Carolina/CMS Summit 2.0 (January 2019)
I still think of curriculum in these four categories: Music Core courses are ones that everyone takes, and have the greatest REACH; Large Ensembles also reach all the students but are all different, they have the advantage of CONTACT TIME; Individual Experiences, such as lessons and advising allow for the greatest PERSONALIZATION, and upper-level Topics classes allow for the greatest SPECIALIZATION
The Carolina/CMS Summit 2.0 held January 18-20, 2019 was without a doubt the most impactful conference I’d attended to that point. It was structured as a game in which everyone was assigned to either the performance or education faculty of one of three branch campuses (A, B, and C). We were tasked with re-imagining the degrees around randomly-selected themes using only syllabus-level changes. Strategy sessions were complemented by presentations from leaders in the field, a performance by Roomful of Teeth, and am exposition of the university’s Chinese film collection. I was assigned to the education faculty at Campus C, and our themes were social impact and communication.
The conference was freeing in a way I’d never experienced: nearly every session “gave me permission,” in effect, to trust my instincts. One session was dedicated to brainstorming what we would be willing to “leave out” of the curriculum to make room for content related to the themes. As one participant later observed, rather than staunchly defending the “canon,” it was almost as though we couldn’t let go of enough. While almost every session had something useful in it, three particularly important ideas I took from the conference were the Gaming Goggles, specialization vs. uniformity, and the need to be intentional about departmental culture.
The “Gaming Goggles” was a technique for moderating discussions that limited contributions to one focus at a time. During the Blue, or “Boost” phase, for example only positive comments were allowed. This was tremendously effective in keeping the group on task and preventing strong personalities from dominating the process. I also appreciated that the Moderator does not contribute to the discussion, but only defines the process.
Afterward, I taught this method in some of my honors classes, but I used it most effectively to moderate the discussion surrounding the revision of the Departmental Mission and Vision in the Fall of 2019.
The theme of the conference was “What do you Stand For?” If the 20th century had been all about standardization, the 21st century would be about specialization. Since we all value “musical excellence” and have an “outstanding faculty,” these are no longer selling points. We need the courage to do something utterly unique and only that; to be able to tell prospective students “We don’t offer X, but if you want to do Y, you have to come here, because no one else does it the way we do.”
In order to do this, one of the key ideas was to take what happens at the periphery and move it to the center. As I continue to work on the HPU music curriculum, this has come back several times: if we regularly hire outside speakers to present on body awareness, for example, maybe that should be part of the core courses. This reasoning also led to my development of a Hip-Hop class, which, with the politics in the department the way they were, ended up being easier to create in the Honors Scholar Program. By the Spring of 2020, I increasingly had music students asking to take the course.
It was also very empowering to hear people from NASM say, out loud, that NASM was never an excuse for “not doing” something. This had been something of a refrain at HPU at the time, even though we weren’t actually accredited. I returned to campus better able to argue both what NASM didn’t require us to do, and explain the flexibility we were allowed in addressing the standards.
I also appreciated that the conference honored feedback from students. Even though focus groups are notoriously unreliable, finding out what students want and how they view the curriculum is the human thing to do, and I will fight for student autonomy until my last breath. In the Fall of 2019, I dropped all my tests and exams in favor of reflective statements, and ran an experimental section with a weekly Thinking Journal. I have been so grateful for the access this gave me to the student’s perspectives and anxieties. Also in Fall 19, as a result of a conversation with my Chair about the Spring course offerings, I administered an informal survey to see what courses the students actually wanted to take. The results were sharply different from his expectations.
A final idea that made a significant impression on me was the idea of actively building departmental culture: if we are not intentional in creating and enforcing it, it will develop around us in less productive ways. In the game we were assigned a culture that included affirmations such as “Challenge your Assumptions,” “Listen with Empathy,” etc. David Cutler, the conference facilitator, later observed that we had under-utilized these. He recommended that we make them into posters, as a reminder of what we stand for, start each meeting with them, and hold each other accountable (“Are we really challenging assumptions here?”). It also bears emphasis that the departmental culture should be in alignment with the core principles of the college, the university, and the community.