Teaching Difficult Topics
Reflections from the Undergraduate Music Classroom
Contributor(s)
Lucas, Olivia R. (editor)
Pruett, Laura Moore (editor)
Language
EnglishAbstract
Teaching Difficult Topics provides a series of on-the-ground reflections from college music instructors working in a wide variety of institutional settings about their approaches to inclusive, supportive pedagogy in the music classroom. Although some imagine the music classroom to be an apolitical space, instructors find themselves increasingly in need of resources for incorporating issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and historical trauma into their classrooms in ways that support student learning and safeguard their classroom communities.
The teaching reflections in Teaching Difficult Topics examine difficult themes that fall into three primary categories: subjects that instructors sense to be controversial or emotionally challenging to discuss, those that derive from or intersect with real-world events that are difficult to process, and bigger-picture discussions of how music studies often focuses on dominant narratives while overlooking other perspectives. Some chapters offer practical guidance, lesson plans, and teaching materials to enable instructors to build discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and traumatic histories into their own classrooms; others take a more global view, reflecting on the importance and relevance of teaching these difficult topics and on how to respond in the music classroom when external events disrupt daily life.
Keywords
music, teaching, undergraduate education, academia, musicology, music theory, race and racism, gender and sexuality, difficult topics, ethnomusicology, pedagogy, inclusive and supportive teachingDOI
10.3998/mpub.12837931ISBN
9780472076963, 9780472056965, 9780472904594Publisher
University of Michigan PressPublisher website
https://www.press.umich.edu/Publication date and place
2024Series
Music and Social Justice,Classification
Music
Techniques of music / music tutorials / teaching of music
Educational strategies and policy
Teaching of a specific subject