Community-based learning (or CBL) is defined as “pedagogy in which faculty collaborate with community partners to identify community needs and goals and integrate these…into the academic goals of a course for the mutual benefit of the partner and student learning.” (Oberlin College Bonner Center for Community-Engaged Learning, Teaching, and Research).
At Oberlin, the first course I taught, “Ethnomusicology as Activism,” back in Spring 2016 involved teaching the theory of CBL and applied/ activist ethnomusicology in the first module and the application in the second module. After learning best practices, students designed and implemented individual projects. While the students learned considerably from the challenges of setting up a partnership and implementing the work, I came to understand the model of individual projects employed in that class was not ideal: they were too short term and not sustainable. I mention this because it is as important to talk about the failures–what doesn’t work–as to celebrate the successes.
I needed to couple a course with a specific project.
I designed a new CBL course, “Gamelan as Community Engagement.”
The first iteration of the CBL course was just a half-course, meaning we met as a course for just 2 hours per week. Like the “Ethnomusicology as Activism” course, we learned theory and best practices around community engagement and community music in the first module and implemented the project in the second. Students trained in the first version of the class went on to become paid student facilitators in the second module.
This was the sustainability part missing in “Ethnomusicology as Activism.”
But I still wasn’t satisfied that this was the best version of the course. Following the work of leading service learning practitioner, Tania Mitchell, I completely revamped it to fit what she calls critical service learning (2008), one that moves beyond learning through service to work for systemic change.
Building Community Through Music
I called the new course, now a full course that would meet 4 hrs per week, “Building Community through Music” (Syllabus). Using suggestions by other CBL practitioners in the U.S., I designed a Meta-Question that structured all course content and projects.
Meta-Question: How does the “geography of opportunity” and economic inequality in Lorain structure–and limit–access to educational and musical opportunities? How do we create an accessible, inclusive, and socially-just music program that works to help low-income kids to flourish, create community, and help address educational inequities?
The course had the following learning outcomes for the students. To
- Understand the historical and social causes of economic inequity in Lorain, and the demographics of poverty (how income is inflected by region, race, gender, disability etc.).
- Understand how the “geography of opportunity” and economic inequity structures educational inequities & limits access to music programming.
- Think about why education is a productive way to respond to inequality.
- Learn how to develop and structure accessible, inclusive, empathetic music and educational programming for kids who are low-income and/or of color.
- Understand what elements are necessary in building reciprocal, sustainable programs that make a positive difference in the lives of low-income kids and their families.
What I love about community-based learning is that it intervenes in and disrupts the traditional flow of knowledge in academia: it puts the community at the center, not the institution, myself, or my students.
This project coupled with this class is my version of putting my ethnomusicological skills to work to create a more just world, to put my love into action and commit to transformation in my own backyard, working with and for the community.
Like other ethnomusicological work, this work requires deep historical, demographic, and ethnographic knowledge of the issues facing the community of Lorain, allowing me to apply my interest in power dynamics to understand historical or root causes of contemporary social and economic inequities, and work towards social justice. And like ethnographic research, this engaged project necessitates a deep and ongoing engagement with a community for the duration of the mutually defined project, ideally stemming far beyond the confines of one semester. It requires empathetic listening to understand the community needs and work with partners to meet them.
Unlike some applied work in ethnomusicology, this project is not designed to result in ethnographic knowledge about the musical practices of Lorain or to produce scholarship that palpably makes structural differences. At the heart of my applied praxis is love-as-action–love for these kids and the community in which they live–and an expansion of the ways we think about teaching ethnomusicology, providing experiential and transformative learning for my students that is responsive to community needs.
This class digs into the structural issues leading to social, economic, and educational inequities in order to move beyond charity, outreach and service models, to work together to build something new. It is, I argue, a different application of ethnomusicology, one involving both the teaching and doing of ethnomusicology.
