Music

Sing!  Anything you want.  Sing out loud.  i’ll wait . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .over here.

How was it?  Perhaps you have been singing your whole life.  Taken lessons, practiced?  Been on stage with a group or even solo?  Perhaps you sing only by yourself, in the car or shower (Sir Paul McCartney says the best sound comes from singing in the bathroom).

And in classes, it is the same.  Some of you have been expressing your answers and thoughts and ideas and questions in class throughout your years of education.  There will be some who rarely, if ever, speak in class, even during a class discussion.  i think the same is true in a classroom as it is in musical performance:  voice is developed with practice and involves risk, the risk of public performance.  Of being judged..

And yet. . .voice – as the expression of who you are, what you think and feel, what you can offer to others – is a critical skill in every workplace.  What you say, how you say it, what you say in response to others, is something of critical importance to employers.  If we are not learning that in our schooling, are we going to wait and risk failing where we believe it will count the most?  Good luck with that!

We’ll come back to music as our metaphor for understanding voice once we consider voice as speaking, not just singing.

Voice in class

One of the things that distinguishes education from the rest of the world is that for years, within a given class you have all been expected to see, think, and say the same things.  Indeed, it is a primary obsession of students to determine what a professor wants them to think and say.  After all, that is the standard criterion for determining what it is you learn in that class.  Students are more likely to speak in class to the extent that the answer to the prof’s question is clear and one that comes directly from a text or what the professor has said previously in class.  Students learn what the prof wants to hear in class and in written work.  Savvy students will even determine how the prof wants them to say it.

As a result, what is important to the prof is whether the students can repeat key course concepts.  Think about the pressure that creates for students:  They know there is only one right answer and they know everyone else is supposed to have it.  A good way to deal with that pressure is to simply let someone else stick his fat neck out.

What is certainly not important is the development of the student’s voice, her specific thoughts on the subject matter.  The problem, of course, is that many employers hire people expecting each new employee will offer value to their organizations.  To do that, one must have developed their own voice because if everyone has the same answer, there would be little need to employ so many people.

So, what is it that we mean by “voice” in this class?

Given that this is a class which requires your engagement, where much of class time will involve student contributions, at the end of the semester many students will say that they learned a great deal from their classmates.  But what does that mean, exactly?  i have asked many students what they mean by this and i have generally received a couple different responses:  First, they mean that a peer has explained something, or put that something in a certain way, that helped them better understand it.  The second, and most powerful meaning of their assessment according to students, is that they were able to see a class concept or theory or practice in a different way.  This “different way” involves using one’s “voice” and means that you must do more than just repeat the answer in the textbook, the one that everyone is supposed to know.  Rather, it involves integrating one’s experiences and knowledge to present things in a different way.  That, in business jargon, adds value.

Another reason voice is critical in this class goes to the heart of my philosophy of what the hell we are doing here.

There is so much rhetoric in the public realm these days about free speech on campus, about safe spaces, trigger warnings, censorship, and indoctrination in colleges and universities.  i have a difficult time with much of this because i think it treats college students as children, ones who are so easily influenced that you have to be very careful about what you say, and how you say it in order not to hurt anyone’s feelings.  But here again my question goes to the curtain that divides higher education from the rest of the world:  In using trigger warnings, safe spaces, and making everyone comfortable, are we assuming that the world they enter after college is one where those things exist?  Or do we believe the world is safe enough that we don’t need those things?  Protecting students from things that, after college, they will face, is setting people up for failure.  People saying mean things provides at least two opportunities for learning:  How to deal with those people in ways that affirm difference and find common ground as opposed to continuing to polarize, and 2) better understand the impact of saying hurtful things to others when we use them.

A major part of the problem is to see what happens in the classroom, or on campus in speeches, as attempts at indoctrination.  Profs want students to understand different, even disturbing ideas, but understanding is quite different than believing.  i think an example here is useful.

Many Global Studies majors are suspicious of capitalism and its signature institution: the multinational corporation. Personally, having worked in and studied corporations for years, i have strong concerns of my own.  However, my concerns are mostly irrelevant in my classes.  Understanding is what is relevant.

So when i created The Global Economy class for Global Studies, i wanted to confront both sides of issues.  i structured the class around debates.  Thanks to Lauren Kilcoyne, my co-facilitator at the time, we created a wonderful partnership with the Rhode Island Urban Debate League (RIUDL), a national organization that sponsors parliamentary debate tournaments in high schools.  Students were organized into debate teams and four times during the semester students held major debates.  One popular topic was: “Is WalMart good for the global economy?”  Walmart is always a lightning rod for those studying the impact of globalization.

When it came to assessment, this was included in our syllabus:

Debate assessment

Although some level of competition can be both motivating and fun, our objective is not to declare a winner in these debates.  Both sides will be assessed using RIUDL’s criteria as well as a few of our own.  The ideal for which we will strive is that both Affirmative and Negative will do an incredible job in their argumentation, rather than reaching a clear-cut “answer” or “solution.”  Thus, the overall objective of the debate is for the sides to work together during the debate to address the question as completely as possible within the presentation framework.  Everyone in the class should leave each debate with a much greater understanding of the issues surrounding each question under debate.

And when each of us leaves the classroom, we take the information we have been given and integrate it with our beliefs, our values, and especially what we have learned through our experiences.  Even better is when we take the information that runs counter to our current beliefs and understandings and use that to challenge the way we see and think about the issues.  Again, college is about learning, not winning.  Deep learning in college is what prepares you for winning in life.

