2022 Southwest Regional Conference (8th)

Non-Member: $75.00
Regular Member: $55.00
Retired Member: $35.00
Student Member: $35.00

Registration Deadline for Presenters & Composers: 12 noon Mountain Time on Friday, January 14, 2022
    * All presenters, performers, panelists, collaborators, & composers whose works will be performed on the program must register before this deadline

Online Registration Closes: 12 noon Mountain Time on Thursday, February 10, 2022
    * Attendees must register on site after this (a late fee will apply)

Cancellation Deadline: 12 noon Mountain Time on Thursday, February 10, 2022 (see terms & conditions for details)

As you finalize your travel arrangements, please note that while there is no official conference hotel, we recommend that you investigate the following properties, which are conveniently located near the Azusa Pacific campus:

Home2 Suites by Hilton (1 mile from campus)
229 Azusa Ave
Azusa, CA 91702
(626) 239-2015

Best Western Hotel (2.5 miles from campus)
625 E Route 66
Glendora, CA 91740
(626) 335-2817

See also Azusa Pacific’s hotel information site for other recommendations: https://www.apu.edu/azusa/visit/hotel/

The Music School in the 21st Century: Pipelines, Politics and Pathways
Dr. Eileen Strempel, Inaugural Dean and Professor, Herb Alpert School of Music
Professor, School of Education and Information Studies

Our educational world has recently been experiencing tumult on a variety of fronts: with the pandemic and its attendant challenges, as well as with the racial reckoning of our time. For music schools and programs these conversations are especially fraught and personal, both for those who have devoted their entire lives to the preservation and study of a musical canon that they perceive as under assault and for those who view a re-centering of the curriculum–and a re-design of the music school as an institution–as long-overdue. As we collectively inhabit this time of reflection and reorganization, this is a moment not only to re-examine our curricula, but to extend our reforms more foundationally and inclusively both towards the students that we serve and the students that we have yet to serve. The National Center for Education Statistics latest report indicates that 73 percent of American college students are now neo-traditional students. They are older, from historically underrepresented communities, Dreamers, transfer students, low-income (Pell-eligible), first generation. They are parenting students and/or students with veteran status. This is our country’s “new normal.” And yet, as music schools and programs, we have not historically tended to serve these students, and when we do so, we haven’t fostered their success—even as judged by limited data frames such as time-to-degree and graduation rates when examined in comparison to their “traditional” peers.

What does an intentional lens on equitable student access and success look like within the field of music, and what might an examination of both the national data as well as an understanding of our own institutional context reveal? At a time when free college has gained remarkable popularity, we are called to go Beyond Free College to craft a more nuanced approach that helps to address the root challenges while offering a transformative pathway forward.

Our educational world has recently been experiencing tumult on a variety of fronts: with the pandemic and its attendant challenges, as well as with the racial reckoning of our time. For music schools and programs these conversations are especially fraught and personal, both for those who have devoted their entire lives to the preservation and study of a musical canon that they perceive as under assault and for those who view a re-centering of the curriculum–and a re-design of the music school as an institution–as long-overdue. As we collectively inhabit this time of reflection and reorganization, this is a moment not only to re-examine our curricula, but to extend our reforms more foundationally and inclusively both towards the students that we serve and the students that we have yet to serve. The National Center for Education Statistics latest report indicates that 73 percent of American college students are now neo-traditional students. They are older, from historically underrepresented communities, Dreamers, transfer students, low-income (Pell-eligible), first generation. They are parenting students and/or students with veteran status. This is our country’s “new normal.” And yet, as music schools and programs, we have not historically tended to serve these students, and when we do so, we haven’t fostered their success—even as judged by limited data frames such as time-to-degree and graduation rates when examined in comparison to their “traditional” peers.

What does an intentional lens on equitable student access and success look like within the field of music, and what might an examination of both the national data as well as an understanding of our own institutional context reveal? At a time when free college has gained remarkable popularity, we are called to go Beyond Free College to craft a more nuanced approach that helps to address the root challenges while offering a transformative pathway forward.

Strempel’s scholarly interests focus on the music of women composers, and her work includes numerous recordings, commissions, articles and edited volumes that examine the political, social and musical contexts of the most influential female composers of our time. As a trained opera singer, she has been featured on eight recordings, including love lies bleeding: Songs by Libby Larsen, prepared with the composer. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts, Strempel is also a nationally recognized champion for transfer students and views superb public education as one of the principal social justice issues of our time.

Strempel and co-author Stephen J. Handel are celebrating the Rowman & Littlefield release of their third book together, focused on higher education public policy entitled: Beyond Free College: Making Higher Education Work for 21^st Century Students. This work is a follow up to their co-edited the two-volume set, Transfer and Transformation: Fostering Transfer Student Success.

Strempel served as the Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Cincinnati and Professor at The College-Conservatory of Music (CMM) prior to joining the team at UCLA. Previous to that, she served in a variety of roles at Syracuse University over a seventeen-year span, where she was awarded a Kauffman Foundation eProfessorship and an ACE Fellowship, which she served at Colgate University. Strempel received her Bachelor of Music from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and she received her doctorate from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. An avid runner, she is the proud mother of two sons.