ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: LEARNING PATHWAYS: A PROJECT AND INTERNSHIP REFLECTION Alexandria Pecoraro. Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology, 2021 Thesis Directed By: Professor Fernando Rios, Musicology and Ethnomusicology Division, School of Music This thesis seeks to examine the author?s experiences as an intern for Smithsonian Folkways and their work on the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways project. The aim of the Learning Pathways project was to create an open-source resource for K-12 educators and students that utilizes Smithsonian Folkways large and diverse musical catalogue, while also providing a much-needed resource on musics of diverse populations in the USA and abroad. The background of the project, along with the methodologies used both by the author and the Folkways Learning Pathways team to create learning materials are investigated and reported upon, and the ethical implications of the project are explored. LEARNING PATHWAYS: A PROJECT AND INTERNSHIP REFLECTION by Alexandria Pecoraro Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2021 Advisory Committee: Dr. Fernando Rios, Chair Dr. Siv B. Lie Dr. William Robin ? Copyright by Alexandria Pecoraro 2021 Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................. ii List of Figures .................................................................................................. iii Chapter 1: Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 Overview of Internship .................................................................................. 2 Content Creation ....................................................................................... 2 Academic Writing ...................................................................................... 3 Other Daily Tasks ...................................................................................... 4 Overview of the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways Project .............. 6 Background ............................................................................................... 6 What is a Learning Pathway? ................................................................... 7 Educational Philosophy ............................................................................. 9 Chapter 2: Methods ........................................................................................ 13 Learning Pathways Curriculum ........................................................................... 13 Beginning Steps ...................................................................................... 13 Research ................................................................................................. 14 Resource Creation .................................................................................. 17 Engaging Students Paper .......................................................................... 20 Preparation .............................................................................................. 20 Revision and Submission ........................................................................ 21 Chapter 3: Ethical Considerations .......................................................................... 23 Ethical Considerations ................................................................................ 23 Project Based Concerns ......................................................................... 23 Personal Involvement and Positionality ........................................................ 27 Chapter 4: Conclusion .................................................................................... 30 What was accomplished? ........................................................................... 30 Project ..................................................................................................... 30 Personal Involvement .............................................................................. 31 Implications for Further Research ...................................................................... 31 Bibliography .................................................................................................... 35 ii List of Figures Figure 1 Learning Pathways flow example (Mellizo 2020)??????? 9 iii Chapter 1: Introduction On Saturday, January 18, 2020, I received an email from the Society for Ethnomusicology?s (SEM) listserv that eventually led me to writing this thesis. Dr. Logan Clark, an ethnomusicologist who is the Executive Assistant at Smithsonian Folkways Records, was advertising an education contract position for a new project, at the time formally titled ?Learning Pathways for Music Education: Closing the Gap in Access to Diverse Resources.? The description was very brief, and I did not know what a contract position entailed but I was intrigued by what I saw and sent an email requesting more information. Dr. Clark sent me the grant proposals and the outline of the contract requirements. As someone who decided to leave the world of music education partially out of frustrations with the inequities in musical representation in the K-12 classroom, I was immediately interested in the project?s goals, and its plan for execution. In the end, the contract position was not for me, but I was determined to be a part of the Learning Pathways project. When applications opened up in the spring of 2020, I applied to intern with Smithsonian Folkways, and made sure to talk about my interest in the Learning Pathways project in my cover letter and application. Though there was not originally a position advertised for working on this project, a role was created for me through the interview process. I was accepted and began my 1 work with the Folkways team officially in June of 2020, with Dr. Clark as my principal advisor and mentor throughout the experience. Through the next 6 months, I spent significant portions of my time contributing to this project as a content creator, researcher, writer, copyeditor, licensure and copyright enforcer, and, to my surprise, an education specialist; all of my efforts focused on this Learning Pathways project. This, and the time spent afterward reflecting upon and discussing my experiences with others, represents the culmination of my graduate experience thus far, from both the perspective of using more traditional academic skill sets and from the experiences that can be enhanced by these skill sets in a setting adjacent to, but outside of, the academy. The goal of this document is twofold: to present and explain my work on the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways project, and to contextualize and critique it within the frames of music education and ethnomusicology. Overview of internship experience Content