Teaching in Real Time: A Participatory Workshop on Teaching in Music and the Humanities, with Eric Usner

Time: April 7, 2017, 9:30 a.m. - noon

Location: 309 Bowne Hall

This collaborative dialogue aims to foster reflection and lead to renewed resolution about what we are as music educators and why we are called to the work we each do. The goals are thoughtful listening, spirited dialogue, and further collaborative and dialogic pedagogical techniques (concrete activities) and strategies (ideas and theories that techniques enact) to transform our classrooms and courses into encounters in real-time.

 “Humanism is not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the reverse: its purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny as the product of human labor, human energies for emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as importantly, human misreadings and misinterpretations of the collective past and present.” - Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 22.

What is the work you do? What does it mean to teach? Should our teaching be engaged, site-specific—responsive to the lives of our students, resonating with local, national, and global realities? Perhaps, but only if it has curricular relevance? Or do our responsibilities as teachers extend beyond curricular concerns? Do events beyond the “ivory tower” compel a change in how we act in our roles within? What is higher education’s responsibility in the present moment—in how we arrived here and how we progress? Amidst the constant noise of crises of civil society, democratic governance, forced global migration, continuous war, environmental ruptures, is there a moral imperative to examine why and how we do what we do?

If the humanities are expressions of the human condition, we study them to understand what it has meant to be human, to use them as resource and inspiration in our specific individual and collective explorations of universal questions. What does it mean to teach them—to teach perhaps the most profound expression of all—music. How can music respond to our daily lives, while continuing to foster moments of transformation and hope that nurture the individual and communal capacities to live our lives?

This workshop will not be a lecture, but a collaborative dialogue between participants and guest professor Eric Usner that fosters reflection and leads to renewed resolution about what we are and why we are called to the work we each do. The goals are thoughtful listening, spirited dialogue, and further collaborative and dialogic pedagogical techniques (concrete activities) and strategies (ideas and theories that techniques enact) to transform our classrooms and courses into encounters in real-time. This event is organized primarily by and for those who teach in music, but is open to anyone working in the arts and humanities. We will meet over brunch; reservations required.

 To reserve space or request disability accommodations, please contact Professor Sydney Hutchinson.

ERIC USNER
A teacher, writer, and ethnographer of expressive culture, Eric Martin Usner earned a BA from Dickinson College, an MA from University of California-Riverside, his Ph.D. from New York University. He held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago and has taught at Riverside & NYU as well as at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Vienna, the University of Chicago, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, and in Departments of American Studies and Music at Franklin & Marshall College where he is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music. He has designed surveys of Western Art, World, American, & popular music, and an array of seminars from a cultural-historical and ethnographic approach to music that integrate fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz studies, and American music. He has also developed courses on critical food studies, the US food system, and material culture within an American Studies curriculum.

This working group event is supported by the CNY Humanities Corridor.