COMMUNITY FIRST: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY INTO TEACHER’S AND STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES WITH DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS IN A SECONDARY CHORAL CLASSROOM By Rebecca Marie DeWan A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Music Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2022 ABSTRACT Discussing current events, engaging with the historical context of repertoire, or identifying systemic oppression are all possible conversations that music students or teachers could find difficult. I aimed to investigate such conversations that could take place in a secondary choral classroom. In an increasingly polarized sociopolitical environment, I anticipated the possibility that students or teachers may experience discomfort because of the topic of a conversation or disagreement during it. Thus, in this study I asked: How do students and a teacher experience difficult conversations in a high school chorus classroom? Throughout this narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2013; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006), I listened to and lived alongside Nick Metta and the Broadport High School Chamber Choir members (all pseudonyms). I attended most Chamber Choir rehearsals for three months and sang with students. Nick facilitated two significant class discussions: first, interrogating implicit bias in a tweet about the Super Bowl halftime show, and second, a debate on the impending end of the mask mandate at their school. I interviewed Nick 11 times, which included formal interviews and several after-class debriefs. After I conducted initial interviews with 12 Chamber Choir members, I reevaluated the focus of the inquiry. The study shifted from an investigation of difficult conversations to an exploration of the importance of community. Students reported that the community they experienced in class determined their comfort level in discussions more than the topic of a conversation. I conducted further interviews with two featured students, Jimin and Spring, who shared their experiences both related to discussions and how they participated in the choral and school community. In this document, I invited the reader to join me on the inquiry journey as I navigated my assumptions and reorientation based on emergent themes. I time-bounded only the first two chapters to capture how I entered the inquiry; the shift in focus that occurred during the inquiry is a finding unto itself. Initially, anti-racism served as the theoretical framework for the design, and I situated my understanding of navigating difficult conversations on Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort. Emergent themes included cultivating an environment for discussions, experiencing belonging and fitting in at school, and the reciprocal relationship between music making and conversation. The importance of community was the salient finding of this inquiry. Parker’s (2016) community concept in choral classrooms thus framed the discussion chapter. Based on the emergent themes, I critiqued where I started this inquiry—challenging both the anti-racist framing and a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) as a pedagogical approach. Culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2021) was ultimately more suitable for Nick’s teaching philosophy and the students’ experiences than anti-racist education. Additionally, I determined that utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort in the inquiry’s setting would be a misuse of the approach. The findings of this inquiry lead to implications for the field. K–12 teachers can explore how community building impacts their ensembles and can work to integrate critical conversations across the curriculum. Music teacher educators could utilize a pedagogy of discomfort to disrupt whiteness in preservice music education programs. I propose many possible future inquiries, including integrating adolescent voices in music education scholarship. Copyright by REBECCA MARIE DEWAN 2022 This dissertation is dedicated to Meredith. “They talked. The end.” v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dear Nick, Jimin, Spring, and the Broadport High School Chamber Choir students, Thank you for allowing me into your space, sharing your stories, and giving me your time. Your experiences are rich, and I only hope that I captured them satisfactorily in this document. It was a privilege to live alongside you and inquire with you into your experiences. Nick, you are a music educator with eternally high standards who cares deeply for students. We are all lucky you are in this profession. I learned from you, especially when your pedagogical practices differed from mine and you eagerly engaged in philosophical debates with me. Your deep commitment to reflection makes you not only a fantastic educator but a stellar research participant also. To all the Chamber Choir students who participated in the mini-interviews, that process sent me in the new direction of investigating community rather than looking for discomfort. Jimin and Spring, your words are profound, and your stories matter. You shared your high school experiences: your love for BTS and Heartbreakers and struggles with racism and fitting in. You were patient with me as I realized how much I had forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. Thank you. Dear family, it takes a whole village to raise one child. Thank you for surrounding Meredith and me with love and support during this journey. The freezer meals and nightly dinners are not nearly “thank you” enough for what you have given to us. You provided Meredith with stability and activities (Horses! Dogs! Gardens! Swimming! Bees! Ceramics!), especially at the end when I isolated in my office to write. Dear MSU, I am grateful for everyone I have had the opportunity to learn from and learn alongside throughout my journey. To the Ph.D. cohort, I appreciate the ways you stretched my thinking and always strove to make things relevant in the classroom. What a wild pandemic journey this has been. While the COVID-19 pandemic continues to negatively impact education vi at all levels, I pause to make space for gratitude. I am grateful for the opportunity to return home to conduct this dissertation research. To the faculty, thank you for supporting my decision to remain in Maine. You demonstrate a commitment to supporting the student and the person that I will take with me. To my committee, thank you for the rich feedback and always being willing to Zoom. To Juliet: Thank You, from the bottom of my heart. When I brought you my list of dissertation ideas, you supported me in the most nebulous topic and helped me craft it into this project. You challenged my thinking, and I always appreciated when you pushed back. Thank you for believing in me and helping me develop my researcher voice. And to my forever friends, my chosen family, thank you for being just a text away. You bring balance to my life. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................................... xiii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................xiv CHAPTER 1: AN INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 A Note to You ..................................................................................................................... 1 Narrative Beginnings ........................................................................................................... 2 Three Stories of Experience .................................................................................... 2 Reflection on Growth from These Experiences ...................................................... 6 Researcher Lens....................................................................................................... 7 Temporal Context for Possible Conversation...................................................................... 8 Education Impacted by COVID-19 Pandemic ........................................................ 8 Socio-Political Landscape ..................................................................................... 10 Neutrality and Controversial Issues........................................................... 11 Politics and Post-Truth .............................................................................. 12 Response to Racial Justice Movements: DEI or Anti-CRT ...................... 13 Current Events in Classrooms ................................................................... 15 Psychological State of Teachers ............................................................................ 17 Psychological State of Students............................................................................. 20 Impact of Public Discourse on Secondary Choral Music Education .................... 21 Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................................... 23 Race and Racism ................................................................................................... 24 Anti-racist Education ............................................................................................. 26 Anti-racist Music Education .................................................................................. 28 Anti-racism in this Inquiry .................................................................................... 30 Anti-racist Work in Predominantly White Spaces ................................................ 31 Research Question ............................................................................................................. 32 Difficult Conversations Defined........................................................................................ 32 Dissertation Outline ........................................................................................................... 33 Summary............................................................................................................................ 34 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................. 35 Teaching Controversial Public Issues in General Education Classrooms ......................... 35 Emotional Constructs in the Classroom ............................................................................ 38 Empathy ................................................................................................................. 38 Vulnerability .......................................................................................................... 40 Caring .................................................................................................................... 42 Pedagogy of Discomfort .................................................................................................... 44 As Originally Conceived ....................................................................................... 45 Critical Hope ......................................................................................................... 47 Pedagogy of Discomfort Applied .......................................................................... 48 Considerations for Facilitating Discomfort ....................................................................... 52 Strengths and Criticisms of Pedagogy of Discomfort ....................................................... 53 Strengths ................................................................................................................ 53 Criticisms ............................................................................................................... 54 viii Controversy, Dialogue, and Discomfort in Music Education ........................................... 57 Controversy and Dialogue in Music Education..................................................... 57 Choral-Dialoguing ................................................................................................. 59 Discomfort in Unfamiliar Music ........................................................................... 61 Synthesis of Discomfort in Music Education ........................................................ 62 Need for the Study ............................................................................................................. 62 Theorizing a Role for Discomfort in the Secondary Choral Classroom ............... 64 Summary............................................................................................................................ 65 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................. 66 A Brief Overview of Narrative Research in Music Education .......................................... 66 Clandinin’s Narrative Inquiry Methodology ..................................................................... 67 Design Considerations ........................................................................................... 70 Narrative Beginnings ................................................................................. 70 Research Puzzles ....................................................................................... 71 Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving .................................................... 71 Research Justifications .............................................................................. 72 Commonplaces .......................................................................................... 72 Research Process ................................................................................................... 73 Design Aspects of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education Literature ................................ 74 Research Questions ............................................................................................... 75 Participants ............................................................................................................ 76 Research Justifications and Theoretical Frameworks ........................................... 77 Relationality .......................................................................................................... 78 Data and Time in the Field .................................................................................... 80 Final Research Text ............................................................................................... 81 Design ................................................................................................................................ 82 Narrative Beginnings ............................................................................................. 83 Research Question ................................................................................................. 84 Ethical Considerations ........................................................................................... 84 Research Justifications .......................................................................................... 88 Participant Selection .............................................................................................. 89 Confidentiality ....................................................................................................... 91 Listening and Living Alongside ........................................................................................ 92 Observations .......................................................................................................... 92 Interviews .............................................................................................................. 93 Teacher Interviews .................................................................................... 94 Student Interviews ..................................................................................... 95 Walkthrough .............................................................................................. 97 Other Artifacts ....................................................................................................... 97 From Field to Research Texts............................................................................................ 98 Summary............................................................................................................................ 99 CHAPTER 4: PLACES, PEOPLE, AND EVENTS ............................................................... 101 Introduction to Towns ..................................................................................................... 101 Broadport High School .................................................................................................... 102 Nick Metta ....................................................................................................................... 104 ix Journey to Music Teaching ................................................................................. 105 Nick’s Perception of the School .......................................................................... 107 Administration Tackling Difficult Conversations ................................... 108 Misalignment of Values at Previous District........................................... 108 Multiple Roles of Nick ........................................................................................ 110 Student View of Mr. Metta .................................................................................. 111 Broadport High School Chamber Choir .......................................................................... 112 COVID-19 Pandemic .......................................................................................... 112 Members of the Chamber Choir .......................................................................... 