Community Engagement

I first became interested in community engagement when I was in graduate school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I had a couple of student jobs, including working in the education section at the Spurlock Museum and as a student assistant in the Center for World Music. In both these positions, I helped create programming and/or exhibits for the public or K-12 audiences.

At Oberlin, I started exploring community engagement work after I received tenure, creating the class “Ethnomusicology as Activism” where students designed and implemented individual projects. I later incorporated an optional community-engagement project into my Introduction to Ethnomusicology class with a partnership with a music teacher at the local elementary school.

But this work really came to the forefront for me personally following the 2016 U.S. election. I needed to do more. I wanted to use my ethnomusicological training and skills to work towards creating a more socially just world, to address issues and communities that would be impacted by shifts in policies. 

I had long wanted to create a gamelan project for kids, but I didn’t want to just provide an opportunity for kids of Oberlin faculty and staff, who already had access to many wonderful educational opportunities. After nine months of thinking intentionally about the project and exploring possible partnerships, I created a new class coupled with a community music program, Bang on a Gong.

The idea was to learn best practices of community engagement and the theory of community music in the first module and put it all into practice with a program for kids in the second module. For two years, we partnered with an after-school program for low-income kids at the Salvation Army center in the nearby city of Lorain. The Oberlin College students trained in these classes would go on to become student facilitators in following semesters.

Although the synergy between the courses and the program is great, it is worth talking about the two separately.