A major component of voice, then, is what we encounter when we leave the classroom.  It is the unique perspective or worldview we have developed over the course of our lives. Another component, often the most challenging, is found in this definition: “If someone finds their voice [sic], they start to speak in spite of fear or surprise or difficult circumstances.”  In other words, it is one thing to know where it is we stand on issues, but it isn’t a voice anyone really hears unless we use that voice in dialogue with others, especially when our voice runs counter to other voices.

In a cult, everyone must represent the same voice.  In this classroom – where learning, especially about oneself and others, is paramount – the more unique voices, across a wide spectrum on issues, the better.  We learn how to express ourselves and we learn how to listen to – and learn from – others.

Class discussions in general

Take the following scenario:  The professor asks a question.  Students who did not read the material for that day will not answer.  It’s not just that they don’t know the answer, they are not even sure the question was addressed in the assigned material.  Students who briefly reviewed the readings usually won’t answer.  They have little confidence in their knowledge – understandable since they did not study the material in depth – but they also do not want to take a chance on the dreaded follow-up question.

Students who studied the material might not answer for a few reasons:  Despite studying, they might have little confidence in how well they can address the question, they too don’t want to face the prospect of a follow-up question (which might be from a previous lesson, one they might not have read as carefully, or they know there are a few in class who generally will speak up first).

The students who will answer, often about 10-20% of the class, might have confidence from the fact that they have studied all lessons, or they have been practicing speaking up for years so they don’t get anxious.

Until we change the way we look at class discussions, that is pretty much how every class will go.  From talking to students over the years, as well as colleagues, this is how many classes go at PC.  Here is a question:  From the behavior of the students in such a class, what is the primary objective of class discussions?  Think about this for a minute before moving on. . .

Clearly, the objective is to answer the professor’s questions.  It doesn’t make any difference who does it – indeed, it is always the same few – it’s the only way to get it to stop.  It is a game that is played and has nothing to do with student learning.  To truly see that this is a game, you might have had a class where a professor will ask a question, wait a few seconds, then answer his or her own question.  No student will ever answer since they know that, if they just wait a few moments, the prof will tell them the answer anyway.

OK, so now you know the extent to which i draw parallels between this world of higher education with the world you will be entering soon, let’s extrapolate this game to the workplace.  You have been hired, a pretty nice full-time job with a good salary.  You know that your employer expects that you will earn that salary by adding value to the enterprise.

You are in one of your first department meetings: your immediate supervisor and 10 other employees. You know at least generally what the boss will ask since you were given the agenda for the meeting a few days ago.  The boss asks her question, wanting input from all of you.  What might be the consequences of all 11 of you playing the same game you were playing in your classes?

So more questions:

• What do you think is the objective of employee participation in meetings?  Is it the same as we noted above in classrooms?  Is it to make sure someone answers the boss’s questions with the answer she expects?
• Since speaking up to add value to a conversation is a skill, where are you practicing it currently?
• If, instead of the CPG (Class Participation Game), our objective was to learn as much as possible about the material we were discussing, as well as learning more about each other, what would a class discussion look like?  Most important, how would we get there?

Our challenge: Making music in the classroom

Consider the structure of music.  One form is monophony, which involves one dominant voice.  That would involve a solo or lead in a particular song.  The idea is to follow, and parrot, that voice so that everyone is singing the same melodic line.  In many songs we strive for homophony, understood as harmony, whether with backup singers or chords in instrumental music.  But harmony is layered on top of a dominant voice, everything still follows that voice.

The analogy to the classroom is simple:  A lecture is monophony, one dominant voice.  When a professor asks questions or engages in class discussion, all responses follow the dominant voice.  That’s when voices or instruments are in harmony, or homophony.

Returning to our discussion of right and wrong, most classrooms end up in one of the two forms above.  Everything revolves around the authority of the professor.  Again, however, this is not the way the world works.  One has to believe, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there are right answers, objective “truths,” in order to create a social situation (classroom, workplace) where everyone knows the same things, even looks, thinks, and acts the same.  But human experience, especially in current times, suggests the opposite:  that there are many “truths,” and each one of them emerges from continual changing conditions.  So is there another alternative?  One built around the idea that music can be created from a multitude of different voices?

Yes.

Polyphony is just that:  “. . .a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices” (Kakabadze, 2010).  However, rather than the “noise” we assume when independent minds – voices – come together, polyphony interweaves independent voices into a melodic unity.  Much modern much is polyphonic.  Perhaps the easiest form for which to see the difference is jazz.  Instruments follow their own score; at times creating harmony, at others, disharmony.  But it is clear that the instruments are all working together to create the whole, the song.  Indeed, much of jazz is improvisational where there is no musical score; each instrument – sometimes including voices – does its own thing while following a very loose musical structure.

This is our challenge.  We are different people with different experiences, different values, thoughts, and opinions.  In order to create a discussion for the purposes of learning – as opposed to the purposes or grading – our challenge is to create a polyphonic dialogue, whether oral or written.  What this means, then, is that this class will not be successful if everyone leaves at the end with the same questions and answers.  Rather, it will be successful if we can learn from the different perspectives held by each and every person in the class.

Does that sound like a worthy challenge?