113 Featured Students ............................................................................................................ 114 Jimin .................................................................................................................... 115 Adult Perspective..................................................................................... 119 Spring .................................................................................................................. 121 Adult Perspective..................................................................................... 125 Major Events ................................................................................................................... 126 Super Bowl Halftime Show Discussion .............................................................. 126 Mask Mandate Ending Debate ............................................................................ 129 May Concert ........................................................................................................ 131 Summary.......................................................................................................................... 133 CHAPTER 5: TEACHER’S EXPERIENCES ....................................................................... 134 Ideal: Teacher Practices ................................................................................................... 135 Observed Teacher Traits...................................................................................... 136 Fuel for Teaching ................................................................................................ 137 A Shift in Philosophy .......................................................................................... 139 Reflection and Flexibility .................................................................................... 142 Reality: Stress .................................................................................................................. 144 The Pandemic Has Changed Us: “Have Grace”.................................................. 145 “Good Enough is Good Enough” ........................................................................ 146 Pressure of Performance ...................................................................................... 147 New Parenthood .................................................................................................. 149 Split Between Two Buildings .............................................................................. 150 Community and Classroom Environment ....................................................................... 152 Community, Relationships, and Investment ........................................................ 153 Safe Environment ................................................................................................ 154 Risk-Taking ............................................................................................. 154 Attunement .............................................................................................. 156 Discussion Norms .................................................................................... 157 Conversation in Chamber Choir ...................................................................................... 158 Role of the Facilitator .......................................................................................... 160 Difficult Conversation ......................................................................................... 161 Conversations about Race ....................................................................... 161 Takeaways for Students ........................................................................... 162 Summary.......................................................................................................................... 163 CHAPTER 6: STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES ........................................................................ 164 The Temporality of the Adolescent Experience .............................................................. 164 x COVID-19 Pandemic .......................................................................................... 166 Social Media ........................................................................................................ 167 Adults in Their World ......................................................................................... 168 School .................................................................................................................. 169 How to Be a Student ................................................................................ 173 Political Identity ...................................................................................... 174 Binary Thinking................................................................................................... 174 Environment in Chamber Choir ...................................................................................... 176 Supportive............................................................................................................ 177 Like Family ......................................................................................................... 178 Comfort and Confidence ..................................................................................... 179 Community Building Practices............................................................................ 180 How Chamber Choir is Different Than or the Same as Other Classes ............... 181 Comparing Environments ........................................................................ 181 Only In Chamber Choir ........................................................................... 182 “An AP Kind of Vibe” ............................................................................ 184 Belonging vs. Fitting In ................................................................................................... 186 Belonging ............................................................................................................ 187 Fitting In .............................................................................................................. 189 Judged By Peers ...................................................................................... 190 “We Are On The Same Side” .................................................................. 190 Walkthrough ........................................................................................................ 192 Jimin’s High School ................................................................................ 192 Spring’s High School .............................................................................. 194 Students’ Reflections on Conversations in Chamber Choir ............................................ 199 It Was Important To Have These Conversations ................................................ 200 Topic-Specific Hesitancy and Discomfort .......................................................... 201 Takeaways from Conversations .......................................................................... 203 How Conversations Impact Ensemble Music Making ........................................ 204 Summary.......................................................................................................................... 205 CHAPTER 7: DISCUSSION .................................................................................................... 206 Emergent Themes ............................................................................................................ 206 Articulating a Shift in Focus................................................................................ 207 Defining Community ........................................................................................... 209 The Importance of Community ........................................................................... 210 Sociality: The Impact of Who Is In The Room ....................................... 211 Sociality and Place: Troubling Safety and Family .................................. 215 Place: Two Buildings and the Importance of Space ................................ 219 Empathy, Vulnerability, Discomfort ................................................................... 222 Empathy ................................................................................................... 222 Vulnerability ............................................................................................ 224 Discomfort ............................................................................................... 226 Culturally Relevant Pedagogy ............................................................................. 227 Critique: Challenging Where I Began ............................................................................. 233 Discussing Controversial Public Issues ............................................................... 233 Anti-racist Education ........................................................................................... 235 xi Pedagogy of Discomfort ...................................................................................... 239 Summary.......................................................................................................................... 246 CHAPTER 8: IMPLICATIONS .............................................................................................. 248 PK–12 Teaching .............................................................................................................. 248 Making Time for Community Building .............................................................. 249 Acknowledging Adultism .................................................................................... 250 Interrogating the Value of Discussion ................................................................. 252 Critical Conversations Across the Curriculum .................................................... 253 Opportunities for Professional Development ...................................................... 256 Music Teacher Education ................................................................................................ 257 Inviting Discomfort into the Undergraduate Classroom ..................................... 258 Disrupting Whiteness in Music Teacher Education ............................................ 259 Future Research ............................................................................................................... 262 Adolescents in Research ...................................................................................... 263 Inquiry Possibilities ............................................................................................. 266 Epilogue ........................................................................................................................... 270 Reflections on the Research ................................................................................ 270 Temporal Context: An Update ............................................................................ 274 A Final Note To You ........................................................................................... 276 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 277 APPENDIX A: TEACHER CONSENT FORM ..................................................................... 303 APPENDIX B: ADMINISTRATION SUPPORT LETTER ................................................. 305 APPENDIX C: STUDENT ASSENT FORM.......................................................................... 306 APPENDIX D: PARENT/GUARDIAN CONSENT FORM ................................................. 309 APPENDIX E: OBSERVATION PROTOCOL ..................................................................... 312 APPENDIX F: TEACHER INTERVIEW PROTOCOL ...................................................... 313 APPENDIX G: STUDENT MINI-INTERVIEW PROTOCOL ........................................... 315 APPENDIX H: FEATURED STUDENT INTERVIEW PROTOCOL ............................... 316 APPENDIX I: WALKTHROUGH PROTOCOL .................................................................. 318 xii LIST OF TABLES Table 1–Teacher interviews .......................................................................................................... 95 Table 2–Broadport High School Chamber Choir Members ........................................................ 114 xiii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1–Jimin's first piece of artwork ........................................................................................ 118 Figure 2–Jimin's second piece of artwork ................................................................................... 119 Figure 3–Spring's artwork ........................................................................................................... 123 Figure 4–Whiteboard at the end of the Super Bowl Halftime Show discussion ......................... 127 Figure 5–Spring's High School Map ........................................................................................... 199 xiv CHAPTER 1: AN INTRODUCTION A Note to You Dear Reader, This narrative inquiry was designed to explore difficult conversations in a high school chorus classroom. I inquired into the experiences of Broadport High School’s (BHS) music teacher and the students enrolled in Chamber Choir by entering in the midst and living alongside participants. For three months, I observed BHS Chamber Choir rehearsals. I interviewed two- thirds of the students in the class and had extensive interviews with the teacher. I sought to understand how the students and the teacher experienced difficult conversations. Before I began data collection, I imagined those possible conversations to be around world events or equity issues, perhaps literature-based conversations, or working through tensions caused by social dynamics in the ensemble. I carefully designed the project and outlined the theoretical and pedagogical frameworks I anticipated needing. As I transitioned from being in the field to writing research texts, my original exclusive focus on difficult conversations expanded to include themes of connectedness, community, and belonging. I found that a student is more likely to engage in conversation if they feel comfortable. The topic of conversation, difficult or not, is secondary to how they feel in the space. Therefore, the focus of this dissertation shifted from difficult conversations to community. Reader, you are an integral part of this dissertation. Narrative inquiries require researcher, participant, and reader—storytellers and listeners. I am inviting you on the journey: to live alongside me as the researcher, to engage with the experiences of one teacher and the many exceptional young people, to consider how their experiences spark reflection on your personal stories and inform your professional practice. I hope you find pieces of this dissertation that prick 1 your consciences (Barone, 1992), that invite you to critically reflect on your life and practice (Clandinin, 2013). “No one leaves a narrative inquiry unchanged” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 201). Live alongside, enter in the midst, be with me on this journey. This shift from difficult conversations to community is a finding unto itself, and so I timebound Chapters 1 and 2 to capture where I started. In this chapter, I share three stories of experience that inform who I am as a researcher in this inquiry. Then, I capture temporal context for possible conversations I might observe. Initially, anti-racism served as the theoretical framework for this inquiry. I then introduce the research question followed by an exploration of difficult conversations. I provide a full outline of the dissertation at the end of this chapter. Narrative Beginnings A narrative inquirer must examine how their past experiences inform who they are as researchers and how their experiences shape a project. Therefore, I offer three discrete stories from my time as a secondary choral teacher. After each story, I reflect on how the experience caused me to consider who I am in this project. Three Stories of Experience “My dad said you’re wrong. Schools don’t raise children. Parents do.” A freshman boy in the chamber singers I directed recounted his father’s objection to my introductory words during the previous night’s concert. I was taken aback. In my introduction of “It Takes a Village” by Joan Szymko, I had shared that the lyrics “it takes a whole village to raise one child” felt more profound since giving birth to my daughter, who was at that time just four months old. In recognizing the importance of the support system around me as a parent, I felt an increased responsibility and joy in being a teacher. I thanked the audience for allowing me to be a part of the village of the high school involved in raising their children. During chamber 2 singers’ discussion following the concert, one student shared his father’s vehement objection to my insinuating that schools raise children. The father expressed to his son that raising a child is solely the responsibility of parents, not the education system. The student’s words caught me by surprise. I thanked him for sharing and called on the next student raising their hand. Prior to this experience, I did not recognize my strongly held belief that public schools play a vital role in child rearing. The father’s contradictory notion that raising a child rests solely with parents unsettled my assumption that everyone shared my belief. Words have impact, and I acknowledge that I do not remember exactly how I stated that sentiment to the audience. I cannot control how my words are received. In