When I think about decolonization in the music room, the first thing that comes to my mind is to decenter whiteness AND to center the voices of thinkers and doers of color; especially women of color. Whiteness, Eurocentrism & Androcentrism (centering men) has dictated so much about music education, due to the curriculum/repertoire by way of European classical music, the ensemble/courses offered such as band, orchestra and/or chorus and by the fact that the vast majority of music educators as well as researchers are white. In 2016, over 77% of the teaching profession was White.

Last summer I read the gorgeous and transformative book “Emergent Strategy” by adrienne maree brown. If you can do one good thing for yourself, after drinking water, eating greens and getting enough sleep, IMHO that thing should be buying this book and reading it. You can do so here. In this wee post, I’d like to share the intersections and connections that have crystalized for me in regards to my practice as a radical (music) educator. These days I am more concerned with facilitating liberating, emergent, and healing spaces where students, teachers, and administrators can blossom and self-realize, instead of at best merely surviving. 

1- Small is Good, Small is All. (The Large is a Reflection of the Small)

This capitalistic, neoliberal society I live in tells me everyday that I need bigger, louder, stronger, more expensive things. I recognize that I am socialized to ignore smaller things and instead put more emphasis on bigger things. By making sure that small activities are intentional and loving and through small interactions, like passing students in the hallway (whether they are walking to class, or cutting class) I plan to honor the smallness and powerfulness of it all. If I can make a small ice breaker or a warmup activity feel like liberation, then I can make anything feel like liberation. I hope. I dream. I think. I wish. I aim. I can.

2- Change Is Constant — “Be Like Water.”

We are conditioned and socialized to live “by the book” and to regurgitate curriculum given to us (but also, ugh, ain’t never enough time to lesson plan, triple ugh, so no shade for doing this!). We are expected to be rigid in the ways in which we uphold classroom rules:  ways that either worked for us in previous years,  ways that we read in books- but mostly in ways that folks who have never taught in the classroom have said we should. If we are to facilitate liberation through education, we must embrace change- a change that is rooted in honoring (not just responsive to) every aspect of every one who is in the room. This kind of embrace of change makes it so that curriculum honors the experiences and voices of the humans with whom we are sharing it and encourages us to change it based on who these humans are (students and teachers), where we are at in this given time we are together (emotionally), and where we are in physical space (spatially.) 

3- There is Always Enough Time for the Right Work.

What is the right work? TO BE HAPPY. TO BE IN COMMUNITY. TO BE FREE. How do we do this work? Well, that is a journey for each of us to decide. We don’t have to know where the path ends- we can be in that journey, searching together. For me, this journey looks like this:

a) Center Community Over Skill: As a music maker and music educator, I remind myself that any judgements of how “good” or “bad” my drum circles or rock bands sound is just a judgment based on the way my own mind has been colonized by a Eurocentric system of musicing and music educationing. What is most important, is that the community be in community together- in sound, in breath, in rhythm, in connection, in unity first.The skills will come with time and effort.

b) The “right” work for me, and the community I serve, is to facilitate conversations about identity, intersectionality, community, multi/interculturalism, oppression, liberation, privilege, queerness, race, religion, youth power/powerless, love, heartbreak, ability dis/ability, food, sex, sex education, healthy and unhealthy relationships, connection, voice, activism, Black Lives Matter, Whiteness, immigration, hip hop, improvisation, popular music, technology, among others. For me, every single minute I spend engaging the youth I serve on any of these topics (or others they bring up) is time well spent on doing the right work. “There is always enough time for the right work.” What does it look like for you? I invite you to explore that, and once you know, find ways to room your practice in it.

4- “There is a conversation in the room that only this people at this moment can have. Find it.” — Taj James

This means being open to listening to and hearing the babies. Truly listening from the heart is allowing everyone to have space to explore what freedom is. Owning that I have a hard time with this myself, I am saying that I am committing to being better at this today that I was yesterday and that, as a work in progress, I make space for growing, and for reflecting critically. Now, I am not saying this principle calls for letting students chit chat away during class. But I am saying that (may) be part of it. Speaking literally through this conversation, if we are listening from the heart, and if we develop strong and healthy relationships with the youth we teach, we might be lucky enough to be invited into their spaces, and thus finding what the conversation is about. It has been my personal experience that most of what the “right” work is, has come from such conversations.

5- “Never a failure, always a lesson” — Rihanna

Another way of showing resistance (and self care!)  is to reframe failures as lessons- first for myself, and then to model that lens for my students. I recently transitioned out of a 9 year partnership from a human I still very much love, care for and am bound to. How we are transitioning (not breaking up) how we are separating, is designing the world I want to live in. Acknowledging the pain of things, the complexity of things, the fuckedupness of things, the unfairness of things, while not destroying the things we build (individually and together), not disposing of one another, not abandoning one another because we no longer smash bits together, is teaching me about challenging what winning and what failing is. I don’t yet know what that is, but I am engaged in this lesson.

6- Trust the people. “If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.” — Inversion of a quote by Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, by Stephen Mitchell.

How can we do anything of depth together if we don’t trust each other? What can we do to make people “trust us”?

“There is no liberation without community” — Audre Lorde

“But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do, not just about what we feel. It’s a verb, not just a noun. — bell hooks 

I think trust is the most important thing we can develop, both inside the schoolhouse and outside. Trust needs love, compassion, kindness, openness, and time. Trust needs consistency and freedom.

7- “Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass. Build the resilience by building the relationships.” — Mervyn Marcano’s remix of Stephen Covey’s “speed of trust” concept.

So much of my life as an educator is rushing. So much is about upholding expectations that just because I did a community building drum circle or a theater game once, or even for the whole year, that the kids should just “hurry up and be in community already”. “Move at the speed” of trust is brilliant. It allows for ALL the previous principles. It allows for people to be where they are at the time they are at in the space they are at. It holds space for growing together, pushing each other to take scary steps and knowing that if someone falls, we’ll catch them. “Move at the speed of trust” assures folks that truly “no child will be left behind”. We are where we are, and we are there together.

8- Less Prep, More Presence.

I can’t tell you how many years I spent prepping multi page lesson plans and staying up until 3am doing so to then be in the classroom, totally phoning it in, not present with myself, much less with my students. This principle is about making space for the unknowns, for folks in the room to be together in “not knowing” and challenged to find out what might be possible. After all, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire teaches us that students are not empty vessels, and that the banking model of education is oppressive. Being present with students, and making space for presence, baking it into our practice, our lessons and our demeanor, is liberatory. Can we transform our practice into grounds that are fertile and present? Can presence be in our rubrics, in our planning time, in our agendas? Can we behave like it? Can we embody (and thus model) being present the way we embody preparedness? Making space to be together, is a strategy of emergence.

9- What You Pay Attention to Grows.

This. This. This. This. This a million times. If there is one principle that flexed my brain around and made me a bit more “woke” after reading the book, is that whatever we pay attention to grows. What we focus on, what we water, what we care for, what we tend, is what grows. What do we want to grow in our garden? What do we want to contribute to the land?

What we pay attention to grows. Building requires imagining things differently, and then doing the work toward making that view of the world a reality. Finding and plugging in to a group of people doing the work — together, tending the garden together, coming in unity to make community around the things we want to pay attention to and thus grow them— is where I believe it is at.

• I originally wrote this article for Medium.com in the Summer of 2018. Edited in the Summer of 2019. It can be found here.