Singing in the classroom: The last barrier? I grew up in a singing family: we sang at the dinner table before eating, we sang at church, in the car, around the campfire. This wasn t about performing; there was no pressure to get it right, particularly with my brother Van, who has Down Syndrome, belting out all the songs at the top of his lungs, in monotone, one octave below everyone else. It was about the joy of opening up your whole body to song, about joining voices, bringing emotion and energy into the room, having fun. And expressing ourselves in other ways than just talking. Growing up as a teenager and young adult in the U.S. in the 1960s, I was also shaped by the protest and community singing of that decade. We sang in marches for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, in coffee houses and conferences. I led singing at summer camps, and we organized community sing-alongs, or hootenannies, drawing as many as 300 people into a local park on a summer evening for an impromptu songfest. We carried guitars almost as easily as we carried purses or pens, they were easy tools to encourage group participation. After moving to Canada in the early 1970s, I continued to bring my guitar into situations where I could get people singing. I was already living in Toronto by that decade, and completing my PhD on Paulo Freire s method of teaching literacy and raising critical social consciousness, or conscientization. As a member of the Participatory Research Group, I joined friends dian marino, May Ann Kainola, Winnie Ng and others in a radical new initiative of the Toronto School Board and Metro Labour Council to teach English in workplaces to facilitate the communication both among workers and between them and management. This seemed the perfect place to apply Freirean literacy methods to ESL, and to use the codes that Freire proposed as catalysts for critical dialogue about common issues. Codes could be photographs or theatre skits or songs, really almost anything that could re-present a shared problem to people so that they could look at it anew, as they were also learning the language.
So we wrote collective songs about things that were happening in the garment factory where we taught ESL after work in the cafeteria. A common problem emerged when several women shared their frustration at losing pay if their sewing maching broke down; in a context where they were paid by the piece and not by the hour, time was precious and they needed fast action to get working again. Once we identified this as a theme for Freirean problem-posing education, we began to analyze why it existed and what could be done about it. In sharing strategies for how to resolve the problem and get their machine fixed, we found a pattern in the responses, which had them moving up the ladder of authorities in the company: they would first go to the foreman, then to the supervisor, then to the manager, etc. This ladder metaphor opened up a conversation about the broader powers beyond the factory itself: the owners, the investors, etc. (insert the cartoons that accompanied the song) I was reminded of an African American spiritual, Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to which also incorporate this dynamic of running from one to another source of salvation. So we adapted that tune to a song we collectively wrote, based on our analysis. It went like this (check article for accurate words): My machine s broken down, what can I do? My machine s broken down, what can I do? 2
My machine s broken down, what can I do? I m losing my pay. Go to the foreman, foreman will you help me? (3 X) I m losing my pay. And it continued: Go to the manager, manager will you help me? (3 X) Go to the owner, owner will you help me? (3X) Go to the investors, investors will you help me? (3X) I m losing my pay. The song became not only a synthesis of our emerging analysis of the power structure within which they were working, and a form of sharing strategies, but it also served as a release for the frustration the workers expressed, and as a way to learn some useful language in the process. There are many other examples of songs we wrote with workers during that period, but I want to move into other contexts to explore how song can transform the conversation in more formal settings like conferences and classrooms. I preface this by noting that my own singing experience has been deepened and technically improved recently by being a member of a community choir since its founding in 2000. Common Thread Community Chorus, as described on its website, is a secular, non-audition choir that sings folk music reflecting the languages and cultures of Toronto. The choir is for anyone who believes that social justice and community can be built through music. Its founders always envisioned that it would balance performance with activities that took music into the community, getting people to sing again, aiming to put a song on your lips, and not just in your ears. Part of the social justice mission, then, was to support a wide range of causes and groups, and to challenge a commercialized music culture that has made people consumers rather than producers of song. I joined others over the first years, as we got groups singing in antiwar rallies, anti-poverty marches, city hall deputations, labour conventions, conferences and workshops. But by the end of the first decade, the choir had evolved to focus primarily on performance, while community engagement had to be re-articulated and even defended as central to the mission. Out of this debate, I became determined to 3
personally take music into any context where I was working and to show how transformative it could be to get people singing in community again. One of my first opportunities came in 2008 (?) when I was invited to speak about Myles Horton, founder of the Tennessee-based Highlander Center, at a Community Development Institute held at George Brown College in Toronto. The conference, attended by over 200 community workers with diverse cultural histories, was opening with a tribute to three of the (white male) giants of popular education and community development: Paulo Freire of Brazil, Moses Coady of Canada, and Myles Horton of the U.S. Myles had been a mentor to me in the 1970s and 80s, a close friend and coorganizer of a hemispheric popular education gathering in Nicaragua in 1983, and I had named my son Joshua Myles, in his honour. As I prepared the talk, rereading his educational autobiography, The Long Haul, I noted that Myles suggested the history of Highlander could be told through song. In fact, it was a key site for the music that stirred the civil rights movement: We Shall Overcome had been shaped and launched form there by Myles late wife Zilphia; Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Guy and Candy Carawan, Bernice Reagon Johnson, and Jane Sapp, had all brought their songleading skills into this center and out into surrounding communities over the decades. 4