our class discussion, I thanked the student for sharing. Although I quickly moved the conversation forward, his words claimed a spot in my consciousness, slowly questioning the role of public schools in society. What would it have looked like to engage the singers in a discussion on the purpose of public school? How could I have cared for the wellbeing of the student who spoke up and shared his father’s belief if his peers disagreed? I reflect on how I reacted to—and avoided—such unplanned opportunities for rich discussions as I examine who I am in this inquiry. As a cisgender straight woman, I rarely considered my gender and sexuality in my teaching. The privilege this majority identity afforded me caused me to gloss over or disregard the impact of gender and sexuality in the lives of the students in my music classroom. A singer shared with me that his older sibling—who came out as trans after graduating high school—quit chorus because of the required concert attire that reinscribed gender binaries. A year later, a current student in the program came out as trans. In a moment that demonstrated his grace beyond his years, the freshman said “it’s ok if you make a mistake with my pronouns since you knew me last year as a girl.” I recognized the need to educate myself on issues of gender in the 3 choral classroom. The following year during course work for my master’s degree, I aligned this line of inquiry to a review of literature assignment. As a result of the research I read—Bergonzi (2009), Elpus and Carter (2016), M. L. Garrett (2012), McBride (2016), Nichols (2013), Palkki (2015), and Paparo (2014)—I made a number of conscious changes in my classroom: (a) the removal of gendered language from course documents, (b) the use of section-specific language in rehearsals instead of referring to gender, (c) the adoption of universal guidelines for concert black attire that did not reinscribe gender norms, and (d) the deliberate selection of choral music to avoid solely heteronormative narratives in lyrics. I explicitly addressed the need to be gender- inclusive in my explanation of these changes to students. This is an example of my decision to address what could be perceived as a controversial issue in my classroom. Teaching in a rural, conservative-leaning district, I generally avoided anything that could be construed as social justice. I anticipated receiving negative feedback from parents because of how directly I was addressing issues of gender. I was prepared to defend my choices with the research I had done and the ethical imperative to do right by students in my classroom. However, the parental pushback never came. What I did witness was an anecdotal increase in students’ perception of inclusivity and positive climate in the music room. What other inequities were upheld in my classroom because I was afraid to address them? I reflect on the ways that I deliberately planned for pedagogical changes to address equity and inclusion in the latter stages of my K–12 career as I embark on this inquiry. During the final spring of my teaching high school, the band teacher and I took the ensembles to a music festival. We viewed it as an end-of-the-year celebration of students’ hard work. Each ensemble performed for judges, had a brief clinic, and received a rating. For most students, the music portion of the trip was overshadowed by the subsequent visit to the 4 amusement park. Following the chorus’s performance, the clinician joined the ensemble onstage to workshop a few musical details. He held the score out to refer to a specific measure. I nodded in acknowledgment from the side of the stage as I was trying to give him the limited floor space available. He gestured with his hand for me to come closer. I took one step toward him and nodded emphatically, not saying that I did not need to see the score I had spent several months studying to know what he was talking about. My meager movement did not satisfy him. He exclaimed “Come closer! I won’t tell my wife!” I did not respond to the inappropriate comment in the moment. I was worried that my standing up to the clinician could negatively impact his rating of the students’ performance. I was concerned that responding in the moment would lead to an awkwardness for the remainder of the clinic. I was aware of the power dynamics of age, gender, and experience between me and the clinician. For these reasons, I simply smiled, leaned closer to look at the score, and then stepped back to reclaim my personal space. I did, after careful consideration, address the interaction during class the following day with students. Reading from notes I had made in preparation for the discussion, I expressed regret that I missed an opportunity to demonstrate how to respond to inappropriate comments. Students’ reactions during this discussion ranged widely, from disgust at the clinician’s comment to assuring me that I had not done anything wrong to expressing surprise as they had missed the exchange in the moment. I reflect on how I returned to events a day later to have difficult conversations as I inquire into other teachers’ and students’ experiences. Reflecting on these scenarios from my teaching experience led me to several wonderments about difficult conversations in classrooms. How do music teachers integrate conversation in their classrooms? How would other music teachers have handled similar 5 scenarios? To what extent do teachers encourage discourse about current events? How are teachers managing during this time of heightened political polarization? Ultimately, these wonderments led to the design of this dissertation study in which I inquired into the experiences of a teacher and several students with difficult conversations in a secondary choral classroom. Reflection on Growth from These Experiences These three vignettes offer a glimpse into my experiences with difficult classroom conversations. The first demonstrated missed opportunities. I shied away from controversy and my avoidance resulted in upholding the status quo. The second exemplified the positive possibilities of unsettling the status quo. The change in practice regarding gender came because of my learning of a former student’s negative experience in the choral ensemble. Although I did not have a conversation with this former student, I made a shift in my practice, thought critically and carefully through changes, and presented evidence-based decisions to current students. I believe that schools play a part in raising children, yet the first vignette demonstrated that I was not prepared to discuss this view with students. The second vignette presented a situation in which a strongly held belief—that my classroom needs to be inclusive and accessible to all students—resulted in change to practice. The moral obligation to do right by students pushed me beyond my desire to avoid controversial topics. It was difficult for me to hear that the gendered choir uniforms caused a student to quit chorus. I was prepared for further difficult conversation with students and parents about the changes I made to challenge heteronormativity in my classroom, but those never materialized. Although I explicitly explained the changes to students in the classroom, I did not ask their thoughts on the changes, nor did I solicit feedback from parents. Had I done so, it is possible that difficult conversations could have materialized. The final vignette illustrated how I learned to return to necessary conversations, even if bringing 6 them up again would be uncomfortable. The power of hitting “pause” on an important conversation positively influenced my teaching. I learned to acknowledge the desire or need for a conversation in the moment and to let students know we would return to it at a later point. This afforded me the opportunity to thoughtfully prepare for the discussion. Over time, I learned to value classroom conversations as a regular part of the ensemble rehearsal process. For much of my career, I believed a learning environment devoid of politics was not only possible, but admirable. I recall overhearing students’ lunchroom conversations about current events, sometimes shaking my head at the reiteration of conspiracy theories. The students were tuned into the world, but I shut it out in my classroom. I erroneously thought their chatter harmless and their world views inconsequential to education. I did not invite discussions on topics on which we might disagree into the classroom. I believed an apolitical classroom was possible. Although the vignettes I shared at the beginning of this chapter document a shift in this perspective, the growth in my views on this topic influence who I am in this inquiry. Researcher Lens The study took place in a high school music classroom; therefore, I consider my identity as a music teacher and the role such conversations had in my professional life. I was once someone who actively avoided conflict. This avoidance led to complicit acceptance and perpetuation of the status quo. I presented three stories from my time as a high school chorus teacher and reflected on how those experiences shaped my orientation toward difficult conversations in teaching. In this reflective process, I can begin to understand who I am in this study and what propels me to do this research. Researcher reflexivity is essential to narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2013; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006), the methodology for this dissertation. This process is ongoing and continued throughout the dissertation process. To that end, I will 7 discuss my place within this study in greater detail in Chapter 3. I situate myself in a specific time and place, acknowledging that how I experience the world impacted how I interpreted this inquiry. The multi-faceted insider knowledge I have shaped this inquiry. This study took place in a high school chorus classroom in Maine. I taught high school choral music for thirteen years, and that experience informed how I designed and interpreted this research. As someone who attended schools and taught in Maine, I can offer unique insight into the music education landscape in the state, but also recognize that my worldview is solely mine. Temporal Context for Possible Conversation As I planned for a conversation-focused research project, it is important to include public discourse on various world events as all conversations are contextually situated. Research does not exist “in isolation from social and material contexts,” therefore I must acknowledge the relational existence between “human and nonhuman entities” (Patel, 2015, p. 49). In the following sections, I explore the turmoil of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has caused significant upheaval to education in the United States. I address the tense social-political landscape that permeates classrooms. I aim to capture this moment in time regarding education amid the pandemic and social-political landscape because I believe it had an impact on what I observed, how participants experienced education, and the types of conversations that took place in classrooms. Education Impacted by COVID-19 Pandemic Education during the COVID-19 pandemic looks different as districts made changes to instruction modality, funding, and technology to adapt (St. George et al., 2021). Due to the coronavirus, schools in the United States began shutting down in March of 2020. For many parts 8 of the country, the 2020–2021 school year was a mix of virtual offerings and in-person classes with masking and social distancing. The rise of the Delta variant in the summer of 2021 dashed any hope of returning to a “normal” fall as the pandemic disrupted a third school year (North, 2021). Teachers scrambled to adapt to emergency virtual instruction and some districts explored offering permanent virtual options for students at all grade levels (St. George et al., 2021). The disruption to K–12 education during the pandemic illuminated the many functions of a school beyond academics, such as childcare, mental health care, and food security (Bombardieri, 2021). The stress of the pandemic exacerbated the mental health problems among teachers (Gewertz, 2021). Students may be negatively impacted by their caregivers’ financial and emotional instability and isolation during remote learning, and school closures may limit student access to mental health care (Rodriguez, 2021). For school staff and students alike, the pandemic has changed the education experience. Mask mandates are a divisive issue prompting protests and disrupting school board meetings (Eaton-Robb, 2021). Florida and Arkansas prohibited districts from requiring masks (Fausset, 2021). A rural Maine father sued the school system his 12-year-old daughter attended over their mask mandate, claiming that COVID-19 posed “little, if any, health risk to children,” and he should have sole authority to make medical decisions for his child (Sharp & Whittle, 2021). In the first week of March 2022, the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) rescinded its indoor masking recommendation for schools. Almost two years after the start of the pandemic in the U.S., most Maine school districts moved to a mask-optional policy (Cohen, 2022). Waves of new variants continue to disrupt efforts to provide in-person learning. At the start of the 2021–2022 school year, more than half of Maine schools opted into the pooled testing 9 program provided by the Maine CDC (Costa, 2021). Despite preventative measures such as pooled testing, masking, and social distancing, several Maine schools shifted to virtual learning just weeks into the school year due to outbreaks of COVID-19 cases fueled by the Delta variant (Keithley, 2021). The Omicron variant caused a record-high surge in coronavirus cases in December 2021 through January 2022, which led to some Maine schools going into outbreak status or cancelling classes due to staffing shortages (Hoey & Russell, 2022). While the Omicron subvariant BA.2 became the dominant strain in March of 2022, officials prepared for a shift from pandemic to endemic as the United States learned to live with the coronavirus (Kimball, 2022). Socio-Political Landscape The United States is becoming increasingly polarized. The widening ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans has led to substantial party loyalty and animosity toward opposing parties (Abramowitz, 2021). Klein (2020) argued the polarization of the public and of the media act as a feedback loop, perpetuating the growing divide between political parties. The political landscape infiltrates PK–12 classrooms, impacting both the teacher and student experience. Educators feel a lack of trust from administrators and the public, and a lack of autonomy surrounding curricular decisions within the sociopolitical context of teaching during an election cycle (Dunn et al., 2019). I aim to capture the moment in time of data collection to contextualize what I observed in the field. I review scholarship to demonstrate that students and teachers are impacted by their political surroundings. I draw on digital and social media to frame the public discourse on topics that may affect teaching and learning. Inundated by the 24-hour news cycle covering the pandemic, climate change, racial equity, gender/sexual orientation, reproductive rights, and partisan politics, this is a challenging time to navigate the world, whether one is a teacher or a 10 student. Although I could not predetermine the content of classroom discussions I ultimately observed, this overview of current issues serves to set the stage for some of the difficult conversations I encountered. Neutrality and Controversial Issues A desire to remain neutral in the classroom could be the catalyst for avoiding contentious issues, though such claims of teacher and curricular neutrality are impossible (Boler, 1999; Journell, 2011). Political neutrality became fraught for teachers especially during the 2016 presidential campaign. The counties that hosted one of the more than 300 Trump campaign rallies experienced an increase in hate-motivated occurrences such as violence fueled by anti- Semitism and white-supremacist extremism (Feinberg et al., 2022). In response to the hateful rhetoric of the Trump presidential campaign, many teachers and administrators across the country opted to remove overt discussions of politics (Payne & Journell, 2019). Dunn et al. (2019) asserted that remaining (or striving to remain) neutral is also a political choice. In an attempt to remain neutral, teachers are, in fact, enacting the opposite of neutrality—choosing to maintain the status quo and further marginalizing members of certain groups. (p. 465) The decision not to discuss politics gave power to the hateful rhetoric that students likely heard outside of class. Abstaining from class discussion and silence on an issue is not neutrality; it is a political decision that further marginalizes the members of the groups that Trump attacked. Classrooms are a microcosm of the larger society, and especially in times of controversy and conflict, teachers can engage students in an active discourse on controversial public issues (Sondel et al., 2018). Instead of avoiding potentially contentious topics, teachers can lean into difficult discussions (Finley, 2020), courageous conversations (Singleton, 2015), and 11 controversial issues (Zimmerman & Robertson, 2017). Although significant research exists in this realm for social studies classrooms, “preparing students for participation in our democracy must happen across the curriculum” (Sondel et al., 2018, p. 177), including in music education. It is a challenging time to be teaching and learning with an abundance of potentially controversial issues. The Trump presidency left an indelible mark and educators continue to grapple with teaching in a post-truth1 environment. Following the murder of George Floyd, the summer of 2020 was filled with protests for racial justice. However, by February 2022, lawmakers in an estimated 36 states made efforts to restrict teaching about racism and bias (Stout, 2021). