BRENT TALBOT & JULIET HESS
Brent C. Talbot is an associate professor and the coordinator of music education at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music of Gettysburg College. He is the artistic director of the Gettysburg Children's Choir and the founding director of Gamelan Gita Semara. Brent’s research examines power, discourse, and issues of social justice in varied settings for music learning around the globe. He is the editor of Marginalized Voices in Music Education (Routledge) and the author of Gending Rare: Children's Songs and Games from Bali (GIA). Brent servces on the steering committee for the MayDay Group and is associate editor for its journal Action, Criticism and Theory in Music Education. For more, visit www.brentctalbot.com.
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Juliet Hess is an assistant professor of music education at Michigan State University, where she teaches secondary general methods in music education, principles in music education, and philosophy and sociology of music education. Juliet received her Ph. D. in Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She previously taught elementary and middle school vocal, instrumental, and “world” music at a public school in the Greater Toronto Area. Her research interests include anti-oppression education, activism in music and music education, music education for social justice, and the question of ethics in world music study.
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A Talk to Music Teachers
In 1963—a racially-charged time in the United States—James Baldwin delivered “A Talk to Teachers,” urging educators to engage youth in difficult conversations about surrounding events. We concur with Giroux (2011; 2018) that political forces influence our educational spaces and that classrooms should not be viewed as apolitical. Audre Lorde (1984/2007) speaks powerfully to the necessity of art in troubled times. Drawing upon A Tribe Called Quest’s 2017 Grammy performance of “We the People...” — an explicit response to events occurring post-election—we consider ways to work alongside youth in schools to respond, consider, and process such events through music.