John Buccheri
Those Who Can, Teach
Pie charts! Could it be a residue of the holiday season that causes me to visualize pie charts? Whatever the reason, it has provided me an effective way to think about the character of our Society and its many functions. Imagine the segments: professional development, technology, scholarship, communication across disciplines, advocacy, issues of gender and diversity—the College Music Society embraces all of these as they apply to music in higher education. It seems to me, though, that what brings us together, what provides the generating energy for all of the Society's activities, is that individually we are, or strive to be, passionate and dedicated teachers of music.
There. Now you know my bias. It is appropriate, as I begin my term as your President, that you be aware that I will tend to view all that CMS does through the lens of music teaching and learning. This perspective rests on three foundations that will no doubt resonate through whatever might be said in this column during the next two years. I will sketch them briefly for you now.
First, and no doubt of greatest import, is an almost phoenix-like renewal of interest in teaching and learning whose wellspring, I believe, was Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate. Published in 1990 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Boyer's report established four categories of scholarship: discovery, teaching, integration, and service. The discussions of the nature of especially the last three of these "scholarships" (the first comprises traditional research and publication) have refined and broadened the understanding of what constitutes faculty productivity.
The Carnegie Foundation, Pew National Fellowship program, and the American Association for Higher Education continue the work. Pat Hutchings and Lee Shulman, in a recent issue of Change, describe the major initiatives now in place to "foster significant, long-lasting learning for all students, advance the practice and profession of teaching, and bring to teaching the recognition afforded to other forms of scholarly work." The College Music Society now has projects underway to fulfill its responsibility to support these initiatives.
Second, a conviction that The College Music society is uniquely --iited to help the scholarship of teaching and learning flourish lends "`weight to my perspective. This was dramatically reinforced by the constitution of our recent gathering: Toronto 2000. Incidentally, it occurred to me that we missed a grand opportunity to have an Olympics-like opening ceremony, replete with academic regalia and a colorful panoply of societal banners unfurled as in some medieval gathering of guilds (with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing—what else?—the Overture to Die Meistersinger).
In less fanciful moments, I was struck again by the inclusive nature of CMS and by the thought that CMS has a place for whatever specialties lend identity to each of the other thirteen participating organizations. That is, CMS provides an ideal platform for the scholarship of integration, whereby the most recondite and focused research in one musical field might be given fresh meaning and relevance by being elucidated for and connected with one or more other areas of music.
Two ways the scholarship of integration might happen in CMS are (1) analysis and historical performance practice brought to bear on interpretation in a master class, or (2) aspects of gender theory, ethnographic studies, and music education methods combined and formulated to present to a class for the general student. And the essential component in each of these examples is that the outcomes bear fruit in the domain of teaching and learning. I like to say it this way: whatever particular aspect of music we teach, we are helping our students develop their own sophisticated answers to the deceptively simple question, "How does the music go?"
The third and final foundation for viewing CMS from the perspective of teaching and learning is a personal one. I can't help it! I have been teaching music theory for thirty-eight years. I don't know exactly when I realized that, given the various aspects of my life as an academic and a musician, I was at my best in the classroom. I do know it took an awfully long time to feel comfortable with that self-knowledge. It also became clear to me that I needed and loved to teach, that if my youthful imagination had not been so consumed by music, I would be teaching psychology, reading, carpentry—who knows what—but I'm convinced that I would be imparting some skill, or trying to clarify some concept, or delineating some process for the sheer exhilaration of changing the way someone thinks, and therefore changing who that person is.
"Those Who Can, Teach" is the title of a talk I gave as part of a panel entitled "Mid-Career Renewal and Responsibilities," sponsored by the Professional Development Committee of the Society for Music Theory in Toronto last November. The full text, from which some of the above is taken, will soon be available on the SMT web site.
Happy New Year, and may you and your students have a productive year of teaching and learning!