continued using corresponding themes from Sketches: “I generally try to blend theory with practice so there is a lot of music making along with discussions about peda- gogy and the adolescent learner.”
Acknowledging and Sharing Power During our first class, DeLorenzo shared these
thought-provoking statements: • We teach students who bring rich backgrounds to the classroom.
• We are teaching students to be change agents. • The context of music—it’s historical, cultural, and social dimensions—is often considered ex- traneous to the music itself.
To contextualize our reflection on these statements,
DeLorenzo presented two videos. The first, a documen- tary exposed misinformation surrounding protests led by Black students during the Soweto Uprising1
[School] has to mean more than "I teach my subject." School has to be about teaching people to change the world for the better. If we believe that, then teaching will always be a political act. We can't be afraid of our students' power. Their power will help them make tomorrow better. But before they can do that, we have to give them chances to practice today. (TED, 2017)
Combined, these videos encouraged me (and pre-
sumably DeLorenzo’s students) to begin considering what it might mean to teach music for social justice—to look critically at pedagogy and the balance of power in our classrooms and communities. Our first examination of teacher/student power concluded when DeLorenzo’s students discussed the as- signed reading, Raywid’s (1995) “A Teacher’s Awesome Power.” They surveyed each time the word “power” was used while DeLorenzo recorded main ideas from their discussion on the dry-erase board. Students reviewed their compiled discoveries silently and reflected on the following relationships: (a) between themselves as stu- dents and their former teachers, (b) between themselves as students and DeLorenzo, and (c) between themselves as teachers and their future students. Similarly, my jour- naling during this silence considered my changing role
JANUARY 2021 . Next, we
watched a video featuring Sydney Chaffee, an advocate for social justice teaching. In summation, Chaffee said,
from secondary music teacher to university music teach- er educator.
Intertwining Pedagogy and Social Justice Because my teacher role was starting to look more
like DeLorenzo’s, I asked how she prepares to teach for social justice. DeLorenzo described her preparation as a promise:
I promise them that I will teach them to the best of my knowledge … that I will use the most up to date teaching methods … that they will be prepared to teach general music at the secondary level and what that entails … that they will learn about the behav- iors and the dispositions of middle school or high school students … that they will have concrete teach- ing ideas. (L. DeLorenzo, personal communication, 2020)
DeLorenzo begins her planning with the big ques-
tion: What do I want my students to know at the end of this course? She considers which competencies, habits of mind, and philosophical groundings her preservice mu- sic educators need. From these, she generates five to six essential questions that will guide her in planning the overall arch of the course, e.g., “How can we use music to bring about social change?”, or “How can technology help adolescents shape and express their own complex musical ideas?”
These (and more) questions steered the design of
three exemplar music composition lessons that formed the heart of the course. DeLorenzo presented these les- sons through the social justice lens of climate change guided by this essential question: “What is the connec- tion between nature and music?” To get us started, De- Lorenzo distributed graphs2
presenting climate change
data: melting ice, rising sea levels, increased wildfire ac- tivity, habitat destruction, and unusual weather patterns. She invited us to consider climate change’s dispropor- tionate effect on minoritized people and explore how this awareness might be expressed through music. She asked, “How could you assign pitches to the highs and lows of the graph?” Using a mobile phone piano app, students selected pitches, chromatically centered, and created a “data” melody. Because students had previously created diatonic data melodies, DeLorenzo began the next lesson by lis-
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