Creation The most significant amount of time that I spent working as an intern was focused on content creation for the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways project. Content creation encompassed the steps from doing research to eventually creating a ready-to-use educational product with 2 activities that aligns with national learning standards. As an intern, I was involved with most of the early to middle aspects of this creative process. When I arrived, there were two contracted employees working solely on this project: Dr. Jennifer Mellizo, who is a music educator at the University of Wyoming Lab School and has studied and researched world music education as a pedagogy in her graduate studies and in her daily practice as an educator, and Dr. Ty-Juana Taylor, who is an ethnomusicologist whose research area focuses on the musics of Africa and of African Americans and is an advocate for educational equity and the diversification of pedagogy. Both women were who I was in most direct contact with throughout my internship, with Dr. Taylor being my mentor on the two Learning Pathways I developed. When I began my work, there was no process in place for creating these Learning Pathways, so my work took shape rather organically, with support and encouragement from Dr. Mellizo and Dr. Taylor. As the process for creating a pathway came to a close, part of my work was to help another intern, who was working from the project management side of things, create a guide to developing additional pathways in the future as the project, hopefully, grows and expands. Academic Writing A major task that I volunteered for during my internship was to draft an academic-facing article for the journal Engaging Students- Essays in Music Pedagogy, with a relatively short turn-around time. As the Learning Pathways 3 team, we discovered the call for papers and collectively decided to ?go for it? about a week and a half before the due date. While the paper was not required to be as substantive or as formal as a typical journal submission (the CFP described the format as a ?blessay? or blog-essay), it was still a relatively tight turn around because of my newness to both the project, and the writing style, in addition to the time I wanted to leave for the team to read and edit (which they used). Though this was a rather stressful process that ultimately ended without a publication, in retrospect it was a great learning experience. Not only did I get to navigate the process of publishing with a lot of support, I experienced writing on behalf of a group and a project that I had to get to know really quickly. I also learned how to work collaboratively on a publication, which is something that I do not often see represented in the more mainstream journals within ethnomusicology. Other Daily Tasks While the majority of my time was spent working directly on content creation, towards the end of my internship especially I spent a significant amount of time on related, but less creatively involved tasks. These two main tasks were copyediting and licensure/media organization. Once the majority of the content creation was completed for the grant- funded pathways, the team collaboratively copyedited and made suggestions on the progress made thus far on the pathways, as well as on their supporting documents. Many of the edits were basic, relying on grammatical, spelling, 4 and word choice, leaving the majority of content and learning outcome specific edits to representatives from the Smithsonian, the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). Licensure organization involved the documenting, citation, and permissions process of using media in our curriculum. Since the Pathways Project is a part of Smithsonian Folkways, we had access to their entire catalogue of music recordings to use with our presentations, so this part of the licensure process was simple, but time consuming. Any other media needed permission to be used. We did our best to utilize Smithsonian-owned materials to ease the process, but this was not always possible. The majority of my work in this area consisted of filling in a detailed spread sheet with information on each piece of media being used in the Learning Pathways. While this was not my favorite part of interning, it provided some valuable experience that I can translate into publishing experience. Aside from these two additional responsibilities and my two major duties outlined above, in a lot of ways, my internship did not follow what a typical Smithsonian Folkways internship would look like. Due to COVID-19 and the ensuing pandemic, my internship was entirely virtual. While there were efforts made to connect interns outside of their respective projects with the larger Folkways and Folkways Recordings community, it was not a key feature of the internship. While I did some networking, it was very different than what I imagine would be spontaneous interaction with other people in a 5 physical space. I suppose the best way to put it was that it felt more like I was a contracted worker for the Learning Pathways Project than that I was having??at least what I would imagine to be based off of expectations from interviewing??a typical Smithsonian internship. Overview of Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways project Background Smithsonian Folkways, and its parent the Smithsonian Institution, have long taken part in public facing education initiatives. For the purposes of this thesis, and for simplicity?s sake, I would like to focus on one of Folkways? most recent and adjacent educational ventures. On the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings website, under the ?Learn? sub-section, there is a large map of the world with small markers denoting the geographical location pertaining to a musical lesson plan. These lesson plans are freely available and widely used, with over 300,000 downloads recorded yearly (Clark 2019). Working with the Folkways team, I learned that the vast majority of these lesson plans are made by educators taking week-long ?World Music Pedagogy? courses offered by Smithsonian Folkways, and developed by Patricia Shehan Campbell. Ultimately, while these lesson plans were created with good intentions, and a similar pedagogical basis, most were not created by culture area specialists and have errors throughout. Folkways had a passive role in educational output through the acceptance of 6 World Music Pedagogy style lesson plans, but there was not a wider pedagogical stance further than exposure and availability. The Pathways Project, at least at its origin, centers Folkways in the creation of educational materials, not only by creating a centralized team and standards for content creation, but also by highlighting the resources available at Folkways, namely the large and independently