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continued to disrupt schooling and implementing public health policy was politically divisive. All of this impacted the psychological states of teachers and students in the 2021–2022 school year. Politics and Post-Truth With the rise of phrases like “fake news” and “post-truth,” teachers may struggle with classroom conversations not supported by evidence. The concept of fake news exploded during the 2016 presidential election, leading to growing conspiracy theories and a rejection of mainstream media outlets (Schulten & Brown, 2017). Teachers encountered students who argued that the Holocaust did not happen, that COVID was a manufactured crisis, and that the 2020 presidential election was rigged (Moyer, 2022). Conspiracy theories are abundant on social media, and false news spreads faster and farther online than the truth (Vosoughi et al., 2018). Adolescents spend a significant amount of time using social media (Vannucci & McCauley 1 Selected as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016, post-truth is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford Word of the Year 2016 | Oxford Languages, n.d.). 12 Ohannessian, 2019), therefore students may benefit from learning how to discern truth from lie online. Organizations such as the Stanford History Education Group advocate for schools to teach digital literacy skills to better equip students to navigate the emerging media landscape (Wineburg et al., 2016). In an era when the former president regularly dismissed his critics in mainstream news organizations as “fake news,” teachers might struggle to impart to students the importance of grounding one’s arguments in fact. Response to Racial Justice Movements: DEI or Anti-CRT A plethora of highly public murders of unarmed Black people by law enforcement led to increased calls for racial justice in the United States in 2020. The Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum and many organizations, companies, and individuals responded with pledges of support. School districts’ responses varied widely across time and place as the pendulum swung from calls for racial justice to anti-CRT legislation. One widely used resource challenging the white-centric2 narrative is the 1619 Project, a collection of essays published by the New York Times Magazine3 in 2019 that centered the experiences of enslaved people in the creation of the United States. It is viewed by some teachers as a complement to their existing curriculum to embrace a more holistic approach to understanding the country’s founding (Tharoor, 2020). In 2020, then-president Trump argued that any criticism of the United States is unpatriotic and 2 APA standards dictate that “racial and ethnic groups are designate by proper nouns and are capitalized” (p. 142). I capitalize Black and African-American to reflect the “specific cultural group” (Crenshaw, 1988, p. 1332). However, the notion of whiteness, while powerful in the sociopolitical landscape of the United States and elsewhere, does not refer to a specific cultural group. Therefore, I will not capitalize white, unless to maintain the original language of a quote. This differentiation is not my own; see https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php for more information. 3 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html is the collection of essays. There is also a curriculum repository for teachers to use the essays in their classrooms: https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/1619-project-pulitzer-center-education-programming 13 announced a national campaign to promote “patriotic education” by forming the “1776 commission” (Balingit & Meckler, 2020). The 1776 Commission released its report on January 18, 2021; newly-inaugurated president Biden issued an executive order dissolving the commission on January 21 (Kelly, 2021). Nevertheless, with national culture wars playing out in local classrooms, teachers express being “scar[ed] into silence” and are feeling increased levels of scrutiny regarding how they portray the founding of the country (Savransky, 2021). By 2021, the “anti-CRT” movement gained significant momentum across the country. Critical race theorists acknowledge the racial disparities imbedded into the systems that are the foundation of the United States. It is a theoretical framework used primarily at the graduate level, and some scholars find the suggestion that it is being taught in PK–12 schools laughable (Linker, 2021). Nonetheless, conservatives called for the ban of divisive topics in schools and indeed legislation exists in over half of the states to limit teaching on racism and bias (Stout, 2021). Supporters of such bills purport that banning topics leads to more equitable teaching environments, though teachers report being more cautious in class discussions for fear of retaliation from parents as the language is so subjective (Fortin & Heyward, 2022). Often comprised of members more conservative than the community they serve, school boards in some states have long worked against racial progress, perpetuating white supremacy in education (Conwright, 2022). While some schools performed Equity Audits to identify discrepancies in student access and opportunity (Creating Equity Audits, n.d.), lawmakers in at least 36 states made moves to restrict the teaching of racism and bias in schools (Stout, 2021). This pair of responses reflected the nation’s polarized views on education. 14 Current Events in Classrooms Teachers grapple both with how and whether to talk with students about current events. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, protests against police violence and racism occurred across the country with as many as 26 million people participating by June 2020, making it the largest movement in United States history (Buchanan et al., 2020). Providing context for current events and space for students’ thoughts are two import facets of helping students make sense of the demonstrations (Proulx & Schulten, 2020). Because of the intersection of the protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, many teachers had to navigate these important conversations virtually (Tadayon & Smith, 2020). The April 2021 conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd once again put the event in the national spotlight. Several organizations offered suggestions on how to discuss the topic with young people.4 These included specific lesson plans for various grade levels, guides to having difficult dialogue and resources for families to talk about racism at home. Education blogger Fink (2020) encouraged teachers to listen, send support, be responsive to the needs of the students even if that means scrapping planned lessons, and purposefully plan lessons on the topic. The 24-hour news cycle, perpetuated with easily accessible technology throughout the school day, can result in the events of the world permeating the classroom in real time. Major events and issues—such as the pandemic, the presidential election, mass shootings, and natural disasters—could be topics of discussion in school. In the days immediately following the January 4 See https://medium.com/waospi/resources-for-talking-to-students-about-police-violence-and-the-murder-of- george-floyd-d23d6a0bf4f0 for a collection of such resources. 15 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, teachers did not have to search far for resources on how to talk about it in their classes.5 The Learning Network (2021) offered teaching and learning resources on exploring a peaceful transfer of power, the role of the news media and social media, and investigating the president’s responsibility. On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in the largest military mobilization in Europe since the end of World War II. Thousands of lives have been lost and more than three million people have fled Ukraine (Bilefsky et al., 2022). The magnitude of these two events is unlike anything secondary students have previously experienced in their lifetime. With the possibility of constant news updates on their cell phones, students may want to discuss events in real time, which could happen during any course including music. Students may benefit from difficult conversations being woven into every class at every grade level. Dunn (2022) proposed “days after pedagogy” which works to support all children in the pursuit of justice and equity. Recognizing that the classroom does not exist in isolation from the events in the rest of the world, Dunn advocated for teachers to “take risks and change [their] curriculum” (p. 14) in response to unfolding current events. Students are capable of engaging in critical discussions at all ages. Dunn pointed to the cyclical white ignorance and privilege that occurs when white educators embrace the idea that certain topics should be off limits for their white students. Young children develop values based on their social contexts, including schools. Engaging in conversations that acknowledge different identity sites can “destigmatize people 5 For example: https://www.facinghistory.org/educator-resources/current-events/responding-insurrection-us-capitol, https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/talking-kids-about-attack-capitol, https://www.npr.org/sections/insurrection-at-the-capitol/2021/01/07/954415771/how-to-talk-to-kids-about-the-riots- at-the-u-s-capitol 16 from communities that are not like their own or those from marginalized groups, modeling an asset-based and humanizing approach to learning about others” (p. 83). Dunn found that teachers often believed that even major news stories “have to be connected to the subject area in order to merit class discussion” (p. 90) and therefore teachers avoided having discussions. Especially in an age of constant access to news via social media and mobile phones, students and teachers can be inundated with time-sensitive news updates throughout the day. Students do not experience their lives as compartmentalized and therefore, acknowledging the events that are affecting their lives is one way to teach the whole student. Critical conversations should not be relegated to one time of day or one specific class, but a commitment to addressing issues must be “inherently intertwined with the key mission of teaching and learning” (p. 35). Curricular and conversation decisions are never apolitical. In this increasingly polarized and politicized national environment, it may be tempting for educators to avoid politics. However, even to avoid conversations on world events is in and of itself a political act. Whether a teacher decides to engage or not may be influenced by several factors, including district support, state laws banning critical conversations, and job security. All of these factors may contribute to the psychological state of teachers in this current time. Psychological State of Teachers Teachers are overworked and professionally burned out. The atmosphere at school during the pandemic “has shifted from abject panic and disbelief of March 2020 to the ubiquitous dread of April 2022” (Jong-Fast, 2022). A survey conducted by the National Education Association (NEA) in January 2022 showed that 74% of respondents reported filling in for colleagues or covering duties as a result of staff shortages (Jotkoff, 2022). Additionally, 80% of respondents reported that the unfilled job openings led to a higher workload for the teachers who remained at 17 school. Feelings of burnout are a serious problem for 90% of the NEA survey respondents (Jotkoff, 2022). Morale is low as only 46% of teachers in the U.S. feel valued by society (Will, 2022). Almost half of teachers (49%) reported a desire to leave the profession because of the diminishing school climate and feelings of safety at work (McMahon et al., 2022). Adding to the unique school environment during the pandemic, in February 2022, National Guard members served as substitutes in New Mexico and bus drivers in Massachusetts, and Oklahoma police officers substituted in classrooms due to the teacher shortage (Nierenberg, 2022). Though school officials in New Mexico stressed that National Guard members serving as substitute teachers was merely a short-term solution, advocates for youth incarceration reform expressed concern about their presence in the classroom (Fordham, 2022). Some soldiers, given the choice, opted to wear their uniforms while substituting in order to command respect (Attanasio, 2022). Such militarization of the teaching force could have dire effects on students. This is especially likely for Black students because of the disproportionate rate of juvenile incarceration among Black youth compared to white youth (Rovner, 2021). Teachers’ workplace environment is increasingly hostile. As more state governments move to implement bans of teachers discussing LGBTQ issues in classrooms, Fox News personality Tucker Carlson encouraged parents—specifically dads—to “thrash the teachers” who do not comply with new regulations (Kane, 2022). Although not necessarily directly related, one- third of teachers indicated they experienced at least one incident of verbal harassment or threatening behavior from a student, and 29% reported at least one incident from a student’s caregiver (McMahon et al., 2022). The threat of physical violence that Carlson encouraged is a reality for some teachers—14% of teachers reported incidents of physical violence from a student. These statistics of abuse and harassment do not capture the psychological toll on 18 LGBTQ educators who teach in a state with legislation that bans discussing identity issues in the classroom. Although almost half of teachers plan to leave the profession in the next two years (Will, 2022), some teachers are leaving midyear and facing consequences. North Carolina educators could have their teaching license suspended for an entire year if they leave their job before the school year ends (Mayer, 2022). Similarly, school districts in Texas requested the state suspend or revoke teachers’ certificates for job abandonment. Such is the case of a former math teacher who chose not to return after winter break citing the increase in class sizes and concerns for her personal safety after a student brought a gun to school (Wiley, 2022). These are examples of teachers opting to leave the profession. As the national debate over appropriate topics in school increases, teachers struggle to navigate classroom discussions on identity. The vagueness of the laws prohibiting discussions on race and sexuality are causing some teachers to carefully consider how they answer student questions and the content of lessons during Black History Month for fear of parent retaliation (Fortin & Heyward, 2022). This fear is reinforced by Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill—known often as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill—which forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in K–3 classrooms (Block, 2022). Signed into law in March 2022, this bill allows parents to sue the school district if they believe a teacher has violated the restrictions. