Yes, I like maps. Here’s a map of rural outmigration by county in the United States. A couple of reasons for outmigration are excellent schools (many economic opportunities for well-educated students are in metropolitan areas) and not-as-desirable landscapes. Scenic rural areas tend to attract new people. Also, medical rural counties with reliable broadband access tend to retain population. Anyway, the article from the USDA can be found here at Amber Waves and here’s the map:
The Center for American Progress has an outstanding interactive map showing the number of rural students and rural students in poverty state by state:
Interactive Map: Rural Students in Poverty
There is also a report on effective rural schools. Check it out!
I felt I ought to update readers of my activities of recent months, to which I will at least party attribute my lack of attention to the site over the summer. In May I moved from Madison, Wisconsin, where I had lived and taught at the Univ. of Wisconsin for nearly 5 years, back to my home near Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The cultural differences between the U.S. and Canada have been on my mind since my re-entry to Canada. Even small things like the procedure to change my driver’s license from Wisconsin to Ontario provided adventures that speak to cultural differences and societal expectations. As I prepare to teach courses at the University of Toronto, these cultural differences continue to raise questions for me. One of the courses I am preparing to teach is titled Music Education in Cultural Perspective, designed for students in the music teacher education program. I suspect that over the coming weeks, the course and the discussions emerging from its readings may provide some interesting questions to wrestle with around the issue of cultural identity and curriculum. I look forward to sharing my musings on these and other issues.
Thanks to Cathy Benedict for bringing to my attention MENC”s latest offering on rural, suburban, and urban music teaching. Here is the rural part with my comments in brackets:
“So, have you thought about where you want to teach? Rural, suburban, urban–how different are they? Janice Smith, Frank Heuser, and Michele Kaschub offer up the rewards and difficulties of teaching in each area.
Rewards
[Okay, this was indeed my experience in 12 years of teaching in rural schools . . . to a degree. I could scrap the concert band, but influential commmunity members and administrators still expected me to maintain some sort of band–jazz band in this case. I don’t think they would have gone for rock, country, or bluegrass bands. Alone in planning curriculum and concerts? Concerts, yes, although the students were involved here and I could have involved them even more. And, the elementary Christmas operetta was written by the first grade teacher, directed by myself and the sixth grade teacher, the set was painted by the elementary faculty, the PTA made the costumes, and so on and so on–truly a cooperative effort. Curriculum, yes, although we also spent a lot of curriculum planning and professional development time together as high school and elementary faculties. Still, creativity is a great asset to have and budgets can be a challenge although this isn’t true for all rural schools, some of which have excellent facilities and budgets.]
[Both of these items were very true to my experience. I played organ and piano for weddings, furnerals, church, and the local Elks Lodge. And, I taught students K-12–I even taught a bunch of children of former students.]
Difficulties
[This is true as far as the music education profession is concerned; rural music teachers are often isolated from the musicings they engaged in at university and from fellow music teachers, although internet communities make it possible to stay connected. For me, one major connection to the profession was the Mayday Group. On the other hand, rural music teachers do not have to be isolated from colleagues outside of music. Socially? Yes! I spent 6 years living in a small rural community as a single man. That was quite lonely. One other thought . . . many rural schools are quite close to metropolitan areas with all kinds of opportunities for teachers who might feel isolated in rural areas.]
[Okay. I’ve got to take issue with this a little bit. In the first place, racial sameness does not necessarily connote a lack of cultural diversity. Consider additional forms of diversity–occupation, location (town or farm), gender, age, religion, ability, social class. If we look closely and without an anti-rural bias, we may find substantial diversity in rural areas. Secondly, the author is concerned about limited cultural diversity in terms of musical diversity–opportunities to attend a wide variety of concerts. I wonder how many rural music teachers take the opprotunity to attend local performances of country music, for example. In Missouri we have local Oprys. I know quite a few music teachers in the area who don’t attend these events. Why not? This statement seems to be musically elitist–musically omnivorous tastes are superior.]
