“Once you see, you can’t unsee”

Every year, I wait anxiously for this conference. I have been attending every year since 2003 and have only missed two years: once when I was living in France for a year, and last years conference since my daughter was 3 weeks old. I absolutely love the opportunity to catch up with old friends, many of whom I met at Laurier during my undergrad, or teaching colleagues that I have to travel all the way to this conference to have a conversation with. It is an opportunity to be reminded of the good things I already do, and to learn new things that I can apply to my classroom.

Of course, in the context of all the reading I’ve been doing about racism in music education, this year’s conference took on an entirely different tone for me. The three sessions I attended day one were Indigenous-themed. I loved seeing how many people attended each one, it was very encouraging! Looking down the list, however, I was unsurprised to see that many of the same presenters continue to present the same workshops. While the number of social justice-themed workshops has gradually increased over the years, there are always the same workshops year after year.

This year, we had the infamous Dr. John Feierabend, founder of the Feierabend Association of Music Education and he is, to quote his website, “one of the leading authorities on music and movement development in childhood.” Dr. Feierabend was presenting during 5 of the 6 sessions at OMEA, and each time the room would be totally packed. He has developed a large number of resources, several of which I have at my school in my classroom.

In previous years, I would have jumped at the chance to take a workshop from this man. I attended a session of his on his program ‘Conversational Solfege’ during session 5 on Saturday. I was sitting there, looking around at all the teachers around me eagerly taking notes and hanging on his every word, and I realized something. His teaching method leaves NO room for any other music other than Western classical music. At one point, he even said “because of COURSE our goal is to make children love classical music!”, like it should be perfectly obvious to everyone in the room. The fact that I didn’t nod my head like many of the others in the room has signalled a profound change in my thinking. I am no longer willing to take things at face value, even from someone whom I have respected so deeply like Dr. Feierabend.

Friday night I sat down to have a drink and catch up with Brennan Connolly, a percussion prof here at Laurier and an old friend of mine. We were debriefing on the conference and our recent development/evolution in thinking. It was he who pointed out the phrase “once you see, you can’t unsee” with respect to my revelation in Dr. Feierabend’s workshop. I realized that I will now no longer be content to sit in a children’s folksong workshop, without questioning the WHY things are being done. I am realizing that in some ways, things are going to be much harder going back into the classroom, because I will be doing a lot of rethinking of my curriculum and approaches. I know though, that my teaching will be vastly improved as I will seek to give an authentic learning experience to my students through bringing in community members, including a variety of musics, and ensuring that each student sees themselves reflected in my classroom. I don’t think that what I was doing before was wrong necessarily, I just know that I will be able to do it much, much better moving forward!