owned catalogue of music and recorded spoken word materials (Clark 2019). What is a Learning Pathway? The Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways are a set of music curriculums that are targeted for a specific age group and focus on a subject that encompasses one or many musical cultures. Topics were chosen based off of trends in Smithsonian Folkway?s musical catalogue, requirements of the various grants applied to in order to fund the project, and the educational aims detailed in early documentation. Here is a list of titles, subjects, and age groups of Pathways that are currently in progress: ? Power to the People: Sounds of Civil Rights (9th - 12th Grade) ? Si S? Puede: Music of the Chicano Movement (5th - 8th Grade) ? Cajun & Zydeco: Flavors of Southwest Louisiana (4th - 8th Grade) ? Listen What I Gotta Say: Women in the Blues (4th - 8th Grade) ? Music of the Asian Royal Courts (K-3rd Grade) Each of these Pathways contain a set of 12 components that each focus on a topic related to the main theme. Each component contains 3 lessons related to the component?s topic. For example, I worked primarily on the Sounds of 7 Civil Rights Pathway. Within that Pathway I created the Alternate Spaces of Resistance Component, which contains 3 lessons, Music and Politics, Marching Bands, and Record Stores. Each Component is displayed as its own PowerPoint presentation and has an accompanying Teacher?s Guide which outlines the lesson and connects it to NAfME learning standards. Though each Pathway constitutes a full unit on a subject, the Components don?t need to be used in their entirety, can be used out of order, or can even be supplemented by a teacher?s own activities. In its design, we wanted to create a product that teachers can approach one component or lesson at a time, in order to best fit into a class. In the above list, you can see that three of the Pathways are appropriate for around the same age group. One of the goals was to engage teachers across different main topic areas to teach lessons with similar themes but a different musical background. Within our Component PowerPoints we have some of these different usages suggested. Here is a visual example that is provided to teachers, using our Chicano Movement Pathway. 8 Fig. 1 Learning Pathways flow example (Mellizo 2020) Educational Philosophy The educational philosophy behind this project evolved from the first grant proposal documents to my time working on the project as an intern. While much of the original rationale still holds, the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil unrest that characterized the summer of 2020 deeply affected the way that we viewed and approached our work. By the time that we as a team were reaching out to SEM, NAfME, and individual educators to tell them about our project in the summer of 2020, we had condensed our aims into four separate points. Education, and more often music education, is in equitable in its access to low-income or ?Title-1? schools. In acknowledgement of this, the 9 Learning Pathways project is totally free to use for educators. While computer technology is the medium through which the materials are accessed, the materials themselves, after retrieved, do not require high processing power or even internet access. The Learning Pathways are adaptable to different classroom situations, and teachers are encouraged to edit as needed. In addition to providing a free, but substantive and professionally made and researched learning material, many of the Learning Pathways directly address the culture, histories, and musical styles of diverse populations that are often represented among students in low-income schools. The musics of BIPOC students are often not taught as a standard part of a music curriculum and the Learning Pathways project seeks to ensure that these students see themselves as ?part of the American story? (Mellizo 2020). A relatively new, but widely accepted standard for new educational materials is a larger usage of primary source materials. This is an aim of Common Core Standards as well as educational shifts for which NAfME has advocated for music education specifically (Mellizo 2020). The Learning Pathways use Folkways-owned recordings as primary sources and supplements them with Smithsonian-owned images and media (including images, videos, and sound files). Not all of the recorded sound is musical in nature; for example, in the Pathway based upon the Civil Rights Era, we used Folkways recordings of speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and other members of the movement. 10 The Learning Pathways provide an integrated approach to music education, meaning that music is examined through a larger variety of contexts than is normally present in a typical K12 music learning space. These frames include performance and history, but they also take influence from the ethnomusicological creators of this project by infusing the examination of music as a social process. This contextualization of music is congruent with research supporting the deep learning outcomes of this type of curriculum (Mellizo 2020). Lastly, the team working on this project acknowledged that while many teachers view introducing diverse perspectives into their classroom positively, they lack the confidence or expertise to implement lessons about those topics (Mellizo 2020). The Learning Pathways project attempts to create a complete product that is easily accessible to teachers and tackles some of these issues through the provision of a deeply contextualized resource. The Learning Pathways do not, however, provide additional support or guidance to teachers about how to use and talk about the information given in the resource, something that I believe is an overlooked and important part of empowering teachers to teach this material. