MENC on Rural Music Education
Thanks to Cathy Benedict for bringing to my attention MENC’’s latest offering on rural, suburban, and urban music teaching. Here is the rural part with my comments in brackets:
“So, have you thought about where you want to teach? Rural, suburban, urban–how different are they? Janice Smith, Frank Heuser, and Michele Kaschub offer up the rewards and difficulties of teaching in each area.
Rural Teaching
Rewards
- You can design your own music program. You will most likely be alone when planning curriculum and concerts. But be prepared to be creative, as limited budgets and resources require you to see things differently.
[Okay, this was indeed my experience in 12 years of teaching in rural schools . . . to a degree. I could scrap the concert band, but influential commmunity members and administrators still expected me to maintain some sort of band--jazz band in this case. I don't think they would have gone for rock, country, or bluegrass bands. Alone in planning curriculum and concerts? Concerts, yes, although the students were involved here and I could have involved them even more. And, the elementary Christmas operetta was written by the first grade teacher, directed by myself and the sixth grade teacher, the set was painted by the elementary faculty, the PTA made the costumes, and so on and so on--truly a cooperative effort. Curriculum, yes, although we also spent a lot of curriculum planning and professional development time together as high school and elementary faculties. Still, creativity is a great asset to have and budgets can be a challenge although this isn't true for all rural schools, some of which have excellent facilities and budgets.]
- You can observe and contribute to each child’s musical journey because you span multiple grade levels and disciplines.
- You often become admired and cherished community treasures because you “are the music.”
[Both of these items were very true to my experience. I played organ and piano for weddings, furnerals, church, and the local Elks Lodge. And, I taught students K-12--I even taught a bunch of children of former students.]
Difficulties
- Isolation – it can be difficult to be the lone music teacher within a school system.
[This is true as far as the music education profession is concerned; rural music teachers are often isolated from the musicings they engaged in at university and from fellow music teachers, although internet communities make it possible to stay connected. For me, one major connection to the profession was the Mayday Group. On the other hand, rural music teachers do not have to be isolated from colleagues outside of music. Socially? Yes! I spent 6 years living in a small rural community as a single man. That was quite lonely. One other thought . . . many rural schools are quite close to metropolitan areas with all kinds of opportunities for teachers who might feel isolated in rural areas.]
- Limited funds – responsibilities are plentiful, but you often have small budgets.
- Limited diversity – you may have limited access to live performances and limited cultural diversity. There may even be complete cultural uniformity.
[Okay. I've got to take issue with this a little bit. In the first place, racial sameness does not necessarily connote a lack of cultural diversity. Consider additional forms of diversity--occupation, location (town or farm), gender, age, religion, ability, social class. If we look closely and without an anti-rural bias, we may find substantial diversity in rural areas. Secondly, the author is concerned about limited cultural diversity in terms of musical diversity--opportunities to attend a wide variety of concerts. I wonder how many rural music teachers take the opprotunity to attend local performances of country music, for example. In Missouri we have local Oprys. I know quite a few music teachers in the area who don't attend these events. Why not? This statement seems to be musically elitist--musically omnivorous tastes are superior.]
- Social challenges – being one of very few young professionals means having an exceptionally small pool of friends.
[Yes, this was true for my social life being young and single. I did develop some lasting friendships that continue to this day (thanks to Facebook!). However, the social challenges seemed to disappear after I married Kristin. Now, we have four kids and I cherish my time with them but also long for a little alone time.
Overall, I’m glad that MENC is concerned about place. I imagine it was Michele Kaschub who contributed the rural stuff–her bio indicates she taught in southern Maine. I would add a couple of advantages to teaching in rural schools. First, there is a real sense of community where people pull together to support the school. Second, the music teacher along with colleagues has a considerable degree of political clout including ready access to the school board consisting of neighbors and sometimes even relatives. I wrote the high school discipline policy and course schedule, for example. Third, many rural settings are extremely beautiful, clean, and quiet. We spent last week out in the West Desert of Utah. We spent one night sleeping on the salt flats under the stars. No concert can compare to an unobstructed (by city lights, see my first post) view of the stars.
Check out the MENC stuff for yourself at http://www.menc.org/v/future_teachers/backwoods-to-big-city-pluses-and-minuses/ and thanks to MENC for being interested in the topic.
Anti-rural Perspectives 2
Here’s some more from Mr. Gibson:
“A third problem is one that has to do with the rural school children themselves.
Many of these have had little musical experience. They have heard little music and taken part in less up to the time they enter school.
They come into school where there are chi8ldren in seven and eight grades, of varieties of voices of having no singing voices at all. The children are vocally and rhythmically awkward and self conscious as a result in their music efforts.
They look upon music with suspicion and often assume a trivial or fun-making attitude toward it. They are frightened at hearing both their speaking and singing voices because they have not been taught to use them. They have no intelligent basis for music appreciation and therefore little respect for it. They often make fun of anyone who tries to take part in the music lesson, until those who might develop themselves in this subject and help the less musical, give up because of this ridicule. Their habits of expression, or lack of them, are more firmly fixed than are those in less isolated sections, and it is hard to break through these fixed habits.
Meeting all this the rural teacher, unless she is a very determined and well-trained person, gives up in despair.”
Of course, we might say that this rural bias is a thing of the past, but I have heard similar judgements of rural students here at Northwest Missouri State University and elsewhere.
