TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
With an understanding that students come from a variety of educational and personal backgrounds, I draw on critical pedagogy techniques pioneered by teachers like bell hooks and Paulo Freire to empower students to become their own learners. Learning is a process, not an endpoint, and my students leave the classroom with a greater appreciation for and awareness of their own learning styles, strengths, and areas for improvement. This appreciation extends beyond the confines of a single classroom or semester and enables students to approach new topics with a passion and critical insight.
One of my foremost goals in teaching is to equip students to evaluate historical evidence on its own terms, no matter the subject area or topic. The ability to assemble facts and deploy them in support of arguments is a skill that extends well past a course’s final meeting. I rely on primary sources in the classroom—concert programs, epistolary evidence, first-hand accounts—to challenge students to think beyond the textbook. Together, we explore the process of writing history. This means having students ask questions about the musical canon, discussing why certain composers have been excluded, and writing their own miniature histories of overlooked works and historical figures. In a course on twentieth-century music, for example, students wrote about and discussed what modernism (in its many guises) meant to different composers over the course of the semester. When we finally reached discussions of postmodernism, we engaged with it as both an aesthetic and historiographical context, and students were surprised but exhilarated to realize that the same modernist thinking that fueled Schoenberg’s twelve-tone composition had also allowed for history to be written and taught a certain way. For their final projects, students then re-designed parts of the syllabus to include relevant material they thought was essential to twentieth-century music history and to justify their selections. They then reflected on the ethical and political values that go into curricular choices and the practice of writing history more broadly. Students commented on how they were surprised at how difficult it was to make these choices and how thought-provoking it was to negotiate musical and social boundaries. A reflexive approach to learning such as this, I have found, enables a greater and more critical engagement with the material. Crucially, it also empowers students to identify their own strengths and areas for improvement in their own study.
Ultimately, I strive to teach a music history of the past alongside one of the present. Having students acknowledge the connections and discontinuities between themselves and their historical interlocutors positions them within a broader narrative. Asking students to examine their own listening expectations through Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” for example, allows them to better understand why sonata form may have been such a powerful means of creating musical narrative in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Studying history, I hope to impart to students, does not only entail looking down at the page or up at the board. Rather, it means standing at one point on a long and messy path, looking back.
Mentoring and advising
As an advisor, I similarly seek to equip students for lasting intellectual engagement both within and beyond the university. I am eager to work with undergraduates to help students develop their own research paths by asking questions, encouraging them to spend time with primary sources, and offering a forum for them to reflect on their scholarly process. With graduate students, I have found that a hands-gently-on approach—one that is supportive and consistent while not dictating the student’s direction—helps the student develop into their own scholar, not just as a graduate student. Given the multitude of career paths undergraduate students in the humanities today may take, I believe that nurturing a student’s intellectual development in this way can help prepare them for a variety of futures both within and without higher education. My former undergraduate mentees and MA advisees have gone on to fully funded PhDs at R1 universities as well as fruitful and successful careers outside of academia.
I encourage any potential graduate students interested in sound, media, or technology studies, the Cold War, and/or Eastern Europe to reach out to me to discuss advising opportunities.