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the advertisement and rationale of the Learning Pathways project?s importance as a specifically digital resource, something that was not emphasized in early documentation and grant proposals for this project. Regrettably, the low funding for this project prevented an earlier roll out that might have made a profound difference in 11 some of the online-based learning that was foundational to music education this past year. 12 Chapter 2: Methods Learning Pathways Curriculum Development Beginning Steps When I began my internship, my interviewing team asked which Learning Pathway I would be most interested in working on. The Pathways available to me were varied in content matter and age range (as you can see in the previous section) and ultimately the Sounds of Civil Rights met my interests, abilities, and content area knowledge most completely. My areas of research interest??music, social movements, and social justice choral activities??relate directly to the vast majority of what was being proposed to be covered in this Learning Pathway. One aspect of early content creation to which I did not expect to be a major contributor to was the organization, explanation, and assignment of NAfME standards. My ability to do so can be attributed to both the age range of the Learning Pathway I worked with, and my experiences as a music education undergraduate student. The age range, 9th?12th grade, is the one I had the most experience working with as a high school teaching intern in my undergraduate degree, as well as in teaching English as a foreign language. Having done extensive work in my undergraduate degree on assessment, content creation, and standards based teaching, I had a skill set and familiarity with the ?education? side of our work at the high school level that was not present among other members of the team. One of the first major 13 tasks I completed was compiling the NAfME high school standards and creating a guide for usage. For K?8 general music classes, the standards are all in one document; however, on the NAfME website, the high school standards are broken into four different course types. I ended up reading and synthesizing the four separate documents, and recording where they overlapped. Thankfully, the basic standards were the same across all four class types, but some of the language was changed to accompany different modes of music making. Prior to my involvement with the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways project, the team had already completed some Learning Pathway components, and prior to their work in the spring of 2020, some proof-of- concept prototypes were made by Harvard Fellows Faye Zhang and Julie Estrada and Graduate Fellow Glen Patterson (Clark 2019). While I personally did not interact with the initial prototypes, I did base my own work on the completed or in-progress components made by Dr. Mellizo, and my direct supervisor Dr. Taylor. Research When I began my work on the Sounds of Civil Rights Learning Pathway, Dr. Taylor had an overall idea of what she wanted to cover in the Learning Pathway and had most of the components covered. Together, we brainstormed different ideas and approaches to the topic and came up with 11 of the 12 required component topics. For the last component, my thought process in coming up with a topic was a little unconventional for our project, 14 but it ended up working and being included in the final draft of the Learning Pathway. The Sounds of Civil Rights Learning Pathway is currently the only Pathway in production for high school aged students. High school music classes are overwhelmingly (at least before the COVID-19 pandemic) performance-based in title and practice (for example, band, orchestra, and chorus are standard class options). The majority of music-making that we were going to cover in this Learning Pathway was vocally centered. Due to the nature of the Learning Pathways project, this provides several components for teachers to use as an introduction to our materials without necessarily requiring them to commit to an entire Pathway. Essentially, it gives teachers and accessible, standards-driven ?in? to our materials that is immediately applicable to the daily music-making already happening in their classrooms. Choir and vocally-driven music were well covered in this Learning Pathway, however, there were no direct connections being made to instrumental music, which constitutes a significant portion of high-school music classrooms. Though I do not have a strong background in instrumental music, I knew that there was something to be discussed here that would create a direct entry point for instrumental music classrooms. One of the first things I thought of were marching bands. I knew that marching bands at HBCUs had received national attention in the late 1950s and 1960s through their appearances on national television. Though not of marching bands, 15 Smithsonian Folkways owned several recordings of African American community bands from the early 1900s, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture had several images and resources pertaining to African Americans and bands. Between all of these primary sources, I decided to use this as a lesson in the twelfth component. This still left two lessons to account for, and an overall theme to tie them together. I decided to continue on with this idea of giving different types of classes an ?in? to this product, and eventually landed on the idea of space reclamation and Black-owned record stores. Though perhaps not my finest way of making a connection, the idea to look into that topic sprung from my familiarity with the musical Hairspray, which uses a Black-owned record store as a major setting and place for community building for the Black characters in the musical. From this connection, I researched to see if this was a historically-accurate phenomenon. While the sources I was able to access were limited, they were sufficient to plan a high school level lesson around. When preparing this lesson, I had social studies and civics classes in mind, a secondary goal of the Learning Pathways. The final lesson I created in this component, which turned out to be positioned as the first presented to students, focused on definitions of politics. This lesson was inspired by a lecture given by Dr. Nicole Powlison for the Impact of Music on Life undergraduate course at UMD during the Spring semester of 2020. I interacted with this material deeply as a TA and used her 16 sources to reconfigure the information and focus to be more appropriate for a high school level. As an entry point to the sections on marching bands and record stores, the focus on widening student?s ideas about politics serves to illustrate the significance of two seemingly apolitical entities. Of the two that I was in charge of, Alternate Spaces of Resistance was the one that I spent the most time conceptualizing. The other component, Children in Protest was mostly outlined, conceptualized, and researched prior to my involvement in its creation, but I made some edits and additions at this stage to better fit the format that was solidifying across the content creation team. Resource Creation With the content researched and outlined, I created a document for each component in which the content of each lesson was written in an accessible, often narrative fashion. These narrative content explanations exist in an edited form in the Teacher Guides for each component. From these content explanations, I separated blocks of information into what would later become slides. I distilled the major take-aways for each set of information, and created student facing information based on those main take-aways. With the content-focused slides developed, I went on to about pedagogical framing and