So my introduction to Myles and Highlander was punctuated by four songs, each emphasizing another aspect of his approach and the Center s actions. I put the words of the first song on the large power point screen, and began to sing before I opened my mouth to speak. Within a few phrases, many of the people in the audience were singing along with me. And I would estimate that a majority of them were immigrant community workers, not born in North America, and so they didn t necessarily share the history or the repertoire. But they sang, and even more joined in when I encouraged them. I had chosen songs with simple melodies and repeatable lyrics, and the content resonated with those committed to social change work. Perhaps also there was a relief that they didn t have to sit passively and listen to yet another lecture. But this was my first experiment in integrating singing into a talk, and involving the audience throughout. Granted, it was easier to do because the subject was popular education and the participants were activists, but we were still breaking the pattern of most conferences, and many came up to me afterwards, saying that this is what they will remember, the songs, the singing. Over the next couple of years, whenever I was invited to do a keynote about popular education or the arts, I continued to get people singing as an integral part of my presentation and message. And I always started singing before I talked. This actually helped me be more present, it grounded me fully in the context and in my own feelings as well as thoughts. Following the first song, after bringing everyone s voices and bodies into the hall, I would ask: How have we just transformed the energy in this space? How have you been changed from passive consumers into active producers? How can other similar artistic processes be integrated into our education and organizing work to tap these energies, this spirit? So I would use the experience as an introduction to what I as talking about the other powerful ways of knowing and communicating and acting that the arts can generate, and especially when they are democratized, when everyone s voice and creativity is tapped. The choice of the songs was critical, too, as they became the outline or touchstones for what I was saying. For example, when I gave a keynote on popular education to the International Conference of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed in Minneapolis in 2009, to illustrate three key features of popular education that it is glocal (merging the local and global), inclusive (challenging power and promoting equity), and holistic (integrating body, mind and spirit) I chose songs that would illustrate those processes. 5
While this leap into song in my keynotes initially took a lot of courage (or a kind of willingness to make a fool of myself, and not care too much), it was easier than my first efforts to sing in a university classroom. In part, because I had to work harder and live longer with the students than I did with a captive audience waiting for my public speech. Again I was able to justify the use of song in an introductory course on Community Arts for Social Change, arguing that it was one of the many tools which activists and artists could use to engage and animate communities. So at the first class, facing 100 students from diverse faculties (fine arts, environmental studies, social work, business, etc), I began singing Gonna look to the people for courage, in the hard times coming ahead, we re gonna sing and shout, we re gonna work it out, in the hard times coming ahead creating new verses such as We re going to look to the people for stories or for wisdom or for action all suggesting that community arts was first about tapping and animating the resources of everyone their courage, their stories, their wisdom, their action. This became part of the introduction to the course objectives and content. And once again, I invited everyone to join me in song. Usually most did, but not all, and we would then talk about how they felt, why they felt energized or why they felt uncomfortable opening their mouths, what did that say about what we think can happen in a classroom. Thus we opened up a conversation about the pedagogy of the course as well, which was an attempt to walk the talk of community arts, and to challenge many hegemonic notions of teaching and learning in the process. A few would drop the class at that point, but most were intrigued, if not hooked. However, while I started the first class with my song, I acknowledged that my repertoire was from another era, and that I would need volunteers for the subsequent weeks to open up the class with other kinds of music, reflecting their own passions and related to the day s theme, as well as engaging the rest of the students in some way. Thus, we were able to experience a range of musical openings from a jazz group that took over the second week, creating a jam based on the readings, and giving the audience the sound of the backup instruments, to an African stick music making to connect to our session on Indigenous practices, to an improv piano player riffing with the audience on another reading. My willingness to take risks the first day created a space, I think, for others to take similar risks in subsequent weeks. In any case, for some, it may never have felt comfortable: not everyone likes to sing nor to experience different kinds of music; many have had their voices squashed early on in public schools where they were told that they couldn t sing ; others will just hear the hegemonic voices in 6
academic walls saying: this just isn t done in university classrooms, singing can t be a part of serious learning. In bringing music into learning contexts, in welcoming everyone to join in, we are also challenging a highly developed commercialized music industry and consumer culture, which has, in some ways, robbed us all of participation, by connecting us mainly through pop star celebrities, fan culture and ipod earphones. On the other hand, there is a re-emergence of group singing and choirs (perhaps inspired by TV programs like Glee) and also of creative music-making through new media technologies and internet sharing that encourage a do-it-yourself culture. But often the new technologies encourage individual creation and don t necessarily help to create community or mobilize collective energies for change. I will close with a recent experience in group singing, which I led as part of a keynote I gave at the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, in the fall of 2012. As the first Chair of Social Justice, I was asked to speak about Art for Social Change. Because I wanted to counter the tendency to honour the individual genius artist while denying the capacity of all people to be creative, I chose a song that had become my father s mantra, which he often led in family gatherings or large meetings (yes, I fell not far from the tree!). It started I am one voice and I am singing, I am not alone, and proceeded to add voices in the subsequent verses: We are two voices, we re a hundred voices, we re a million voices, etc. Quite simply, it recognized the importance of each unique single voice, but slowly built up to include many voices, whose collective strength could move mountains. 7
Choosing a song associated with my father, a song we had sung at his 2008 funeral, brought me more fully into the room, connecting with a deep and rich personal history. And people responded, adding their voices to the chorus. Transforming the energy, creating connections among us. We re a million voices, we are singing; we are not alone. 8