[Yes, this was true for my social life being young and single. I did develop some lasting friendships that continue to this day (thanks to Facebook!). However, the social challenges seemed to disappear after I married Kristin. Now, we have four kids and I cherish my time with them but also long for a little alone time.
Overall, I’m glad that MENC is concerned about place. I imagine it was Michele Kaschub who contributed the rural stuff–her bio indicates she taught in southern Maine. I would add a couple of advantages to teaching in rural schools. First, there is a real sense of community where people pull together to support the school. Second, the music teacher along with colleagues has a considerable degree of political clout including ready access to the school board consisting of neighbors and sometimes even relatives. I wrote the high school discipline policy and course schedule, for example. Third, many rural settings are extremely beautiful, clean, and quiet. We spent last week out in the West Desert of Utah. We spent one night sleeping on the salt flats under the stars. No concert can compare to an unobstructed (by city lights, see my first post) view of the stars.
Check out the MENC stuff for yourself athttp://www.menc.org/v/future_teachers/backwoods-to-big-city-pluses-and-minuses/ and thanks to MENC for being interested in the topic.
I notice Rural and Urban Music Education being grouped together at multiple conferences along with the assertion that they share a lot of the same challenges. Other than higher levels of poverty than suburban areas, seek I’m not sure I would agree that there are significant similarities. Does it really benefit rural music students and teachers to have their unique concerns grouped with urban concerns? Given the propensity of music education researchers to be interested in urban issues due to the typical location of large research universities in large cities, pharm maybe grouping urban with rural serves to mask the needs of the latter.
During MayDay Colloquium XX, check cialis sale held June of 2009 in Boston, buy cialis Hildegard Froehlich did this lovely wondering-out-loud-thing she does most beautifully. Thinking aloud with us during the opening session she pondered how she felt she was no longer able to refer to students as “mine” or as “her” students, or “my” students.
“That’s nice.” (I remember thinking not so very generously to myself.)
Ah, but then when I recognized the stealth-like meaning of this comment my next reaction was one of those intensely joyous “Ah hah” moments in which your entire world suddenly shifts. In this one brief moment (one that was probably a deliberate pedagogical strategy that was shared as a think-aloud protocol – she really is that lovely and brilliant) she shattered the illusion and desire of ownership. She did away with those possessive pronouns we so easily take for granted and reminded those of us in the room of the hegemony – the maintenance of domination through consensual social practice [1] that is produced in the simple yet insidious use of words.
I have since had a conversation similar to Hildegard’s in every single class I have shared with others. Her insight so shifted my world that I no longer even feel comfortable using the words “my” class, or even the words students “I have taught.” I have so embraced this message that I stumble over describing what I “do” when it comes up with others. I usually settle on something like, “I am one who helps others think about what it might mean to think through what it might mean to teach and learn music.”
Oh, thanks. Sorry I asked.
This conversation with students, as to the shedding of possessive pronouns, is often messy. Their first reaction is why not refer to the class as mine, it lets people know a certain amount of information. Their second reaction is, “But, they are mine.” Well, perhaps in the sense that for 40 minutes twice a week they are in a space of which you are ostensibly and legally “in charge.” But to the extent that a sense of ownership pervades the thinking they do, they creating they do, the singing and moving and playing they do, then no, they certainly aren’t yours. And not only are they not ours, with the cavalier use of these words (these performatives) we succeed in erasing our own presence, our own thinking and musical lives, our own being.
I believe that we ought to consider this use of possessive pronouns as one that leads to the formation of curriculum as self-centered, as one that replicates rather than affords understandings upon which we have no control, upon which we desire no control. We might also consider that the naming of “my” students is what creates, to a certain extent, the differentiation between school music, which often centers upon an individual’s class (”my” class, “my” orchestra) and music making that is engaged in and with elsewhere.