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign further legislation that prohibits any instruction on historical events that could make students feel discomfort because of their race, sex, or national origin (Goldstein, 2022). Florida State Senator Shevrin Jones called the move “an attempt to revise history and keep White people from feeling uncomfortable” (Simonson, 2022, para. 10). A similar law already passed in Oklahoma that prohibits educators from teaching material that could cause students feelings of “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other 19 form on psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex” (Forman, 2021). School staff argue that curriculum restrictions on LGBTQ issues lead to incomplete and inaccurate lessons and alienate student identities (Belsha, 2022). However, there is no consensus among the general population regarding how public schools should discuss racism and sexuality or the degree to which parents should be involved in curricular decisions (AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 2022). Educators are losing their jobs because they are facilitating discussions deemed inappropriate by administration or the public. A school district in Mississippi fired an assistant principal for violating the code of ethics when he read the children’s book I Need a New Butt! (McMillan, 2014) to second graders (Cramer & Paz, 2022). A Tennessee history teacher was fired for insubordination and unprofessional behavior after teaching lessons that critically explored the role of race in the United States with his predominately white students (Dennis, 2021). A lifelong resident of the town in which he works, the teacher is fighting to get his job back, stating a desire to “teach where it was needed most” (Dennis, 2021). A Kentucky music teacher resigned after controversy stemming from the message he wrote on his whiteboard— “you are free to be yourself with me”— and the criticism he received from administration for classroom conversations that occurred and were deemed outside his content area (Blackford, 2022). The increased public scrutiny over curriculum and the stress from the pandemic has had a toll on the psychological state of teachers. Psychological State of Students Rates of depression among U.S. teens are rising, and some point to increase social media use, a lack of social connection, and the inundation of world events as factors (Thompson, 2022). A 2021 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that feelings of sadness 20 or hopelessness prevents almost half of high school students from participating in normal activities (Rico et al., 2022). Social media does not cause depression among teens, but rather amplifies an adolescent’s existing mental state (Murthy, 2021). Feelings of connectedness and belonging are key to healthy development, and the pandemic limited social interaction and increased isolation for many teens (Richtel, 2021). Hopelessness can also be a response to the inundation of news about stressful world events (Murthy, 2021), such as climate change and the war in Ukraine. Impact of Public Discourse on Secondary Choral Music Education Just as education does not exist in a vacuum from the society at large, the public discourse on issues such as racial equity, partisan politics, and mask mandates may be relevant to secondary choral music education. Many choral educators across the country experienced a shift in their priorities and practices as a result of the pandemic (Gackle, 2021). Some may yearn for the “return to normal” of pre-pandemic performance-centered ensembles. Some educators may create space for discussions of such topics even if unrelated to class. Other music educators may reevaluate curriculum or pedagogy in light of the current social-political landscape. Calls for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in music education have exploded in journals and online spaces. The National Association for Music Education is developing a new strategic plan which will be “built upon the foundational understanding and actualization of equity in music education” (Spradley, 2021, p. 5). The June 2021 issue of Music Educators Journal featured articles reimagining classroom management to be more culturally inclusive (Martin, 2021), questioning equity in ensemble repertoire (Orzolek, 2021), and challenging music teachers to be anti-racist to disrupt white supremacy in the field (J. Hess, 2021b). DEIB efforts in choral music can lead to teachers questioning the dominance of the large 21 ensemble, while others see it as an opportunity to highlight a wider variety of composers in selected repertoire. Choral Journal published a two-part focus on Black history, music and composers which included articles that explored anti-racist choral pedagogy (Dungee, 2020), Black composers who write outside or in addition to jazz, blues, gospel and spiritual idioms (M. L. A. Garrett, 2020), and the perpetuation of racist stereotypes through various choral genres (Clinton, 2020). Websites such as Decolonizing the Music Room6 offer practical resources and guidance for music teachers interested in engaging in equity work and decentering whiteness in their classrooms. The choral world is not immune to the backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement. In the midst of the pandemic when many honors festivals occurred virtually, high school students in the 2021 Connecticut All State Choir recorded two songs from the Justice Choir Songbook (Bamberger, 2021). The festival experience included teacher-facilitated discussions on the history of singing and social justice movements. The Connecticut Music Educators Association (CMEA) withheld release of the video performance when the video editor and several high school teachers involved in the experience refused to remove images of peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. CMEA leadership balked at the protest imagery because they did not want to align the organization with a political ideology (Gellman, 2021) After five months of silence from leadership and uproar from teachers, CMEA released the unedited video and a statement apologizing for the pain their actions caused (Connecticut Music Educators Association, 2021). The 2021 CMEA All-State choir was a student-focused opportunity for high 6 https://decolonizingthemusicroom.com 22 school students to thoughtfully engage with the context of music making. Removing potentially controversial imagery is upholding the status quo, which is inherently a political statement. All conversations are impacted by the context in which they occur. This section demonstrates my approach to reviewing public discourse on issues that may be discussed in classrooms. At the outset of this project, I estimated that the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching and learning a post-truth era, and the heightened political polarization would permeate the classroom. However, that was merely a guess. Throughout the subsequent observation phase of this research, I made note of the salient topics and include context for the observed conversations in the forthcoming discussion chapters. Theoretical Framework The theoretical framework serves as the “blueprint” for a dissertation, guiding every aspect of the inquiry from philosophical and epistemological underpinnings to methodology and analysis decisions (Grant & Osanloo, 2014). Selecting a theoretical framework provides a way for me to align the research problem, purpose, questions, and significance to design a cohesive study. Because I felt drawn to narrative inquiry as a methodology before designing the specifics of this study, I understood the importance of selecting a theoretical framework that would align with the epistemological understandings of narrative inquiry. After examining my values, assumptions, and ethics to reflect on my own worldview (Grant & Osanloo, 2014), I selected an anti-racist framework. In what follows, I define race and racism, give an overview of anti-racist education, review anti-racism in music education, provide a rationale for applying an anti-racist framework for this dissertation study, and consider the implications of anti-racist work in predominantly white spaces. Although an anti-racist framework provided the foundation for the design of this inquiry, I recognized that what I observed in the field could necessitate a change in 23 theoretical framework. Narrative inquiry calls for me to capture the experience of the participants. My views of education and conversation benefit from an anti-racist framework; however, I remained open to the possibility that restorying the experiences of the participants would be better served by an alternate framework. Ultimately, anti-racism proved useful to this inquiry though I also introduce additional literature that supported the participants’ experiences in Chapter 7. Race and Racism Race is a social construct, but the effects of racism are real and have bodily consequences (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). The delineation of people by “race” is a method of categorization by skin color and other physical characteristics. Although humans have attempted such codification for centuries, there is no biological definition of race. “Race is theoretically and empirically a meaningless term” that operationally has significant social, political, and cultural implications (Dei & Calliste, 2000, p. 13). Race is a social construct used to maintain power hierarchies and place some cultures as morally superior to others. Racism, the belief that one race is superior to another, can be systemic and individual. Systemic racism refers to “the policies and practices entrenched in established institutions, which result in the exclusion or promotion of designated groups” (Forms of Racism, n.d.). Enactment of systemic racism does not necessarily indicate individual intent to discriminate. Individual racism, whether conscious or unconscious, “refers to an individual’s racist assumptions, beliefs or behaviours” (Forms of Racism, n.d.). This construction of race and racism, and how they manifest in schools, are important aspects to defining anti-racism, the theoretical framework for this dissertation. 24 Both systemic racism and individual racism can appear in educational settings. Systemic racism manifests in schools through unequal funding, housing segregation, and education inequality (Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Henderson et al., 2019). An overwhelmingly white teacher force struggles to connect with students of color, and Black and Latinx youth are routinely tracked into lower-achieving classes in high school (Dohrmann et al., 2022). Black students are significantly more likely than their white peers to receive office disciplinary referrals (Bradshaw et al., 2010). Such referrals can lead to out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, which can disconnect Black youth from school resources or further exacerbate educational differences (Henderson et al., 2019). Microaggressions are one form of individual racism that can appear in schools. Microaggressions are “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership” (Sue, 2010, p. xvi). Exposure to microaggressions can have psychological consequences, such as experiencing a sense of powerlessness, invisibility, forced compliance and loss of integrity, and a pressure to represent one’s group (Sue et al., 2008). In a longitudinal study involving African American early adolescents, English et al. (2014) demonstrated that experiencing racial discrimination positively associated with depressive symptoms. Students can be negatively impacted by the systemic and individual racism that operates in schools. Although systemic and structural changes are needed, classroom conversations can have a meaningful role in acknowledging and dismantling racism in schools. Teachers can be aware of and acknowledge the impact of microaggressions and lack of representation in curricula as a source of daily trauma experienced by students of color (Lesley University, 2020). Kailin (2002) emphasized that white students are “damaged by racism when they become educated to indifference or intolerance” (p. 83). The “damage” to white students is different than the damage 25 to students of color—being educated in a way that ignores the impact of systemic racism does not compare to the bodily and emotional harm that people of color face as an effect of racism. While white students may feel uncomfortable when they are taught about racism, that pales in comparison to the experiences of students of color. The trauma of racism can have lasting negative psychological and physical effects on students of color (Lesley University, 2020). A white student is not likely hurt by indifference, but racist policies and people can kill people of color. However, it would be negligent to conclude that an inclusive education is not important for all students. The curricula of PK–12 schools can shape how students view themselves and the world in which they live. Racism and hate can be perpetuated if left unaddressed. Anti-racist teachers can disrupt the whitewashed perspective often presented in curriculum (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019). Teachers can engage students in conversations about Eurocentrism of content and explicitly name the normative whiteness that pervades education. Recognizing the impact of trauma, and racism as trauma, on students’ ability to learn and responding by adopting a trauma-informed lens can make education a more supportive environment for all students. Teachers can use explicit and specific language with students to identify systemic racism (J. Hess, 2017). I sought to inquire into the experiences of students and teacher having such conversations in a choral classroom. Anti-racist Education The tenets of anti-racism overlap significantly with critical race theory, but the application and usefulness differs. Anti-racism is action-oriented, and often associated with education. Critical race theory is an analytical framework with its roots in legal studies. Two fundamental beliefs provide structure for anti-racist education: first, that the United States is systemically racist; and second, that education is a site for disruption. Woven into the founding 26 and colonization of the country, racism is imbedded and normalized in the United States (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Modern racist policies, such as mortgage lending practices, uphold power hierarchies based on race in the same manner that overt acts of racism, such as slavery and the Jim Crow laws, did historically (Bonilla-Silva, 2017). Structural oppression is reproduced in all major institutions in the United States rendering marginalized groups perpetually subordinated (Kailin, 2002). The education system is one of the major institutions that reinscribes oppression through centering whiteness in curriculum, disciplinary practices that result in a higher number of office referrals for students of color, and the inequity of school funding. The second building block of anti-racist education situates education as a site for resisting and disrupting hegemonic power hierarchies. This builds on the view that education can be emancipatory (Freire, 1970) as it prepares students to actively participate as citizens in society (Ladson-Billings, 2003). Anti-racism is “an action-oriented, educational and political strategy for institutional and systemic change that addresses the issue of racism and the interlocking systems of social oppression (sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism)” (Dei & Calliste, 2000, p. 13). It is not enough to simply be non-racist, one must actively be anti-racist (Kendi, 2019). Anti-racist educators actively work to identify the ways in which power is given to some groups while denied to others through systems and hierarchies that create and maintain purposeful imbalance (Alemanji, 2018). An anti-racist teacher must be deliberate in their language and their actions. Dervin (2018) acknowledged that “concentrating on race in education is never neutral” (p. vi). However, avoiding direct racial terminology is one of the systemic structures of contemporary racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). Student empowerment is a central element of anti-racist education (Kailin, 2002). Although using explicit language to name white supremacy and racism in 27 secondary classrooms may lead to difficult conversations, students may also feel empowered through those experiences. Anti-racist education seeks to disrupt white hegemony and challenges the notion of whiteness as normal (Dei, 2000). Tenets of anti-racist pedagogy include: challenging objectivity of knowledge and knowledge production; developing students’ awareness of their social position in the world; challenging the power dynamic between teacher and student by decentering authority in the classroom; developing critical engagement with the content and process of learning; and prioritizing a collaborative learning community (Kishimoto, 2018). I developed this project using an anti-racist framework, which allowed me to focus on these tenets of education. Anti-racist Music Education Scholars such as Bradley, Hess, Fiorentino, and Dungee have written and theorized about anti-racism in music education. Bradley (2011) explored the tension between the social justice work of music education and Eurocentric guidelines for teacher education programs. Honoring student identities in a music education program could be at odds with requiring all vocal students to explicitly study bel canto technique utilizing repertoire dominated in the western classical tradition. Bradley (2009) also warned about the possibility of fascistic uniformity veiled as normative performance aspects of choirs. Advocating for providing socio-historical context for music, Bradley (2012) argued that teachers’ tendencies to avoid politics in the classroom masked a fear of talking explicitly about race. Similarly, Hess (2017) urged music educators to explicitly invite political and racial conversations in response to the rise of hate crimes and blatant white supremacy in the United States. Hess (2018b) followed four white elementary music teachers to examine how they disrupted Eurocentricity in curriculum. Fiorentino (2019) explored the 28 possibilities of using an anti-racist framework when placing undergraduate student teachers for their internships. Dungee (2020) argued that the inclusion of diverse repertoire is not an embodiment of anti-racist teaching. Rather, educators must assess their own privilege, advocate for anti-racist policies in their schools and communities, and integrate anti-racist teaching practices in their classroom. Through their publications, these scholars brought to light the implications of systemic racism and white supremacy in music education. There are a number of recent dissertations that interrogate race and music education. Escalante (2019) focused on the experiences of secondary music students and examined the role race played in their predominantly Latinx community. Alekna (2021) and Berglin (2018) examined the issue from the perspective of an undergraduate music education student. Alekna (2021) engaged in counter-storytelling to highlight the points of tension between collegiate music students experiences of equity and inclusion and their institution’s commitment to such initiatives. Berglin (2018) examined the intersectionality of race and social class as identities that impact music education undergraduate experience. Others examined the issue from the teacher’s perspective. Dissinger (2019) documented her journey as a white woman to become more culturally responsive in her choral classroom. Gellerstein (2021) exposed the gatekeeping manifestations of white supremacy within music education at four interrelated periods within teachers’ experiences: their own PK–12 schooling, their collegiate experience, certification, and career. Music teachers learned about critical race theory in a professional learning community facilitated by Lewis (2021). These studies show the growing interest in examining the role race plays in all aspects of music education. Music teachers must recognize and decenter whiteness in the