activities. The creation of activities related to content was one of the most difficult parts of content creation for me. At this point, I had been a Graduate teaching assistant for a year, and had been concurrently teaching and taking courses 17 in education for five years, but my background in music education was largely not helpful in creating the types of materials the Learning Pathways required. The most helpful aspect of my teacher education in creating curriculum was work that I did responding to lectures and planning discussion sessions based on a narrow topic as a graduate teaching assistant. I tapped into those experiences and relied heavily on the models put forth by other content creators on the team. I was also influenced by Dr. Patricia Shehan Campbell?s World Music Pedagogy and her work that influenced the foundations of the Folkways Learning Pathways project (Campbell 2018). When the activities and content were created, I spent time locating media to use on the slides. The majority of the media used is owned or licensed by some part of the Smithsonian organization, to simplify the copyright adherence process. All of this, the content, activities, and media, was put into a PowerPoint for each component, and some basic formatting was completed on the content creator?s end. From this point forward, my work was in the hands of other people. My major work on both components that I was in charge of completed in late August of 2020. Though August was full of internal editing by the various other content creators and interns, perhaps the most important overview and editing happened after this point. By the end of August, the content for the entire Learning Pathway for Sounds of Civil Rights was completed, and though the formatting and presentation still had a ways to go (a template and formatting suggestions 18 were being made professionally by a graphic design branch of the Smithsonian), the content was ready for the next steps of approval. As a condition of the Smithsonian Youth Access Grant, which helped to fund many of the early Learning Pathways, reciprocal ?funding? had to be acquired for the grant to be awarded (Clark 2019). Rather than get monetary funds to meet this requirement (something that I know from conversation that they tried, but were unsuccessful in procuring), the Folkways education team asked for help in the form of, essentially, voluntary labor from and affiliation with two major music related associations, NAfME (National Association for Music Education) and SEM (Society for Ethnomusicology). With regard to content creation, the goal was to have a member from each of these organizations review and offer feedback on each Learning Pathway. The SEM member would have a content area knowledge of the Learning Pathway, and the NAfME member would be familiar with the needs and curriculums of the grade levels represented. The review process involving the above parties, in addition to a Smithsonian Curator assigned to each Learning Pathway, started after our initial completion of the Learning Pathway in August. From that point through my departure from the internship in November of 2020 and the writing of this document, I did not receive any correspondence from reviewers, so I did not have any involvement in revisions of the materials I created based on reviewer feedback, nor did I have access to this feedback. This is a process 19 that I would have liked to have been a part of, and I am hoping that other content creators are not in similar positions with feedback as I am. Concurrently, the design template for the Learning Pathways was being developed and changed fairly frequently, but by the time I left my internship, there was yet to be a unified system decided upon. The most recent versions of the components I created for the Sounds of Civil Rights are not yet available publicly through Smithsonian Folkways? Beta testing of the Learning Pathways project, but I was able to retrieve the most recent edit as of March 2021, and other than formatting, there were minimal differences between that and what I submitted in August of 2020. Engaging Students Paper Submission Preparation During one of our weekly team meetings in late June of 2020, one of the members brought up a call for papers that she had recently received for the online journal Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy. The issue they were seeking entries for was entitled ?Beyond Western Musicalities? and sought to center diverse repertoires to teach music (Colletti 2020). Though it was brought up that this journal focused on collegiate music pedagogy, and more specifically music theory pedagogy, the team thought that it might be a good idea to submit a paper on the Learning Pathways project as a way to inform, explain, and gain support from that audience. 20 The deadline for submission was about two weeks away from that initial introduction to the call for papers, and I expressed my interest in drafting the initial text. I had not at that point submitted to a journal, so I was excited to have an opportunity to do so in such a supportive space. The team made themselves available to answer any questions I may have about the project and its origins, and I was directed to several materials and folders of research to base my writing off of. We brainstormed some connections to collegiate pedagogy and linked some of the educational philosophy and aims to the Black Lives Matter movement, something that was a new addition to our collective philosophy in creating these Learning Pathways. We decided that I would have a draft ready before the meeting the following week, giving me a week to organize materials and write a draft. To be honest, the writing process for this was not difficult for me. I had plenty of materials to work with, a solid understanding of the project, and a fairly comprehensive outline to work with. Revision and Submission The next week before the group meeting, I sent my draft to the group. We spent a little time reviewing it in the meeting, and the response was largely positive with people sending more detailed edits after the meeting. I incorporated the edits and was waiting on one member of the team, Dr. Huib Schippers, for his edits and final approval. When I received those, closer to the submission date, they were more significant than the previous edits, but this was expected from feedback. I ensured that everything was formatted 21 and cited correctly for the journal?s style guide and filled most of the paperwork. After meeting with the team one last time, we determined that the entire team would be credited, but I would be listed as the first author and Dr. Schippers as the second. We submitted the paper before the July 3rd due date, hopeful that we might have publication about our project prior to launching it, but also aware that our work did not line up exactly with the expressed aims of the journal in question. Less than a month later we received a response from the journal, a rejection, which was not entirely unexpected. Rejection aside, this was a useful exercise, not only for me as an early career scholar without much practice in publication, but as a team to regroup and reaffirm our goals for the project. Most of the materials I worked with to write my draft were created before the pandemic and before the rise in public consciousness of movements like Black Lives Matter, and these two things deeply affected our work on a daily basis. They affected our motivation and the rationale for the types of materials we were creating. This is something we address, albeit briefly, in the paper; however, the shift in approach was noticeable in meetings following this paper being written. 