Es mio mio mio! was one of the first sentences I managed to put together in Spanish that brought laughter to my heart. Goodness knows what I was thinking; some moment of selfish poutiness, no doubt. I call it to mind every now and then; often accompanied by foot stomping. The moment brings with it both the remembrance of possession and of the remembrance of moments that can shift one’s world.
Ellos, no son mios.
[1] Darder, A, Baltodano, M., Torres, R. (eds). (2003). The critical pedagogy reader. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer, p. 76.
I came across this grant from Muzak that sounds like a real possibility for an innovative k-12 rural music program.
Here’s the link: http://heart.muzak.com/what/grants.aspx
Rural populations are NOT declining in North America “across the board”. For example, they are declining somewhat in many rural areas that aren’t close to cities, but they are growing in many rural areas within a reasonable commuting distance to metropolitan areas. Rural population growth/decline is a complex issue. The following map details this trend in the United States county by county.
In places where rural populations are declining this trend, I am sure, is one of the major challenges facing rural music teachers. Not only are these teachers expected, despite a relatively small student population, to live up to suburban standards of balanced bands and choirs, but their jobs are threatened as the number of students in the school shrinks to the point of not justifying having a full-time music teacher. Two music teaching jobs in counties surrounding Northwest Missouri State University where I currently teach, for instance, were combined with jobs at neighboring schools this past year. In other words, we lost two music teaching positions. Of course, it was not just the number of students in the school that led to the consolidation, but also the number of students in the music program. So, we need to find ways to keep the students involved–to “fill the seats”. (This might mean changing what we offer, but that’s a topic for another post).
A detailed report on United States rural population trends can be found here:http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/
A thought-provoking episode of Land and Sea on the CBC details the challenges of population decline and issues surrounding the threat of school consolidations on Prince Edward Island:
http://www.cbc.ca/landandsea/2009/09/rural-schools-4501832.html
A detailed report on Canada’s rural population trends can be found here:http://cansim2.statcan.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.pgm?Lang=E&SP_Action=Result&SP_ID=77&SP_TYP=62&SP_Sort=-0&SP_Portal=2
The term culturally relevant pedagogy seems to be gaining a lot of traction these days in education scholarship and practice. Tyrone Howard (2003) writes:
Culturally relevant pedagogy has been described by a number of researchers as an effective means of meeting the academic and social needs of culturally diverse students (Gay, store 2000; Howard, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Shade, Kelly, & Oberg, 1997). Gay (2000) asserts that culturally relevant pedagogy uses “the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant to and effective [for students]…. It teaches to and through strengths of these students. It is culturally validating and affirming” (p. 29). An additional, and some would argue the most important, goal of culturally relevant pedagogy is to increase the academic achievement of culturally diverse students. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NQM/is_3_42/ai_108442646/)
This is all well and good, and I will state here that I basically agree with the description above; it covers the main elements. However, such definitions leave considerable room for variation in pedagogical approach – so the question I would like to ask readers: what does the term culturally relevant pedagogy mean to you as it relates to music teaching at various levels?
This is West Desert High School where I graduated in 1985 as the salutatorian of a graduating class of two–me and my cousin. Grandpa was our guest speaker. Graduation program music performances included a song from the teachers, a song or two from the elementary kids, a song from the high school choir, a performance from the orchestra, and a duet by the graduating class. Music was an important part of our education K-12. Of course, there weren’t enough faculty members to have a specialized music teacher, but we had great teachers who also taught us music. Both elementary teachers sang and played piano and our high school teacher sang and played guitar. Many of our programs were natural extensions of family and community musicing.
You know, there are a lot of small remote schools in North America. In the United States, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there are roughly 8,038 rural public schools (3, 218 of them are “remote”). That’s 56% of the total number of public schools (14,166)! I wonder who’s teaching music at these rural schools. What sorts of musicings take place? How are these rural programs different from the ”standard” suburban school music program? If there are any rural music teachers, students, or music teacher educators ”out there” who are tuning in, I would love to hear from you.
Here’s the URL for the NCES statistics on rural public schools:http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ruraled/page2.asp#many.