field. Hess (2021b) provided examples of white supremacy in repertoire, curriculum, instrumentation, comportment, 29 participation, and the practice of valuing notation over aurality. Curricular emphasis on reading notation to play instruments in large ensembles that perform the music of primarily white male composers is one multi-layered example of centering whiteness in music education. Hess described the othering of non-Western music within programs, both in the way it is taught and the position it holds in the curriculum. Recognizing whiteness in music education is only the first step to dismantling white supremacy. Hess outlined several action items music educators can take to implement change including embracing a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) and having courageous conversations (Singleton, 2015). This inquiry responds to Hess’s call for courageous conversations by investigating difficult discussions in the choral classroom. Anti-racism in this Inquiry Anti-racism informed the design and analysis of this research project. By leaning into multiplicity, rejecting neutrality, and remaining cognizant that educational research can perpetuate racism, I integrated the tenets of anti-racism into this narrative inquiry. Music teachers can decenter their role as leader to make space for multiple student voices (J. Hess, 2018a). Every person has a complex storied life (Clandinin, 2013) and music education can honor those experiences. I explored the experiences of one teacher and a set of students, and I present their stories through an anti-racist lens of choral music education. I seek to inquire into the ways that classroom discussion can make space for multiple voices. Leaning into difficult conversations can work to dismantle educational inequities as a teacher goes beyond merely answering student questions and embraces “a refusal to be silent in the face of injustice” (Dunn, 2022, p. 9). Through constant consideration of temporality, sociality, and place in a narrative inquiry, I can allow for multiple interpretations of the same experience (Clandinin, 2013). Anti- 30 racism acknowledges multiple sites of knowing which aligns with the epistemological belief of experience as knowledge in narrative inquiry. Anti-racist Work in Predominantly White Spaces Given that this research took place in Maine, I expected that the students in the classroom I observed would be mostly white. Maine is the whitest state in the United States with 90.8% of the population identifying as white in the 2020 census (Casey, 2021). This racial homogeneity extends to the high school population in the state with 89.9% of students in grades 9–12 identifying as white (Maine Department of Health and Human Services, 2019). Therefore, I must consider how anti-racism functions in a predominantly white space. View et al. (2020) encouraged teachers to differentiate the anti-racist lens they use to be responsive to the students in front of them. “For school settings that were all white, we wanted teachers to demonstrate cultural competence through their critique of white privilege and of the myth of a hierarchy of human value and to demonstrate critical consciousness through specific and concrete actions” (View et al., 2020, p. 171). While this speaks to the work of teachers, I additionally consider what anti-racist education looks like from the student perspective. One goal of anti-racist education is to address the systemic inequities that have failed students of color by providing culturally-relevant curriculum and challenging white supremacy (Kailin, 2002). Given the racial demographics of Maine, I must consider what anti-racist education looks like when most, if not all, of the students in a classroom are white. Cultivating global racial awareness in a homogeneous environment could be challenging when issues of racial prejudice seem intangible to white students. Teachers must work to avoid tokenizing the identity or experiences of a single student of color in their classroom. By acknowledging how white supremacy is enacted within school and curriculum, teachers can disrupt systemic racism 31 in and through education. This act may result in difficult conversations and teachers would need to learn how to navigate the discussions. Although an anti-racist framework influenced the meaning I made from observations in the classroom, I endeavored to understand how students and teacher experienced the same discussions Research Question My inquiry centered one research question: How do students and a teacher experience difficult conversations in a high school chorus classroom? Through observation, interviews, researcher journaling, and document analysis, I explored and made sense of my co-inquirers’ experiences. I utilized these secondary research questions: (1) What role does conversation play in the chorus classroom? (2) How does the teacher create an environment suitable for difficult conversation? (3) How does the teacher plan for difficult conversations? (4) How does the teacher negotiate unplanned difficult conversations? (5) How do students respond to difficult conversations? Difficult Conversations Defined In a dissertation on difficult conversations, I want to explicitly define the phenomenon. I draw on several aspects of difficult conversations and then theorize an application to the secondary choral classroom. I anticipated adapting this conception of difficult choral conversations after data collection and through analysis. One type of difficult conversation can arise from discussing controversial issues. D. E. Hess (2002) defined controversial public issues as “unresolved questions of public policy that spark significant disagreement” (p. 11). Zimmerman and Robertson (2017) advocated for teaching controversial issues in school, which they describe as an issue that is “the subject of conflict among knowledgeable persons and it must matter, deeply, to members of the general public” (p. 2). These conversations could be 32 difficult if not all stakeholders agree with aspects of the issue or with the facts surrounding it. Engaging in challenging subject matter in the classroom is a critical step for students to develop the ability to connect curricular material to present day events (Finley, 2020). Conversations can also be difficult if a participant’s worldview is challenged (Boler, 1999). This can unsettle strongly held beliefs and result in a feeling of discomfort. Controversy and discomfort could be two common aspects of difficult conversations. There are many possibilities for difficult conversations in the secondary choral classroom. During the planning stages of this dissertation, I envisioned the conversations to be both planned—for example, addressing systemic barriers to LGBTQ musicians—and unplanned—such as in response to a racist remark made in class or a major news event. The discussions could be related to curriculum, through providing historical and social context for repertoire, and in response to world events, through processing an extreme weather event or act of terrorism. Dedicating class time to topics beyond repertoire can be one way to acknowledge that outside events can influence what occurs in class. Some teachers may embrace the opportunity to have difficult conversations and other teachers may actively avoid them. Additionally, I am reminded that everyone’s experience of classroom discussions may be different. Some may experience discomfort while others may be unaffected. I inquired into how the teacher plans for and makes space for difficult conversations, and how all stakeholders experienced those discussions. Dissertation Outline Chapters 1 and 2 are time-bound and situated in the time I wrote the dissertation proposal and began my time in the field (August 2021–April 2022). Chapter 3 explores narrative inquiry and explains the method of the dissertation. Chapters 4 introduces the town, school, participants, 33 and major events. In Chapters 5 and 6, I present the findings from the inquiry from the teacher’s then the students’ perspectives. Throughout Chapter 7, I lean into the differences and similarities between the student and teacher experience and explore emergent themes. In Chapter 8, I present implications for the field and future research. Throughout, I discuss why I set aside literature that I did not find to be relevant once I was in the research, and I integrate new literature that supports findings, discussions, and implications. The journey of this inquiry took me to unexpected places, so acknowledging the concepts and ideas that were left behind is part of the findings. I end with an epilogue, articulating the ways that this inquiry has shaped me as a researcher and will continue to influence my role as a scholar and music teacher educator. Summary In this chapter, I introduced the topic of difficult classroom conversations through vignettes that tracked my growth as a teacher. This led to my interest in exploring others’ experiences in navigating difficult conversations as a topic for this dissertation. Because of the contextual nature of conversation, I captured the current sociopolitical landscape by documenting public discourse on a variety of topics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-CRT movement, and the Black Lives Matter operationalized in schools. Then I explored the utility of anti-racism as a framework for this inquiry. Finally, I offered a definition of difficult conversations and presented the research question guiding this inquiry. 34 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW As I designed this study, I searched for literature that could help me think through difficult classroom conversations. In this chapter, I present a sampling of studies from general education that explored contentious classroom conversation. The findings of these studies informed how I considered the role of discussions in classrooms. I selected Boler’s (1999) Pedagogy of Discomfort as a pedagogical framework for this study. Without being content- specific, the framework recognizes the role of emotions in education. In this chapter, I summarize a pedagogy of discomfort and introduce several studies in which researchers used the framework as an analytic tool or in the field. I synthesize themes for discomfort in classroom conversations, and present both strengths and criticisms of a pedagogy of discomfort. In addition to discomfort, I explore two constructs I found useful in my own teaching practice: vulnerability and empathy. Through the critical lens of a pedagogy of discomfort, I summarize studies that explore controversy, dialogue, and discomfort in music education. I introduce Perkins’ (2019) Choral-Dialoguing as an approach that could perhaps most align with the theme of this study. Building on the synthesis of the literature introduced in this chapter, I lastly theorize a role for discomfort in the secondary choral classroom. Teaching Controversial Public Issues in General Education Classrooms A role of public education is to bring students from all walks of life together (Dewey, 1902). Students learn from each other and with each other. A foundation of a functioning democratic society is to be able to talk with people who hold differing views and to work through issues about which you do not agree (D. E. Hess, 2002). If this is necessary for adulthood, then schools dedicated to preparing students to be engaged citizens in society must address it. This includes engaging with controversial public issues. I designed this project to 35 examine difficult conversations in a secondary choral classroom. However, I could not know the discussion topics in advance, nor could I anticipate the presence of controversial public issues in the classroom. Difficulty can arise from engaging in a wide variety of topics. I investigated the literature on controversial issues in the social studies classroom to provide examples of applicable pedagogical techniques in facilitating discussions. In an influential grounded theory study, D. E. Hess (2002) observed three teachers who effectively led discussions on controversial public issues. According to Hess, these are topics that involve “unresolved questions of public policy that spark significant disagreement” (p. 11). Educators who demonstrated mastery in leading such class discussions: (1) taught for and with discussions; (2) shared power with students through facilitation; (3) selected discussion models that aligned with their goals of using a discussion-based classroom approach; (4) determined whether and how to assess students’ participation that balanced authenticity and accountability; (5) potentially withheld personal views on topics, but recognized that their views influence the definition and selection of topics; and (6) received administrative support (D. E. Hess, 2002, pp. 29–33). While D. E. Hess did not address emotions or discomfort directly, I highlight two studies that are grounded in Hess’s (2002) work that informed the design of my dissertation. Garrett (2020) observed two U.S. high school social studies teachers lead discussions on potentially controversial public issues. One discussion was about monuments and the second was about a recent high school mass shooting. The two teachers framed their respective classroom conversations differently, which had an impact on how the students engaged with the material. The first teacher explicitly named race and white supremacy in a conversation about the role of monuments. The students had impassioned dialogue. The teacher provided space for students’ emotions and required only that they respect each other, not that they agree. The second teacher 36 Garrett (2020) observed prioritized conversation regulation over emotional engagement when they discussed a mass shooting. The teacher asked students “What can the president do?” rather than “What can you do?”, which removed any student agency. The students responded in kind by having a rational, logical, detached conversation. Payne and Journell (2019) presented a case study of an elementary teacher who recognized the importance of talking about the political climate. The researchers interviewed a white fifth-grade teacher, working primarily with students of color, who used the 2016 U.S. presidential election to further her students’ civic knowledge. The teacher drew on her students’ lived experiences as she engaged them in controversial topics. The relationships the teacher cultivated allowed for responsive teaching around contentious politics. She reiterated students’ safety as they grappled with the impact of national politics on their daily lives. Researchers suggested three ways that elementary teachers can teach contentious politics and engage students in controversial identity issues: 1) through critically caring relationships anchored in identity recognition, 2) via purposeful and recursive pedagogical spaces, and 3) by responsive teaching that engages current contentious political issues. (p. 77) Using Sondel et al.’s (2018) pedagogy of political trauma as a framework, Payne and Journell (2019) contended that this case exemplified the possibility for contentious conversations in elementary classrooms. The findings from these two studies were useful in designing this dissertation. Garrett (2020) demonstrated the impact a teacher can have on students’ engagement in discussions along with the potential impact of personalizing a topic and inviting emotion into the classroom. Both teachers engaged in controversial public issues in secondary classrooms, but the resulting 37 conversations differed significantly. Payne and Journell (2019) demonstrated not only the possibility of developmentally appropriate political conversations in elementary school, but that students benefit when teachers engage in political conversations, rather than avoid them. I considered the possible parallels for the music classroom. In my observations, I noticed the language the teacher used to frame expectations and guidelines for conversation as well as how the teacher situated the students in relation to the topic. I observed what topics the teacher chose to engage with and how the teacher made it developmentally appropriate. Especially as students and teachers interact with new viewpoints and difficult topics, they could benefit from making space for their emotions. Emotional Constructs in the Classroom Emotions are a part of any classroom discussion “whether acknowledged, honored, ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed” (Reidel, 2011, p. 17). Prior to discussing controversial topics, students may benefit if their teacher develops a “relational pedagogy by actively creating space for students to process and express their emotions” (Sondel et al., 2018, p. 180). As I designed this study, I considered what possible emotions might be most relevant in classroom discussions and planned to observe how the teacher participant made space for student emotions during classroom conversation. In addition to discomfort, which I discuss at length later in this chapter, I anticipated empathy, vulnerability, and caring to be useful. Because narrative inquiries are emergent by design, it was possible that the teacher participant would facilitate difficult conversations utilizing none of the three constructs I highlight here. Empathy Music education researchers often celebrate music’s role in cultivating empathy in students. In response to the increased social polarization of the United States, Hirokawa (2019) 38 developed an immersive choral program intended to build cultural sensitivity and empathy in adolescent singers. Indeed, the young musicians reported a growing respect for people with different backgrounds through the week-long shared experience of singing, eating, drumming, and playing theater games with their peers. These activities could be examples of what Laird (2015) intended as specific music learning processes that promoted empathy building in students. However, Kirokawa’s study did not address Laird’s argument that the empathic connections inherent in creating music together enhance the aesthetic experience. Studying migrant children in Australia, Marsh (2019) viewed music making as a dialogic space that can promote empathy, develop social inclusion, and play a role in building peace. Music operating as an avenue for empathy building can occur between individuals or through an institutional effort, such as the immersion experience Hirokawa (2019) designed. Instead of focusing on building empathy among choir members, Stone (2019) attended to how singers experience empathy for the people whose music is performed. They advocated for a three-pronged approach within the context of performing spirituals, the last of which was “requir[ing] empathy, not a shared experience” to “consider another perspective or reality and feel with them” for a meaningful interpretation of the music (p. 46). However, scholars lack consensus on how to define the term empathy and how it relates to sympathy (Batson, 2009). Batson (2009) articulated eight conditions or experiences to which the term empathy can be applied, all of which are “processes whereby one person can come to know the internal state of another and can be motivated to respond with sensitive care” (p. 11). Goleman (1995) identified three types of empathy: cognitive empathy, or perspective taking; emotional empathy, or feeling along with someone; compassionate empathy, in which the perspective taking and feeling alongside moves one to help others. Batson (2009) suggested that 39 displays of what Goleman identified as compassionate empathy may be influenced by a person’s desire to end their own discomfort rather than placate someone else’s. Additionally, Boler (1999) cautioned against passive empathy, suggesting that the cognitive empathy Goleman identified is merely the result of “reducing the other to a mirror-identification of oneself, a means of rendering the discomforting other familiar and non threatening” (p.177). Lastly, Walker and Palacios (2016) argued that empathy is not only an emotion, but also a skill one can learn, an idea rooted in the work of Nussbaum (2010). If empathy can be taught, educators must decide whether to evaluate the motive behind students’ actions or merely the actions taken. Because of the numerous conceptualizations of empathy, if the construct is used during the observations for this project, I will need to identify the specific definition operationalized by participants. Vulnerability A second construct I anticipate may play a role in difficult conversations in a secondary choral classroom is vulnerability. Adolescence is a time of growth and self-discovery, while also struggling to figure out where one fits in. To be vulnerable in front of peers could be difficult in the classroom. Additionally, a teacher could experience vulnerability when relinquishing power in the teacher-student knowledge exchange. To lean into difficult conversations could require vulnerability from both students and teacher. Brené Brown has a prominent voice in the public discourse on vulnerability. In her research to understand shame, she identified “whole-hearted” people as those who had a strong sense of worthiness, the courage to be imperfect, and viewed vulnerability as necessary (Brown, 2010). She argued that in order for interpersonal connections to form, people must allow themselves to be seen, to be vulnerable. Cole (2016) argued that Brown reinvented vulnerability into an embodiment of entrepreneurship and capitalism, shifting the understanding of 40 vulnerability from a personal limitation and reconceiving it as a powerful possibility for personal gain. “Brown appropriates vulnerability for decidedly neo-liberal purposes—homoeconomicus in ‘power feminist’ drag” (Cole, 2016, p. 264, emphasis in original) Through this lens, it could be a point of privilege to be able to choose vulnerability, and Cole is weary of the multiple uses of vulnerability. “Emphasizing vulnerability as ‘potentiality,’ moreover, obscures the (temporal) distinction between a general susceptibility to harm and the actual injuries that specific individuals and communities already endure” (p. 265). Attending to the “enabling aspects” of vulnerability may be a worthy endeavor, but Cole argued that “the vulnerabilities that demand our urgent attention are those that deepened inequality and inflict harm” (p. 266). Although I can appreciate Cole’s call, I utilized the construct within the context of feelings rather than a factor in political dominance and inequality. However, I remained cognizant of the risk of viewing vulnerability as unilaterally positive, because being susceptible or open with others could do more harm than good for some (Cole, 2016). In this inquiry, I wondered if vulnerability as a personal attribute would be present during conversations. If so, I could investigate the possibilities of embracing vulnerability as a way to strengthen relational teaching and learning, while also attending to the potentiality of un-chosen vulnerability acting as an oppressive agent. Brown’s work has influenced music education literature, much of which engages vulnerability as possibility as opposed to a construct that perpetuates inequality. Richerme (2016) theorized a role for vulnerability within music education as providing possibilities for growth and connection for students and teachers. Davis (2018) discussed instilling a feeling of belonging in orchestral students to allow them to play without fear of judgement. As a new educator, Dawe (2016) explored vulnerability as a necessary step toward integrating creativity and risk taking in teaching. Speaking from the vantage point of a more experienced educator, 41 Salvador (2019) argued that teaching is an act of vulnerability, and suggested strategies for developing resilience. It is important to note when vulnerability is an act of agentic engagement and when it is expected from less powerful actors. Students often occupy a less powerful position in the classroom and therefore teachers must be aware of how vulnerability is utilized in schools. If the teacher in this study invited vulnerability into their classroom, I planned to observe for how vulnerability was constructed, how it was viewed by students, and the role it played in classroom conversations. Embracing vulnerability can be a choice for some, but being vulnerable can be a state of perpetual oppression and inequality that others face. It is important to acknowledge the duality of the construct. Caring To consider how teachers and students might relate to each other in the classroom, I explored caring (Noddings, 2013) within education.7 Starting from an understanding that caring is a universal human attribute, Noddings (2013) asserted that caring relationships in which people act in a caring manner are ethically fundamental to being human. A caring relationship is comprised of the one-caring and the cared-for; both parties contribute to the relationship. The one-caring assesses the needs and wants of the cared-for and develops a response that provides help for the cared-for. It is not just the quantity of time spent together that necessarily creates meaningful student-teacher relationships, it is the quality of the interactions (Cooper & Miness, 2014). Students want to know that teachers care about them. Cooper and Miness found evidence of Noddings’ (2005) two forms of care in students’ experiences with teachers: caring as virtue 7 In an effort to be completely transparent, I integrated the literature on caring after the inquiry, not as part of the design process. While all other components of this dissertation are presented chronologically, it would benefit the reader to have an understanding of an ethics of care (Noddings, 2013) before I introduce emergent themes. 42 and caring as relation. Noddings argued that the latter is more authentic and meaningful. Students saw teachers with caring as a virtue as those who were simply performing the duties of their job. By contrast, students described relationally caring teachers as ones who developed individual relationships with students. Although it may seem more logical for the students to be cared-for and the teacher to be the one-caring, educators may benefit from exploring role reversal or role sharing with students. By including student voice in the ensemble, teachers could expand the ways students share the planning responsibilities of the rehearsal process. Additionally, students could develop caring relationships with their peers, which may lessen the emotional load for teachers. Both teachers and students ought to be mindful of compassion fatigue (Clay, 2020) when they perform the “helper” duties of one-caring. Noddings advocated for her purposed moral education imperative that involved caring relationships not only to serve the needs of individual students, but also to serve society at large by raising caring individuals. Aspects of Noddings’ work has been taken up by multiple scholars in music education. In her investigation into secondary choral communities, Parker (2016) took up Noddings’ relational care roles, describing the teacher as the one-caring and the ensemble as the cared-for. In the instrumental classroom, Edgar (2014) looked for the same caring relationship between students and teachers. Edgar found that the teachers routinely incorporated an ethic of care to create a classroom environment “where every student was valued and afforded a safe space…where students could care, be cared for, and socially and emotionally thrive” (p. 127).8 Noddings (2002) argued that caring education has four key components: modeling, dialogue, practice, and 8 See Chapter 7 for a critique of “safe” as universally good 43 confirmation. Exploring these components in a music education setting could include: a student may model a specific technique for their peers or a teacher may be a role model for students; dialogue is an open-ended conversation in which there is no predetermined path, which could be explored verbally or musically; students can practice caring for each other and instruments; the teacher can offer confirmation to students not only on musical skills but on demonstrations of a caring attitude (Watts et al., 2020). Researchers have integrated Noddings’ work into music education; perhaps it will be applicable in this study as well. I explored the constructs of empathy, vulnerability, and care in anticipation that they might be present during classroom observations or participant interviews. Because of a firm expectation of the presence of discomfort during difficult conversations, I now present a pedagogical framework to engage with discomfort in the classroom. Pedagogy of Discomfort In this inquiry into the experiences of teacher and students with difficult conversation, I sought literature on critical pedagogies that could act as a tool for data analysis. I found no discipline-specific pedagogical frameworks within the field of music education. I looked carefully at transformative learning (Mezirow, 1990) but decided it was not applicable to the adolescents I would be observing, as the framework is intended for adult learners. Ultimately, I landed on Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort because of how it illuminates the role of discomfort in difficult conversations and how it naturally aligns with the experience-based epistemology of narrative inquiry. In this section, I will review the pedagogy of discomfort, as Boler (1999) originally conceived it, followed by her own call to question the ethics of such a pedagogy (2004). I then review various studies that utilized a pedagogy of discomfort, as they informed how I planned my own study. 44 As Originally Conceived Boler (1999) posed this question: “What do we—educators and students—stand to gain by engaging in the discomforting process of questioning cherished beliefs and assumptions?” (p. 176). Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort is a call to action and a mode of inquiry. Emotions are recognized not merely as feelings but as underpinnings of relational existence and personal identities. This pedagogy is collaborative between teachers and students. Identifying and unsettling cherished beliefs and assumptions are core components to this approach. There are risks and benefits inherent in inviting discomfort into the classroom. Boler drew on Aristotle’s cognitivist theory of emotions to establish that emotions are not merely feelings; they are intricately tied to social context and personally held beliefs. She situated emotions as central to engaging in critical discussions in the classroom: “A pedagogy of discomfort begins by inviting educators and students to engage in critical inquiry regarding values and cherished beliefs, and to examine constructed self-images in relation to how one has learned to perceive others” (Boler, 1999, p. 176). She cautioned against engaging in passive self- reflection as it runs the risk of ignoring the context of relational existence to others. Passive self- reflection could bypass collective responsibility and ignore how teachers and students affect others. Instead, they should carefully consider how their emotions define them by creating emotional genealogies that investigate the origins of their held beliefs. Teachers and students engage in critical self-reflection in order to participate in the collective witnessing that is central to a pedagogy of discomfort. Boler argued that worldviews are overwhelmingly shaped by school curriculum and the media. Thus, Boler categorized the act of critiquing the information that shapes one’s worldviews as either witnessing or spectating. Spectating is both passive and a privilege. People 45 sit on the sidelines, abdicate responsibility for what they take in, and acknowledge no part they have in the events unfolding before them. Witnessing, by contrast, is an active process in which people attend to their perceptions, historical responsibilities, and co-implications to inquire into the emotional values that shape how they experience the world. There is no fixed truth. People are active participants in shaping their worldviews with a critical eye to the impact of the media digested. Theorized over two decades ago, this notion of active or passive critique of media is even more relevant with the heightened popularity of social media. If people only spectate the world around them, they do not critique the influences that have shaped their worldviews. When teachers and students begin to witness rather than spectate the events around them at school or in their outside lives, they sometimes experience defensive anger and revert to binary modes of thinking. Boler defined defensive anger as anger that is experienced when a person’s identity is threatened as a result of their beliefs being challenged. This anger is either driven by the fear of change or losing a portion of one’s personal or cultural identity or by examining “cherished beliefs and assumptions” (p. 176). Boler saw the pitfalls of Western binary thinking when her students were caught in the tension between feeling guilty or innocent as their thinking was challenged. Boler wished to move beyond this “model of binary morality” because it “severely constrains educational possibilities” (p. 186). She aimed to incorporate more flexible language to promote “learning to inhabit ambiguous selves” (p. 196). Boler rejected the notion that education is neutral. She utilized a pedagogy of discomfort to assess the historical and social forces that shape our ways of knowing. In this way, students and teachers collectively witness—instead of passively spectate—the relational way they are in the world, considering how their actions and emotions impact others. Students and teachers need “to examine how our modes of seeing have been shaped specifically by the dominant culture of 46 the historical moment” (p. 179). This is a collaborative inquiry that teachers and students take together. They attend to the changes in perspective and sense of self throughout the collective process. Teachers must be ready to be challenged by students’ opinions and open to change. She acknowledged that “[l]istening is fraught with emotional landmines” (p. 179) and therefore, she advocated for teachers to carefully attend to the classroom climate when engaging in pedagogy of discomfort. “The first sign of the success of a pedagogy of discomfort is, quite simply, the ability to recognize what it is that one doesn’t want to know, and how one has developed emotional investments to protect oneself from this knowing” (p. 199). Boler invited emotion into the classroom as she saw it as central to how we know and interact with the world. I planned to observe for the presence of discomfort within classroom conversation. Critical Hope Boler (2004) explored the ways that compassion and offering hope are important complements to a pedagogy of discomfort. The framework invites critical inquiry into the emotional investments that shape educators’ and students’ held worldviews. Sometimes, when engaged in a pedagogy of discomfort, a student experiences a loss of identity or lack of belonging resulting from worldviews being disrupted (Boler, 2004). “If I am asking students in some sense to annihilate the self as they have known it, I must be able to meet their discomfort with compassion—and with resources to help them replace the lost sense of self” (Boler, 2004, p. 127). Therefore, Boler advocated for educators to be compassionate with students and to provide them with critical hope. Boler (2004) suggested “critical hope” can replace the unsettled feeling that results from engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort. Situated