22 Chapter 3: Ethical Considerations Ethical Considerations Project Based Concerns The ultimate aim of the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways project was to create an accessible resource for teachers that explores diverse musical traditions through the lens of culture and history. As the first round of Learning Pathways begin to be tested by teachers, it is reasonable to say that that aim has been met. The resources are free and open to educators, diverse musics are represented with a focus on the musics of US minority populations, and culture and history are discussed throughout the Learning Pathways. Throughout my involvement with the project, we had to address several issues pertaining to access, accessibility, and compensation. Each of these issues was an important aspect of the work we were doing, but they were addressed in different ways. From the beginning of the project the intent was to have the Learning Pathways freely available to teachers and students. This was evident in the early grant documents (Clark 2019) as well as in conversations I had with team members who had been on the project for a longer period of time than I have been. The issue of resource disparity in schools was a driving factor to this decision, and we kept this in mind when building our materials. The format of our Learning Pathways is computer based but does not have significant technological needs. The overall format is a PowerPoint 23 presentation that has embedded media. This media is downloaded at the same time as the PowerPoint, so stable WiFi is not needed to teach, and there are no plug-ins needed to download. The videos included are largely supplemental and recommended, but not required in most lessons, meaning that if a teacher did not have computer projection capabilities, they could possibly print out the PowerPoint slides and use other methods of projection or distribution. In introductory literature to the Learning Pathways (Mellizo 2020), we encourage educators to use the Learning Pathways in ways they find useful. This, in theory, could mean completely bypassing the PowerPoints and using the content in the Teacher Guide to build a unique lesson that fits to the needs of that educator?s students. The ability for an educator to adapt materials to their own needs flows into the challenges of accessibility that we sought to overcome. One of the other interns for this project had a background in educational design, and around the time we were working with a graphic design team he was tasked with researching design best practices for educational materials so that they may be used by the widest possible audience. Though I was not a part of most of these conversations, they resulted in some tangible changes in the formatting of the PowerPoint presentations. Some adaptations were the usage of standard text font and sizing, limited color and design palate, provision of separate lyric sheets for student usage, and text description of some images. These were adopted and adapted to most Learning Pathways, though at the time of writing this thesis, the Sounds of Civil Rights Learning 24 Pathway these guidelines were implemented inconsistently. Though this was not discussed to my knowledge, an additional consideration that may be of benefit for the aim of accessibility is the transcribing of any video paired with a description of the video to be used when technological ability to play a video is unavailable, as well as to assist people with vision and hearing difficulties when interacting with the Learning Pathways. The last ethical issue I would like to discuss on the level of the project itself is the issue of funding and compensation. As previously discussed, the end product will be free to use for educators and students. As of the time of writing, we will not charge educators or students for the materials and included audio tracks from Smithsonian Folkway?s collection that are embedded in the PowerPoint presentations. This means there is no promise or possibility of income from this project, and it still needs to be funded in some way to be created. Though as an intern, I was not privy to the financial politics of the entire situation, I was able to piece together some information. There is one full-time staff member of Folkways working on the Learning Pathways project, but it is not a primary objective of their position. There is currently not a position at Smithsonian Folkways that focuses on their educational output. While I was a part of the team working on the project, there were two paid contract workers doing the majority of the work on the project. Throughout the summer and fall there were several interns working on the project. My internship was unpaid, as were most of the other interns. There was some interaction with Fellows who would help with sourcing 25 content and those positions were paid. All of this to say, there is not a permanent team continually working on this project and precarity is a common factor at play in the creation of materials. The lack of compensation or sufficient staffing is not the fault of one person, but indicative of a larger funding issue in the department, as far as I can tell. This issue does not just exist internally when working on the project, however; it is also affecting the ways we are reaching out and asking for labor from the academic community. As described in the Methodology section, we partnered with SEM and NAfME as an aim to get those communities involved, but specifically to meet a reciprocal agreement for funding in order to obtain a grant. In effect, these organizations guaranteed labor from their constituents as a ?source of funding?. This is probably common as far as grants and large organizations go, but the ends to which these means produce are challenging to consider. On behalf of the organizations that gave us support and a guarantee of labor, we were often the people to reach out to people in those organizations