[Ed. Note: This is the fourth of five posts in a series where teacher/scholars reflect on the challenges and opportunities of teaching music after following the election of Donald Trump.]
By Naomi Graber, with Mary Helen Hoque, Hanna Lisa Stefansson, and Cameron Steuart
The day before President Trump was inaugurated, the Chronicle of Higher Education published
an article by Michael B. Smith, Rebecca S.
Nowacek, and Jeffrey L. Bernstein challenging universities to “teach
citizenship.” They encourage professors to help students learn “how to become
more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, how to disagree without being
disagreeable, and perhaps above all else, how to be more empathetic.”[1] To these
very worthy goals, I would add one more: teaching media literacy. Informed
citizens should be able to look beyond the trappings of electoral spectacle in
order to better evaluate policy. With the explosion of politicized media and
political advertising in the past twenty years, it is imperative that we give
students tools to think critically about the ways candidates and other
political actors package their message and their identity. As musicologists, we
are in a unique position to help students assess the ways candidates present
themselves to the public given that music is such a prominent part of electoral
politics in the United States.
The media circus surrounding the 2016 election—with its
highly-charged rhetoric and with emotions (still) running high on both
sides—presents a good case study to introduce these skills. To that end, I
designed an assignment and discussion based on the two political conventions in
my “History of American Popular Song” class in Fall 2016, which took place
about three weeks after Donald Trump was elected president. Before the
discussion, I held a meeting with my graduate teaching assistants (Mary Helen
Hoque, Hanna Lisa Stefansson, and Cameron Steuart) to brainstorm strategies for
both effective teaching, and for keeping the discussion from becoming too
heated—to encourage students to “disagree without being disagreeable.” We found
Jay R. Howard’s Discussion in the College
Classroom a particularly good resource in this regard.[2] The rest of this post is a summary of
that meeting, as well as the TA’s reflections on what strategies were most
effective in the classroom.
Even if this assignment is not appropriate for most classes,
my hope is that these strategies will help us encourage our students to think
critically about media of all stripes, and help our students approach
controversial situations with an open mind. So much has happened since November
2016, and giving students the tools to understand how political figures use
sound, music, and media to engage with the electorate is becoming more urgent
almost every day.
The Assignment
My “History of American Popular Song” course is a large
lecture (140 students), with smaller break-out sections of 35 students each,
which are taught by graduate student TAs. The size of the class ensured that we
had a variety of political opinions represented, and as a general studies course,
we were limited to mostly non-technical discussions of music. We decided to
focus on the presidential nominating conventions because they gave us a single
moment in which parties and candidates try to distill their message and their
identity, and because musical choices and performances often play an important
role in that process. To prepare for the discussion, students were given the
following assignment:
Prompt:
In your November 30 sections, you will be discussing the
roll music has played in the 2016 presidential campaign. More specifically, you
will be analyzing the music played at the two major political conventions, as
well as the roll musicians themselves should have in how their music is used in
contemporary politics. In order to prepare for the discussion, read the
following articles, listen to the following spotify playlist, and answer the
following questions.
Read:
Anastasia Tsiolcas, “Come Together (Or Not): Music at the Democratic National
Convention,” The Record: Music
News from NPR, July 30, 2016. Note: watch all the videos embedded in this
article.
Eric Kaspar, “How Music Fits Trump’s Campaign Message,” CNN, July 28, 2016.
Listen:
Spotify playlist of songs played at the
Republican National Convention
Answer each of the following questions in 2–3 complete
sentences:
How do the Democrats’ musical choices reflect the message
they are trying to send to the American people?
How do the Republicans’ musical choices reflect the message
they are trying to send to the American people?
Leaving legal issues aside, is it ethical for candidates to
use an artist’s or group’s music against their wishes?
The Discussion
We found that it was very important define the scope of the
discussion clearly. First, we reiterated that our classrooms were “safe spaces”
where we challenge ideas and not people. We then made clear that we were
discussing politics, not policy—ideas that students often conflate. We defined politics as the ways we identify
ourselves in relation to our larger culture, as well as the range of tactics we
use to convince each other of the rightness of our position. Policy, on the
other hand, we defined as specific legal or governmental initiatives; in terms
of the 2016 election, this meant items such as Trump’s proposed border wall, or
Clinton’s tax plan. We made clear that such topics were outside the scope of
this discussion. By making this distinction, we helped steer the class towards
evaluation of messaging rather than the details of the party platforms. It also
helped ensure a civil atmosphere by taking some of the most controversial
statements of the campaign off the table. While these are certainly worth
addressing in a university context, a political science or sociology course
might be a better venue than a music class for such a discussion. We also made
clear that we were not discussing whether one candidate was better or more
effective than the other. Some of the TAs also asked students to keep their own
political affiliations private to facilitate more objectivity, although this
was not true across all discussion sections.
After defining the terms, the TAs employed several different
strategies. Ms. Hoque broke her section into four smaller groups, each assigned
to explore one of the following questions: “How was music effective in aiding
Trump’s message?” “How was music not effective in aiding Trump’s message?” and
the same two questions for Clinton. She assigned the groups randomly, and told
students that if they found themselves in a group discussion about a candidate
they disliked, they should consider it an exercise in empathy, in trying to see
the world from another point of view. After the small group discussion, she
asked students if anyone in their group had said something particularly
insightful. This might encourage shy students to speak up in front of the
larger group, and further encourages empathy. Although neither Ms. Stefansson
and Mr. Steuart opted use small groups for their classes, both also found that
breaking down the topic into very specific questions helped keep the discussion
limited to music: (What is the Democrats’/Republicans’ message? How does the
music convey that message? Is the music effective in conveying that message?).
By posing specific questions rather than asking students for
their opinions, we hoped to prevent ad
hominem attacks; the students understood that their colleagues were
presenting views that may not align with their personal beliefs. This technique
also helps students look beyond their own experience by helping them to
understand the appeal of the opposing candidate. It is worth noting that some
students may resist trying exploring issues from a point of view with which
they disagree (although this was not a problem we encountered). In these cases,
we should remind students that understanding the opposite position is not the
same as agreeing with it, and that it also helps you make your own argument
more convincing. Still, this strategy may not be appropriate in some cases
because it risks endowing unethical or immoral views with false equivalence. A
black student should not be asked to imagine the world from the point of view
of a white supremacist, for example. There is such a thing as too much
objectivity, and my TAs are instructed to (gently) shut down comments that were
overtly sexist, racist, classist, etc.
In most cases, TAs found that the discussion moved beyond
the conventions in productive ways. Ms. Hoque guided her students through a
discussion of the larger uses of music and politics, with the class exploring
how, why, or even if music was an effective tool in political campaigns. Ms.
Stefansson’s class was more focused on the issue of whether it is ethical for a
politician to use music against a musician’s wishes, and connected those issues
to the idea of political messaging. For
example, they speculated that Trump’s continuing use of songs by musicians who
had denounced him was a way of showing his willingness to flout “rules” and do
what he pleases.
The TAs also developed strategies for defusing tension. We
found it important to develop some questions for that purpose in advance, such
as “are there any similarities in the candidates’ approaches?” or “how do these
strategies compare with other uses of political music that we’ve studied?” Mr.
Steuart found that changing the topic with pivot statements like “We’ve
explored [this issue] quite a bit, but we haven’t thought a lot about [this],”
or interjecting some humor also helped maintain a civil atmosphere. By briefly
poking fun at Bernie Sanders’s musical career, for example,
he kept the discussion from becoming too heated.
We did encounter some problems. Some students in Ms. Hoque’s
class felt that the discussion was too apolitical, and wanted a more vigorous debate.
It might be that our specificity was too constricting for students, and
prevented them from exploring the more controversial aspects of the campaign.
Given that this discussion took place only three weeks after Trump was elected,
we erred on the side of caution, but some distance from the events of the
campaign season might help students process the more difficult moments in an
academic setting. Mr. Steuart discovered that students often defaulted to a
position of “Trump won, therefore his tactics were more effective,” which was
difficult to overcome. He feels that emphasizing that music is only one device
in a candidate’s toolbox, and that music did not swing the election, would be a
good strategy for avoiding this problem in the future.
Conclusions
All three TAs reported that the discussion was productive
and collegial, with students able to explore complex and emotionally charged
issues without attacking each other. No one seems to have felt marginalized or
unheard. Although no students mentioned this assignment and discussion in their
anonymous end-of-the-year evaluations, those reports were very positive, with
students telling us how much they appreciated our willingness to discuss
difficult topics in a collegial manner.
Because of the increasingly polarized and rancorous
political environment since the election, some students are increasingly wary
of expressing their views in class. In those cases, I would recommend some form
of anonymous response. One technique (drawn from Howard) is the anonymous
“minute paper,” in which instructors have students anonymously respond to a
question in writing, then select a few to read and discuss.
More broadly speaking, this exercise proved to me that some
discussions are best understood as explorations of an issue rather than as a
debate between opposing sides. While argument certainly has a place in college
classrooms, too often students are asked to attack or defend each other’s positions. When students do not constantly feel that they
may be put on the defensive at any moment, they may be more open to exploring
alternative ideas and points of view. Framing discussions as group
investigations helps students to listen to each other with open minds. To
borrow an idea from Stephen Covey, debate encourages students to “listen with
intent to reply,” while exploration encourages students to “listen with intent
to understand.”[3] By
maintaining a cooperative rather than adversarial environment, we found that
students feel safer on several levels: they feel more confident asserting
themselves, and more comfortable admitting that they might have been mistaken.
After all, in today’s social climate, teaching students that it’s okay to
change their mind might be one of the most important skills we can give them.
Naomi Graber is
Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Georgia. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation on Kurt Weill’s early
American works. In addition to her research on the pre-Oklahoma! Broadway musical,
she is interested in musical theatre and film of the post-9/11 era,
particularly in issues of gender. Her
work appears in Studies in Musical
Theatre and at Trax on the Trail,
and is forthcoming in the Journal of the
Society for American Music and the Musical
Quarterly.
[1] Michael B. Smith, Rebecca S. Nowecek, and Jeffrey L.
Bernstein, “Don’t Retreat, Teach Citizenship,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 19, 2017, available online
at http://www.chronicle.com/article/Don-t-Retreat-Teach/238923.
[2] Jay R. Howard, Discussion
in the College Classroom: Getting Your Students Engaged and Participating in
Person and Online (San Francisco: Wiley, 2015).
[3] Stephen R. Covey. The
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Miami: FranklinCovey, 2015), 304.