Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and …
Continue reading “Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education”
I applied for something that asked for a ten page summary of my doctoral dissertation. Maybe you would like to read it, rather than the full 300 pages? Learning Something Deep: Teaching to Learn and Learning to Teach Hip-Hop in New York City (summary) Image: Toni Blackman leads a middle school songwriting workshop In this …
As of last week, I am the proud recipient of a doctorate in music education from NYU. It was quite a journey! (Isn’t it always?) The official part took me six years, but the whole process really took more like ten years, or twenty, or thirty, depending on how you count. In this post I’ll …
In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy …
This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am …
The hardest songwriting assignment I’m giving to the NYU Pop Music Practicum is to write and record a short original rap verse. The students come from classical, jazz and musical theater backgrounds, and while many of them enjoy listening to rap, almost none have tried making it. So we are all outside of our comfort …
Continue reading “I am making my students write raps and I wrote one too”
This spring I’m having the pleasure of co-teaching the NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum. This is an opportunity to enact my long-held belief that music teachers should know how to write songs. My method for teaching songwriting is to say, okay, go write some songs. But I don’t throw the students straight into the …
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This year, for the first time, I’m co-teaching the NYU Steinhardt Music Education Popular Music Practicum with Dr Kimberly McCord. Kimberly is doing the first half of the semester, and I’m doing the second half. She’s covering live performance and improvisation in the rock and “modern band” idioms, and I’m doing songwriting and remixing in …
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This week I begin another iteration of my NYU class, a music technology crash course for future music teachers. Given the vastness of the subject matter and the constraints of a one-semester course, the challenge is always to figure out what to put in and what to leave out. I continue to take a project-based …
Continue reading “NYU Music Education Technology Practicum syllabus”
My dissertation research includes a methodology of my own invention, which I’m calling analytical remixing. I’m writing about three hip-hop educators, in order to illuminate hip-hop as an education philosophy, not just a subject area. That includes centering the remix as an important and underexplored music education practice. Beyond just writing about remixing, I am making …