to help, in the beginning, review our work. More often than not, the people we called upon were early career scholars, BIPOC, and/or underemployed. Everybody has a right to compensation for their labor, but the fact that as a de facto arm of the Smithsonian, a large educational association, we were asking people in potentially precarious economic situations to do specialized academic labor without monetary compensation to this day does not sit well with me. As an unpaid intern, I was a part of this process and arguably part of the problem. Having the privilege of financial stability, I took an internship 26 knowing that I would not receive monetary compensation for my labor. By participating in this system, I am, in a way, upholding that system. This stream of thought is influencing my interactions with the Learning Pathways project moving forward. Personal Involvement and Positionality Aside from the issues we encountered as a team, there was one aspect of this work in particular that I struggled with the ethical implications of, and it largely had to do with the subject matter that I was responsible for creating content for. For the Sounds of Civil Rights Learning Pathway, the aim was to examine and teach using the musics and recorded sounds of African Americans primarily during, but also before and after, the Civil Rights era of the 1950?s and 1960?s. While I had a background in researching music and social movements, a skill I used when building content and theorizing lessons within the Learning Pathway, at that point I did not have a scholarly background on African American musics, or the Civil Rights Era further than a unit in a college level American history course. I do not want to discount my ability to do research, find sources, and write and present intelligently and fairly on those sources, but the implications of my work, and the potentially large audience interacting with it, really made me consider my positionality in creating this resource. Though I was not doing original research, rather I was compiling sources and synthesizing their information, I was concerned that my point of view as a white woman was affecting the representation of the materials I chose to include. To be honest, 27 much of this crisis of representation and my thought about it occurred after I had left my internship, though I was aware of my positionality when making the components I worked on. At that point, I had decided when possible, to learn about the topics I was writing about through research and literature written by people of color, and when possible, linking that research as a resource in the bibliography for further information for students or teachers. Another aspect of the process that is worth discussing, though I am regrettably not part of this dialogue, is that my work was ostensibly checked by three, separate and unrelated sources. To my knowledge, before the Learning Pathway is released, it will be assessed by a curator at the Smithsonian (for the Pathway I worked on, this curator would be from NMAAHC, the National Museum of African American History and Culture), a content area specialist from SEM, and an educational specialist from NAfME. This level of oversight, in addition to the collaboration from other team members and guidance of one of my mentors, Dr. Taylor, brings me some amount of comfort in regard to the representation of different points of view in the lessons I have created. This process has affected the way that I approach my work and position as a scholar. Throughout the last two years of ethnomusicological coursework, one of the discussions I have taken most to heart is that of reflexivity and reciprocity, and my work with Smithsonian Folkways and the Learning Pathways project has given me the opportunity to examine my 28 beliefs and actions pertaining to these topics in a way that may not be as evident in a more traditional ethnographic project. 29 Chapter 4: Conclusion What was accomplished? Project Currently, the Learning Pathways project is involved in a Beta test on the Smithsonian Folkways website. Essentially, it surveys teachers on their interest and pairs them with a Learning Pathway to teach a lesson or two from. Following their usage of the materials, the survey asks questions about the demographics of the classroom materials were used in, the teacher?s satisfaction with the materials, and the student?s satisfaction with the materials. Using this data, the team working on the Learning Pathways project at this point will take feedback and edit the Pathways as is needed, and, hopefully, entire Learning Pathways will be published for public use within the next year. Ultimately, this project represents a gravely needed resource for music educators and their students. It provides a repository of related, and well researched (pedagogically and contextually) resources and lessons that can be used in a culturally sensitive way by teachers with little to no experience with the source material. Hopefully as this project grows out of its initial stages, even more cultural perspectives can be explored and introduced to teachers through this program. For all the good it has the potential to do, I hope that this is only one of the first steps taken to integrate diverse musics and viewpoints into the music 30 classroom. These Pathways provide a resource that is sorely needed, but they do not constitute a solution to the various structural issues music education in this country has in relation to representation of diverse musical cultures, and for racial equity in the music classroom. Personal Involvement My work on this project represents the growth and skills procured through my masters degree at UMD combined with my work in the field of music education preceding this experience. Research skills combined with public facing writing and educational curriculum writing in the process of content creation, and I was able to submit a piece of writing to a journal for the first time. The skills and knowledge procured in the classroom had very applied usages which I had the opportunity to use and investigate while also in partnership with a prestigious institution. I also learned how to work on a large-scale project with a team, something I hope I can continue to do as a member of student based organizations in my PhD, and beyond as an educator and someone who hopes to build educational products like this again. Implications for further research The accomplishments of both the Folkways Learning Pathways Project as an entity, and the growth I experienced as a member of the team involved in much of its initial planning are significant. This work will reach a lot of classrooms and color the experiences of how students interact with music in 31 a, hopefully, positive way. This project will help teachers incorporate music from