Anti-Rural Perspectives
Here are some anti-rural views from Thomas L. Gibson, Maryland State Supervisor of Music, in 1925.
“First, there is the problem of the adult rural people.
A very large number of this class have had little or no musical experience. They are illiterate in the subject and see no sense in teaching it. There is also a strong prejudice among the residents of some communities toward music. They still regard it as a fad, a frill or a ‘folly.’ In their opinion it does not contribute toward ‘making a living,’ therefore it is a waste of time to teach it.
Then a number of rural people have formed a habit of spending all their ‘waking’ hours under what someone has called ‘the burden of the cry of the soil.’ They have not learned how to relax. They find no time nor have they any disposition or training for recreation. They just sleep, eat and work, day after day throughout all their years.
There is also in some rural families a rather morbid feeling toward life growing out of constant isolation. These families live in themselves and their circle of social sanity and wholesomeness becomes smaller and smaller until they brood in theri own silence, a state of mind far from normal.”
Gibson, Thomas L. (1925). Rural School Music Problems. School Music, 124(6), 32-48.
Wow! I was searching in the archives for an anti-rural-bias. I had no idea I would find anything this “good”.
Rural and Urban
I notice Rural and Urban Music Education being grouped together at multiple conferences along with the assertion that they share a lot of the same challenges. Other than higher levels of poverty than suburban areas, I’m not sure I would agree that there are significant similarities. Does it really benefit rural music students and teachers to have their unique concerns grouped with urban concerns? Given the propensity of music education researchers to be interested in urban issues due to the typical location of large research universities in large cities, maybe grouping urban with rural serves to mask the needs of the latter.
Rural Population Trends
Rural populations are NOT declining in North America “across the board”. For example, they are declining somewhat in many rural areas that aren’t close to cities, but they are growing in many rural areas within a reasonable commuting distance to metropolitan areas. Rural population growth/decline is a complex issue. The following map details this trend in the United States county by county.
In places where rural populations are declining this trend, I am sure, is one of the major challenges facing rural music teachers. Not only are these teachers expected, despite a relatively small student population, to live up to suburban standards of balanced bands and choirs, but their jobs are threatened as the number of students in the school shrinks to the point of not justifying having a full-time music teacher. Two music teaching jobs in counties surrounding Northwest Missouri State University where I currently teach, for instance, were combined with jobs at neighboring schools this past year. In other words, we lost two music teaching positions. Of course, it was not just the number of students in the school that led to the consolidation, but also the number of students in the music program. So, we need to find ways to keep the students involved–to “fill the seats”. (This might mean changing what we offer, but that’s a topic for another post).
A detailed report on United States rural population trends can be found here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/
A thought-provoking episode of Land and Sea on the CBC details the challenges of population decline and issues surrounding the threat of school consolidations on Prince Edward Island:
http://www.cbc.ca/landandsea/2009/09/rural-schools-4501832.html
A detailed report on Canada’s rural population trends can be found here: http://cansim2.statcan.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.pgm?Lang=E&SP_Action=Result&SP_ID=77&SP_TYP=62&SP_Sort=-0&SP_Portal=2
Music Matters Grant
I came across this grant from Muzak that sounds like a real possibility for an innovative k-12 rural music program.
Here’s the link: http://heart.muzak.com/what/grants.aspx
West Desert High School
This is West Desert High School where I graduated in 1985 as the salutatorian of a graduating class of two–me and my cousin. Grandpa was our guest speaker. Graduation program music performances included a song from the teachers, a song or two from the elementary kids, a song from the high school choir, a performance from the orchestra, and a duet by the graduating class. Music was an important part of our education K-12. Of course, there weren’t enough faculty members to have a specialized music teacher, but we had great teachers who also taught us music. Both elementary teachers sang and played piano and our high school teacher sang and played guitar. Many of our programs were natural extensions of family and community musicing.
You know, there are a lot of small remote schools in North America. In the United States, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, there are roughly 8,038 rural public schools (3, 218 of them are “remote”). That’s 56% of the total number of public schools (14,166)! I wonder who’s teaching music at these rural schools. What sorts of musicings take place? How are these rural programs different from the ”standard” suburban school music program? If there are any rural music teachers, students, or music teacher educators ”out there” who are tuning in, I would love to hear from you.
Here’s the URL for the NCES statistics on rural public schools: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/ruraled/page2.asp#many.
“A Bright Array of City Lights”
Credit: NASA
Just to let you all know where I’m coming from: I grew up, learned and taught music in the middle of the “un-lit” region in the middle of the western United States–between Salt Lake City, Utah and Reno, Nevada–the Great Basin. I’m rural through and through and I’m also a music teacher and a teacher of music teachers. So, naturally, I’m interested in exploring how people experience, learn, and teach music in rural places. I’ll share my own experiences and hope that others will share theirs. We might find that our experiences are similar and we might find that they are vastly different. Here are some questions to start us off (and if noone joins in, I’ll just continue on my own): What are the unique challenges and advantages to teaching and learning music in rural schools? How might the identity of a rural music teacher be the same as or different from any other music teacher? How does rural music teaching/learning differ from place to place? How might rural music teaching and learning be transformed to better meet the needs of rural students?
Well, that’s it for my first post. And, by the way, if the title didn’t immediately bring a specific lyric and tune to your mind, here’s the Youtube link:
