Teaching

While I am currently primarily teaching through public-facing talks and digital humanities projects, I have recently taught as primary instructor at Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and worked as Teaching Assistant at UMass and Brandeis University.

Since my first graduate course in music history, I have been part of the conversations about the canon and how to restructure the course curriculum so to be more inclusive. Obviously that is no easy task, but among the strategies that I have employed, are talking openly about the issue with students, being humble about being a work in progress, and welcoming student participation and input on how to teach music history in a truly inclusive way.

To address some of the issues in the classroom, I recently co-authored a digital humanities pedagogical article titled, “A Collaborative Timeline: Fostering Student Agency in the Music History Survey,” which asks, How do we teach a music history survey in a way that balances addressing canonical works with exploring historically excluded repertoire? How do we undertake such a task without expending all our fleeting time and resources? We share our experiences with TimelineJS, a multimedia digital-humanities tool we have successfully used in music history survey courses, and we offer a dialogic, interactive, imperfect yet expansive use of a digital-humanities tool to bring more student agency to the music history survey.

So, when I taught “Western Music: 1950 to Today” at Mount Holyoke College, in Spring 2023, my first thought was “how do I choose what to teach?” Teaching this class offers a fabulous challenge because most of the repertoire is not canonized, and because of this, it offers perhaps strategies to change the way we teach history. Canonized repertoire is easier to teach because it is a well-established path, that many have studied and taught, and that many remember from the class they took when they were students. Non-canonized repertoire on the other hand, is tough and feels like stepping into the unknown, finding a thread one step at the time, without quite knowing where one is going. And that, I find, the most exciting part of teaching!

Below is the timeline that my students made throughout the semester (I learned about it when I was a TA for Sarah Koval). Each of them had to fill out four each (a style, piece, event, and person) and present one to the class. It was a way for them to argue what should be covered in class, and also an opportunity to share about what they are passionate about with their peers.

At the beginning of the semester I proposed to my students the following:

I will make choices because we need structure, but know so many other things could have been chosen instead, and therefore, this is necessarily a bias syllabus.
Because of the nature of the course, the huge amount of material, and the brevity of the semester, we won’t be able to cover everything you would like, HOWEVER, I will give you the opportunity throughout to present the pieces/works/genres/musicians who you think we should discuss and we will have a shared timeline for the class and the course.
I asked students to engage in public musicology and create for their midterms a wikipedia page for a composer part of the Rebalancing the Canon project, who still didn’t have one.
Students actively participated in discussions around erasure, gender and race discrimination, body shaming, environmental concerns, and issues around sexual abuse. Alongside the music we studied, we also discussed these important issues, and how musicians and scholars engaged with them as well.

This class was an important milestone for me, putting into practice several years of reflection around how to bypass the canon, and how to teach in such a way that students learn both musical and analytical skills, as well as to critically engage with the social issues musicians, composers, and compositions are embedded in. Overall, students loved having a more thematic approach to the class, and being able to discuss openly these issues, while also learning how to critically listen and talk about music in ways that are nuanced and precise.

Aside from working at Mount Holyoke College, I have been gathering lots of teaching experience while working as a Teaching Assistant at both Brandeis University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I supported a range of courses in music history, music appreciation, and film studies. At Brandeis, I have assisted in courses such as Exploring Music, Global Soundscapes, and Music in Western Culture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. My role in these classes has involved not only aiding students in understanding complex concepts but also creating opportunities for them to engage with music in more critical ways, learning how to write, talk, and engage with music in a nuanced way. I also deliver many guest lectures on topics such as the canon, gender, and the music of 16th and 17th-century Italy, music in convents, music in the courts of Ferrara, as well as on influential films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Entr’acte. As a primary instructor for the Performing and Visual Arts residential academic program at UMass Amherst, I developed and taught an interdisciplinary course that integrated music theory with visual arts, encouraging students to think creatively across subjects.

One of my overarching goals is to foster a commitment to hope in the context of resurgent fascism, misogyny, anti-LGBTQAI+ propaganda, and existential environmental threats we face. Despite studying how systems of oppression work in erasing meaningful bonds of collective work across Nations, states, communities, and in the personal sphere, I continuously experience how deep a practice of listening it is to become and remain a safe white person for Black, brown, and Indigenous people. In my classes, I am committed in helping students distinguish between personal and systemic forms of violence in developing practices through which we can act collectively toward dismantling white supremacy, both in private and public life.

Just like I do in my research, in class I bring lots of Interdisciplinary research, asking students to think outside of the box and

Throughout my teaching career, I have consistently strived to create an inclusive, engaging classroom environment that reflect on issues that even professors aren’t able to solve, intentionally drawing them into the real issues that they will need to face in the world.