I’m proud to announce the publication of A Music Pedagogy for Our Time: Conversation and Critique, edited by Frank Abrahams. Frank and I co-authored a chapter on critical race theory in music education. Check it out!
Academic publishing moves at a slow pace. When we started writing, critical race theory was beginning to be a hot topic in the music academy, but it was unheard of in the larger world. By the time we were in final edits, CRT was an obsession of American right-wing media, and its teaching had been banned in twelve states, along with many more municipalities. We had been planning to simply explain what CRT is and how it applies to music ed, and illustrate this theoretical material with some stories from our own teaching lives. However, we ended up devoting a big chunk of prose to a discussion of what Fox News imagines CRT to be, an examination of anti-CRT laws, and the larger hysteria around “wokeness.” This was a harder writing project, but I’m glad we did it.
The intended audience for this book is not academics or activists, it’s “apolitical” music teachers. The publisher was concerned that a couple of chapters would be too controversial for such readers, including ours. So we went through many more rounds of editing than this kind of book chapter normally would. We had to calibrate the language so that “non-woke” music teachers wouldn’t just throw the book across the room when they saw CRT in the table of contents. This is why we decided to lead with a thorough debunking of the mythology around CRT before even getting into what it actually is.
One might question whether two older white dudes are the right people to be explaining CRT. I had some qualms about this, but there are some benefits to our positionality. Frank has a highly traditional choral directing background, so his perspective is a relatable one for people with similar backgrounds. Frank tells stories of teaching in Brazil and experiencing a very different approach to group singing than the one he was used to. The first-person perspective will probably reach some folks who aren’t moved by our more abstract arguments.
Anyway, we worked really hard on this and I’m proud of it. Pick up a copy!