Deep Ecology philosophy. I talk about the paradox of sound and silence being central to music educators. After all, if we're not teaching sound and silence in schools, who is? You cannot have music, not melody or rhythm or form or meaning, without both sound and silence. Famously, Claude Debussy said, "music is the silence between the notes." Though not an inclusive definition of music, Debussy's insight should be incorporated into how we think about and teach music. And it is certain that some of the best music includes dramatic silence ... the dramatic pause is fairly commonplace (listen to the Foo Fighters "Monkey Wrench," which has one such dramatic pause just 12 seconds in).

On a metaphorical level, what might music, simply understood as sound and silence, be in the music teacher's daily life? Since music teaching is a service profession, so much of our daily lives are filled with the sound of service to others: to our students, administrators, other teachers, parents, music ed. organizations, etc. We do this out of love. If we didn't love this service, we would have chosen a much easier and more lucrative profession. But that doesn't mean we don't also need silence. We cannot be service to others if we don't take care of ourselves. I've known too many teachers, who as they near retirement have become bitter. That bitterness has often become health problems. They have let their desire for service-to-others involve too much sound and not enough rejuvenating silence. Sound is good; and so is silence.

In talking about philosophy, Josef Pieper discussed both the need for active thought (intellectual "work"), and contemplation (which is receptive). He draws from ancient terms, ratio, "discursive, logical thought," and intellectus, "effortless awareness." He also criticizes the modern idea that work is good but leisure is not. So much of our day-to-day teaching involves lesson planning, making sense of curricula, choosing level-appropriate, interdisciplinary, culturally relevant, locally rooted musics, dances, games, or deciding how to conduct a piece to elicit from students the most artistic responses. This is ratio, that is, intellectual work. After we finish (its never finished) this intellectual work we practice actually implementing these ideas (this is our craft). None of these (ratio or craft) are silence in the metaphorical sense.

So, music teachers need to set aside time for silence! For quiet contemplation. For going into the woods, or a park, or garden, or even our desk between classes, and, with intention, closing our eyes relaxing and listening for silence. There is no perfect silence, and there is no perfect meditation practice. Every one is embedded within a tradition. My own meditation practice comes from the Catholic tradition I was raised in, and was influenced by my studies of Buddhist and Pagan practices. From my earliest Catholic lessons with Fr. Blaine, I learned to meditate on scripture. From Buddhism I learned to allow outside thoughts and concerns to dissolve. From Paganism I learned to let my imagination wander, and find a relaxing grove within my mind. Its likely that all spiritual traditions have some sort of meditation; some sort of contemplation. Just as day needs night, and summer, winter, our daily sound needs daily silence. Try it. Even for just a few short minutes a day. It has helped me!

References
Link: http://www.nhpr.org/post/why-new-hampshire-noisier-you-may-think#stream/0
Link: http://rcl.ee.psu.edu/Facilities.html
Link: https://soundcloud.com/robinparmar
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy-Philosophy-Autoethnography/dp/0415792576/
Link: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Claude_Debussy
Link: https://youtu.be/aKp5v588-Vs
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/1586172565/

Post 2.

In my book (pp. 4-6), I discuss historical precedents for eco-literate music pedagogy in Satis N. Coleman (and R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who coined the term "soundscape"). Satis Coleman (1878-1961) was a progressive music educator who was active as a writer from the 1910s to '40s, and who taught in rural Texas, Washington D.C., and in New York City at Teachers College and the progressive Lincoln Lab School. And my interest in Coleman began during graduate studies. I have previously written, in Music Educators Journal, about her improvisation-infused  approach, called "Creative Music," as having a spiritual element (this was research I conducted in a class on music education history taught by Robert Gardner at Penn State). Coleman was a heavily published music education thinker, making this type of textual analysis feasible in a way it may not be with more famous (often male) historical figures who wrote far less.

Because Coleman's focus was on music education, even with antiquated early 20th Century terminology (e.g., masculine pronouns and colonial words like "primitive"), there is a lot an eco-literacy minded music teacher can glean from her books and articles. She asked music teachers and learners to begin listening to nature as music (40-50 years before Schafer opened our field's ear to soundscapes); that a child should be taught "to listen for [Nature's musics] and to love Nature with his ears as well as his other senses." This type of "love" is essential for becoming an eco-literate citizen when so much of our society destroys nature.

Coleman-inspired music teachers can begin by taking their students on walks, and pointing out the musical aspects of the sounds they hear. Since Coleman's method utilized improvisation, I suspect singing and improvising melodies with non-human animals would be consistent with her approach. This type of creative activity is done today by improvising musician David Rothenberg. See this YouTube video of him using his clarinet to improvise with cicadas. What might our instrumental students learn by improvising, listening and responding to cicadas (an inescapable part of the soundscape this time of year/the start of a new school year)? Certainly cicadas have a broader conception of dynamics change than most human-composed musics! As Rothenberg tries to adjust his embouchure to match pitch with the insects, I think about how that type of exercise might strengthen a student's embouchure while connecting h/er to the non-human musickers in h/er community--ecological conscientization.