outside of the typical western classical paradigm through which many American music classrooms operate. However, when critically examining this project, I cannot escape from the thought that it is simply a band-aid covering a much deeper systemic issue in music education and scholarship. Something that has been discussed both within the field of ethnomusicology (Brown 2020), and by emerging figures in music education (Hein 2020). This frustration is exemplified even in the attempt to write the paragraph you are now reading. The American music education system, and by proxy the institution whose job it is to train our music teachers, is unequipped to educate students on musics outside of those related to the western classical tradition. As exemplified in Loren Kajikawa?s essay ?The Possessive Investment in Classical Music?, while American schools of music have diversified their course offerings while maintaining a narrow view of what ?music proficiency? means for their major students (2019) (Robin 2020). To expand, schools of music often offer coursework outside of the area of classical music, but these courses are relegated to electives, single outliers in requirements, or classes specifically for non-majors. While there are no direct allusions to music education majors in Kajikawa?s work, they are often taught and expected to adhere to similar standards to their performance driven counterparts. Essentially, the connection between American schools of music in this context, and American K-12 music education, is that they share some of the same structural issues in regard to the teaching and supporting of non- 32 classical musics. There are two aspects, on the front of K-12 music education, that I would like to explore further to better contextualize this statement. Firstly, after elementary school, music class typically transforms into a performance ensemble model. Students learn music as a mode of performance and production. There are distinct benefits to this model, and I do not advocate for its removal; however, the nature and expectations of these ensembles as they are often leave little space for cultural and historical contextualization, which I think is a necessary first step to the incorporation of musics outside to the western classical canon and the other selected standards in K-12 music education. This was not something taught as a part of my curriculum as a music education major or experienced by me in any K- 12 music education experience. This is something, rather, that I learned through my interests in musicology and ethnomusicology. Secondly, the majority of music educators are trained, sometimes exclusively, in western classical music (sometimes jazz is available as an alternative, for example, it was in my undergraduate degree for Music Education, but not for vocalists). This is something I would like to do more research on in order to verify this information. If true, this limits the musical experiences and education of our educators. To oversimplify, to get a degree in music education at most universities you have to be able to sing or play an instrument classically, and study the theory, history, technique and performance of that style, and take music education coursework. Some 33 universities require a ?world music? course or elective, but the training given to our teachers is rooted almost exclusively in the classical, and occasionally jazz, world. The Learning Pathways project equips teachers with carefully planned and complete materials to use in their classrooms that use diverse musical styles and examples while interacting with students musically, often without using performance as the mode of inquiry. Even in the intent of creating these materials it was noted that they were ideal for teachers who did not feel comfortable with or did not know how to incorporate diverse music in the classroom (Mellizo 2020). Working on this project has ultimately given me the opportunity to explore these issues in a new way. Using my background in ethnomusicology, I am interested in the ways that music pedagogy is taught in different cultural contexts, and how those ways of knowing and teaching can be examined to inform our own musical practice. An exercise that I think may prove insightful would be the examination of pedagogy texts used in the United States from an ethnographic perspective. With these two major aspects of music education examined, I am really excited at the possibilities to enact change as an ethnomusicologist and a music educator. As my career progresses, I hope to be involved in changes in policy and practice pertaining to the training of music educators, and, hopefully, the ways by which we approach the teaching of music to children in this country. 34 Bibliography Allsup, Randall Everett, and Eric Shieh. 2012. "Social Justice and Music Education: The Call for a Public Pedagogy." 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Philosophy of Music Education Review 21, no. 1 (2013): 66-91. Hunter, Justin R, ed. 2015. ?Ethnomusicology and Music Education.? SEM Student News 11: 4?25. https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.ethnomusicology.org/resource/group/dc75b 7e7-47d7-4d59-a660-19c3e0f7c83e/publications/SEMSN11.pdf. Johansen, Geir. 2013. "Music Education and the Role of Comparative Studies in a Globalized World." Philosophy of Music Education Review 21, no. 1 (2013): 41-51. Kajikawa, Loren. 2019. ?The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music.? Essay. In Seeing Race Again : Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberl? Williams Crenshaw. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Mellizo, Jennifer. 2020. ?About the Smithsonian Folkways Learning Pathways? Nettl, Bruno. 1995. Heartland Excursions. Urbana, Il: University of Illinois Press. Pettan, Svanibor, and Jeff Todd Titon, eds. 2015. An Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Rice, Timothy. 2003. "The Ethnomusicology of Music Learning and Teaching." College Music Symposium 43 (2003): 65-85. Richerme, Lauren Kapalka. 2016. "To Name or Not to Name? Social Justice, Poststructuralism, and Music Teacher Education." Philosophy of Music Education Review 24, no. 1 (2016): 84-102. Robin, Will. 2020. ?Music Schools and White Supremacy with Loren Kajikawa? Sound Expertise. July, 2020. Podcast, MP3 Audio, 39:31. Rideout, Roger. 2005. "Whose Music? Music Education and Cultural Issues." Music Educators Journal 91, no. 4 (2005): 39-41. Schippers, Huib. 2010. Facing the Music: Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press 36 Stanton, Burke. 2018. "Musicking in the Borders toward Decolonizing Methodologies." Philosophy of Music Education Review 26, no. 1 (2018): 4-23. Talbot, Brent C, ed. 2018. Marginalized Voices in Music Education. 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