Coleman also recommended students dramatize songs, representing animals they heard in nature. I could imagine students creating a story, script or play, using the musics of nature, and putting on a performance. In suggesting that summer camps (and out-of-door life in general) are healthy, Coleman's ideas probably were influenced by the Nature Study movement, already influential in education in the early 20th Century. See Anna Botsford Comstock's 1916 book, Handbook of Nature Study. Coleman then, much like my work in eco-literate music pedagogy (which brings in recent insights from ecomusicology and soundscape ecology), can be understood as an interdisciplinarian, making sense of another academic field for music classrooms.

Finally, it would be remiss to miss discussing instrument construction, which is often considered a defining characteristic of Coleman's approach. Coleman guided students into nature to find materials for instruments they would make (they also used purchased materials). The "creative" in Creative Music referred both to the creation of melodies (improvisation, which used alternative notation such as cipher so that the youngest students could compose and record their melodies) and the creation of instruments that the students would love (that would increase what philosopher John Dewey called "interest," and what Coleman called "the seeking attitude"). There are music educators (Koji Matsunobu, Matthew Thibeault, Clint Randles and others) who write about instrument-making as a pedagogical approach today. There are obvious benefits to interest, creativity, and cultural relevance (many of the world's musical musical cultures involve making an instrument). In a recent conference in Colorado, I discussed how instrument making can also reduce waste, both physical and metaphorical. You can watch a YouTube video I made here.

Thanks for reading,
Please leave comments!
Dan

References
Link: https://www.routledge.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy/Shevock/p/book/9780415792578
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satis_N._Coleman
Link: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0027432115590182
Link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=16405901864287713959&hl=en&as_sdt=5,39&sciodt=0,39
Link: http://www.davidrothenberg.net/
Link: https://youtu.be/bnXmGVVccFc
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Nature-Study-Botsford-Comstock/dp/0801493846
Link: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/r-murray-schafer-emc/
Link: https://youtu.be/knU5qQfbJPE

Post 1.

In this, my first attempt at a pedagogical blog post, I share a recent article written by an acoustic ecologist/composer, and connect that work to my book, Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy. I currently teach music courses at Penn State Altoona. I grew up in rural, Central Pennsylvania, and taught in public schools for twelve years, eleven in the Pittsburgh city schools, and have come to believe music classrooms should be a place for cultivating ecological literacy.

ABC Classic FM, this week in their series "National Science Week," featured an article by Leah Barclay, an Australian sound artist, composer, and researcher. She discusses how the sounds of a place can increase our awareness of "social, cultural, ecological and political layers of changing environments through sound." Acoustic ecology, the discipline where Barclay's research resides, is an interdisciplinary field. In her work, she makes audio-recordings of the soundscapes in places such as wetlands. Wetlands, which store more carbon than other types of forest, have "complex acoustic environments." Sound recording can help researchers recognize when ecological crises are impacting a local environment (for instance, when an insect species disappears or a bird species' migratory pattern changes, there will be an audible change in a soundscape). And interdisciplinary music-science collaborations are not only artistically interesting, they can increase performers and audiences' understanding of complex ecological challenges, such as waste and climate change. You can listen to her soundscape composition, Wetland Wander on the website, as an example. Interestingly, it includes the sounds of many underwater creatures, such as insects, shrimp, and fish, that students might not be familiar with.

Our students can experiment listening to sounds outside, and writing their own compositions. In the Prelude section of Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy (pp. 1-2), I share a reflection on an activity I have done multiple years with a summer choir camp in rural, Central PA. After a short walk into the woods, students listened to, and sung the calls of cicadas, sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, and the music of winds through the tree canopy. They used their voices and found-sounds (such as branches and dry leaves), and used alternative notation to write their group composition. Here is a link to a YouTube recording I made of an early iteration of one of their compositions. Doing this type of group composition has not only increased student creativity, it has increased my own eco-literacy as a teacher. I am more aware now than ever of my role, and the role of musics in our society's ongoing ecological struggles. Barclay's article points out, protecting natural areas "requires interdisciplinary action to inspire and mobalise communities to participate in monitoring and conservation." And in my book, I recognize the importance of students in that community work. I call this community-embedded pedagogy a "philosophy on soil," where rather than treating schools as separate from their communities, schools and the people in them root themselves in their community, in solidarity with human and non-human community members. This type of small-scale action is recommended by countless ecologically-oriented thinkers (going back to Vandana Shiva, Gary Snyder, Rachel Carson, John Muir, and even Thoreau). The ecological demands in the 21st Century call all of us to begin living sustainably and regeneratively.

In the book, I call for increased ecological "awareness" (such as activities described in the National Science Week article) and use the term "conscientization" (that is, consciousness or awareness raising ... a term I take from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire). Especially in relation to ecological issues, the greatest challenge can be lack of local conscientization. I argue that we, in music classrooms, can slow down, listen, and become more conscious of our soundscapes and the ecologies that compose them. Music education can (and must) be a part of teaching people how to listen, to live and act in life-saving ways. This is the work of eco-literacy through music teaching and learning that I have dedicated the last three years of my scholarly and personal life.

Please leave comments below!
Daniel J. Shevock

References (in no particular order)
Link 1: http://www.abc.net.au/classic/features/national-science-week-making-music-from-the-environment/10118814
Link 2: https://www.amazon.com/Eco-Literate-Pedagogy-Routledge-Directions-Education/dp/0415792576/
Link 3: https://youtu.be/5N4txoPzVUo
Link 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire
Link 5: http://leahbarclay.com/