in the work of Greene (1988) and Freire (1973), Boler (2004) described critical hope as accepting a responsibility to advocate for change while 47 acknowledging societal systems of inequality. “One knows, for example, that there is no assurance of justice, but one is yet willing to fight for justice” (Boler, 2004, p. 126). Boler placed critical hope in opposition to naïve hope, which can be characterized as platitudes serving to uphold neoliberal ideals of individualism and meritocracy. A teacher can offer critical hope as a way forward by embracing the constantly changing nature of our world and ourselves and encourage students to accept a responsibility to participate fully. While Boler (2004) wrote that critical hope is what teachers offer students, because both teacher and student are active participants in a pedagogy of discomfort, I wonder about the possibilities of critical hope for educators. What can teachers gain from investing in critical hope? What would that bring to their practice? If discomfort presented in this inquiry, I planned to additionally observe for the operationalization of critical hope. Pedagogy of Discomfort Applied As the final chapter in Feeling Power, a book that theorized the role of emotions in education, Boler (1999) put forth a pedagogy of discomfort. Boler and Zembylas (2003) collaboratively built on this theory to further elucidate how a pedagogy of discomfort could be applied to teaching and learning about difficult issues in social justice education. Since then, the framework has been used both pedagogically and theoretically in a variety of educational settings. In some instances, teachers purposefully engage a pedagogy of discomfort with students, and in other times, researchers use a pedagogy of discomfort as a tool for analysis. I discuss examples of both applications and imagine the role of a pedagogy of discomfort in this project. Several education researchers explored enacting a pedagogy of discomfort with adult participants. Dutta et al. (2016) presented a performance text that enacted a pedagogy of 48 discomfort to critically engage educators, students, and audiences in conversations around various identity sites. In Australia, Nolan and Molla (2018) examined professional development for early childhood teachers that positioned a pedagogy of discomfort as a necessary component of Mezirow’s (1990) transformative learning. The participants valued the “moments of dilemma” and leaned into the “lack of synchronicity” as opportunities for learning (Nolan & Molla, 2018, p. 728). In Sweden, Ojala (2021) interviewed 16 secondary teachers to discern their experiences with emotions in teaching about climate change. The researcher found it common for teachers to turn away from negative emotions but cautioned that it is more productive to help students put words to their worries around climate change. Ohito (2016) conducted a self-study on the utilization of a pedagogy of discomfort with preservice teachers in the U.S. She documented the individual and collective ways that she, a Black teacher educator and researcher, and the students, primarily white undergraduates, witnessed racial oppression within the education system. She described a solely intellectual approach to decentering whiteness as inadequate as it did not attend to the ways that affect, like discomfort, “can stick to bodies.” By “deepen[ing] preservice teachers’ awareness of how their bodily feelings may conspire with their actions to uphold White supremacy in spite of their anti-racist beliefs,” Ohito used a pedagogy of discomfort to move beyond embedded binaries toward a more inclusive, embodied mode of thinking (p. 456). Students built a supportive learning environment by recognizing the interaction between their emotions and bodies, which Ohito positioned as a way to disrupt white supremacy in teacher education. Although a pedagogy of discomfort was useful in these settings with adult participants, I remain cognizant of the developmental differences of the adolescent participants in my study to interrogate the framework’s appropriateness. 49 A pedagogy of discomfort has been used in studies with elementary and secondary students as well, though not as often as with adult participants. Keddie (2021) explored adolescent discomfort and emotion in student activist extracurricular clubs. The author identified boys’ comfort as a primary concern when involving boys in discussing issues of gender justice. Based on interviews with students attending two U.S. elite independent schools, Keddie examined how students’ emotions can either close or open conversations. The researcher embraced the critical role discomfort can play in education spaces (Zembalyas 2014, as cited in Keddie 2021). Yet, after an analysis of interview data, the researcher advocated for utilizing a framework of critical affective literacy (Anwaruddin, 2016, as cited in Keddie, 2021) to engage boys in considering the purpose of their emotions. This study held particular relevance to my dissertation as parallels exist between the two. A pedagogy of discomfort provides the foundation of my understanding of the importance of emotions in classroom discussions, just as Keddie relied on Zembylas, a frequent collaborator of Boler. Though Keddie recognized the role of discomfort, she instead advocated for a new framework to engage adolescents in emotional literacy. I approached my observations and interviews similarly: I brought with me an understanding and appreciation of Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort but remained open to the possibility that another framework may be more suitable. Scholars have explored a pedagogy of discomfort in different cultural and political settings (Leibowitz et al., 2010; Porto & Zembylas, 2020; Zembylas, 2014, 2015, 2021; Zembylas & Papamichael, 2017). One such example took place in a school in Northern Ireland that served integrated Catholic and Protestant children. Zembylas and McGlynn (2012) observed a classroom activity designed for 10- and 11-year-olds to experience injustice. Though the classroom teacher framed the lesson within a pedagogy of discomfort, the researchers questioned 50 the ethics of such a framework, specifically with this age group. They questioned the inherent power dynamics between teacher and students because student participants expressed a hesitation to challenge the teacher during the activity designed to randomly reward one group of students while stigmatizing another. Students recognized the injustice but felt powerless to advocate for their peers. Furthermore, Zembylas and McGlynn looked for the ways the students and teacher reflected on their discomfort in relation to the pedagogical goal of the activity, and they considered how the teacher dealt with the students’ discomfort when planning and executing the lesson. Months after the activity, students reported remembering the uncomfortable feelings but overall felt the activity was worthwhile to explore the importance of sticking up for one’s friends. However, I wonder about the participant-researcher power imbalance, and the possibility that students felt compelled to confirm the usefulness of the activity. These studies prompted me to consider the ethics of engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort in a classroom. Utilizing the pedagogy must be done in a developmentally appropriate way, and the teacher must be mindful of the wellbeing of students. If students experience discomfort, teachers would need to navigate what is productive discomfort as Boler (1999) describes and what is potentially damaging or traumatic discomfort. While Boler’s conception of discomfort in the classroom provides the foundation of my understanding and thinking about emotions in classroom conversation, I could not guarantee its usefulness in this dissertation. It was possible that the teacher participant may engage in the pedagogy with their students. It was possible that, while not observed in the classroom, the framework would be useful in analysis. I brought this uncertainty and openness to the data collection phase, and I discuss the ultimate appropriateness of the framework in Chapter 7. 51 Considerations for Facilitating Discomfort Teachers should attend to the relationships with students and their emotional well-being to support utilizing discomfort productively in the classroom. Teaching and learning can be collective and relational, with the teacher acting as a facilitator (Boler, 1999). When approaching difficult conversations in the classroom, the teacher ought to check in with students’ emotions (H. J. Garrett, 2020) and reiterate students’ safety as they make sense of the personal impact of national politics (Payne & Journell, 2019; Sondel et al., 2018). However, “safety” can act as upholding the status quo, which may be damaging to some students. Inviting discomfort into a discussion is a collective endeavor (Boler, 1999). Teachers should be mindful of the group’s dynamic (H. J. Garrett, 2020) and acknowledge the lived experiences of the students (Payne & Journell, 2019). Acting as a facilitator, the teacher can move the conversation forward or back on task as necessary (H. J. Garrett, 2020; D. E. Hess, 2002). Teachers should not turn away or gloss over negative emotions (Ojala, 2021), and the conversation is best served by explicit language to name a contentious issue (H. J. Garrett, 2020; J. Hess, 2017). Various factors impact a teacher’s decision to engage or not with difficult topics. This may be influenced by their belief that such innocent, young children are not capable of discussing them, which can uphold whiteness as normative in the classroom (Dunn, 2022). Simply avoiding a contentious conversation is not a neutral decision. Teachers’ values, administrative support, and community pressures impact what conversations occur in classrooms (Dunn et al., 2019; D. E. Hess, 2002; Payne & Journell, 2019). The world in which they live affects students (Sondel et al., 2018); therefore, teachers should engage students in discussion about the broader political landscape. Payne and Journell (2019) dismissed the notion that students are ever too young for politics, and they advocated for finding age-appropriate methods 52 of facilitating such conversations. In this project, I inquired into the factors the influenced the teacher’s engagement with possible difficult conversations and how the teacher attended to developmentally appropriate facilitation techniques. A pedagogy of discomfort challenges cherished beliefs and encourages students and teachers to inhabit ambiguity (Boler, 1999). By challenging the deeply embedded ways of knowing, feeling, and being, students are able to consider ways to engage in social justice activism (Keddie, 2021). The discomfortable classroom teacher invests time in understanding negative emotions (Ojala, 2021), values moving beyond dualisms (Harry & Salvador, 2021) and co-creating a space where multiple identities can co-exist (Gould, 2013) to help students see the ways that hegemonic cultural values impact their world (Zembylas & McGlynn, 2012). This discomfort provides an unlimited possibility for knowledge production as students learn about themselves and the world around them (Pereira, 2012). Inhabiting ambiguity might move students away from Western-centric binary thinking, a hierarchical dualism that reinforces white supremacy (Okun, 2021b). This could be one benefit to inhabiting ambiguity as a part of embracing discomfort in the classroom. Strengths and Criticisms of Pedagogy of Discomfort Strengths Through a pedagogy of discomfort, students and teachers can disrupt hegemony by recognizing it and acting to dismantle the ways it oppresses others in society. Utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort can upend the status quo (Ohito, 2016). Discomfort expands possibilities for understanding as students seek to comprehend their emotions, allowing them to learn more about themselves and their world (Pereira, 2012). By recognizing that learning is emotional and 53 valuing the place that emotion has in the classroom, students and teachers can work toward understanding the role their emotions play in the way they see themselves and their contexts. Criticisms Several scholars critique the ethics of a pedagogy of discomfort. There is an inherent power dynamic between student and teacher that may influence a students’ willingness to be vulnerable, and this power dynamic may be more apparent if the students are in grade school (Zembylas & McGlynn, 2012). Educators may not be equipped personally or supported administratively to engage in a pedagogy of discomfort (Leibowitz, 2011). Some argue that discomfort is necessary to unsettle taken-for-granted beliefs and experience transformative learning (Keddie, 2021; Zembylas, 2014), while others reject the notion that discomfort is necessary for learning (Pereira, 2012). Pereira (2012) believed it is “important to avoid overly celebratory and prescriptive conceptualizations of the value of discomfort, as this can slide into a problematic fetishizing of particular emotions” (p. 132). Teachers must be cognizant of the potential for students to express hostility, defensiveness, guilt, or shame when utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999; Keddie, 2021). This emotional “collateral damage” of discomfort could be a barrier to learning (Walker & Palacios, 2016). Scholars critiqued a pedagogy of discomfort as being only for those in power (Zembylas, 2018). Arguing that the framework is enacted primarily at universities in North America to teach students about inequalities others face, Walker and Palacios (2016) accused it as being “a pedagogy for the privileged” (p. 178). There are certainly examples of the framework being used at universities to teach social justice issues that would support that assertion (Dutta et al., 2016; Leibowitz et al., 2010; Ohito, 2016). However, Boler and Zembylas (2003) asserted that a pedagogy of discomfort is “an educational approach to understanding the production of norms 54 and differences” and the “deeply embedded…unconscious complicity with hegemony” (p. 108). For example, Boler (2004) noted how women could hold (perhaps unconscious) sexist beliefs because of society's dominant views and structures of gender inequality. A teacher may benefit from attending to power dynamics between the students in the classroom and the people affected by the topic the students are discussing. Calling for a pedagogy of discomfort presupposes a condition of comfort in the classroom (Nolan & Molla, 2018). Boler (1999) called for teachers to purposefully enact a pedagogy of discomfort, which one could interpret as an assumption that discomfort does not already exist. As I draw on an anti-racist (Dei, 2000) and trauma-informed lens (Venet, 2021), I acknowledge that, for many students, school may not be a comfortable place. An anti-racist lens highlights the racial inequities in school (Henderson et al., 2019), which could prohibit comfort in the classroom. As I framed this study, I wondered if the role of the teacher would be to engage with the discomfort that already exists rather than create new discomforting conversations. Educators sometimes use comfortable and safe analogously. I planned to pay particular attention to the language that the teacher used to describe their classroom environment both in interviews and observations. I inquired into the comfort levels students had expressing their opinions during difficult conversations. Because of the power differences inherent in classrooms, Boler and Zembylas (2003) asserted that there are no safe educational spaces. Several scholars reject the notion of a safe space (Harry & Salvador, 2021; Ojala, 2021) and consider inaction as upholding the status quo. Walker and Palacios (2016) articulated three criticisms of Boler’s (1999) position on emotions in education. First, they asserted that Boler’s orientation might hinder conversation and debate on more conservative ideologies. They felt that “social justice education can sometimes 55 walk a fine line between inspiration and coercion” which may result in students withholding their opinions or feeling pressured to support the majority viewpoint during class discussions (Walker & Palacios, 2016, p. 179). Second, they believed Boler’s rejection of empathy in favor of collective witnessing was a false dichotomy. They countered that the ability to feel emotions is a virtue of being human. They drew on Nussbaum’s (2010) understanding of empathy as “not just an emotion, but also a skill we can practice that takes effort and commitment” (Walker & Palacios, 2016, p. 179). They argued that if teachers lead students to focus on the fallibility of perfect empathy, then students may be led to inaction for fear of “committing some kind of social justice faux pas” (p. 179). Third, Walker and Palacios believed that Boler created a hierarchy of emotions, placing discomfort as the goal. As the researchers reflected on their students’ reaction to the material in their university course on social issues: “sometimes, instead of motivating people to action, the videos and readings, which can be seen as part of a Pedagogy of Discomfort, became a Pedagogy of Despair” (p. 183). In my study, I inquired into the teacher’s goals for engaging in difficult conversations. Walker and Palacios’ (2016) criticisms afforded me the opportunity to think critically about Boler’s positions on discomfort, empathy, and the role of the teacher. The possibility of conceptual coercion in the classroom parallels the fascistic performative possibility in the choral ensemble (Bradley, 2009). The teacher must attend to the individual and group dynamic to ensure that all students have the space to express themselves, even if they differ from the dominant opinion. Empathy—how educators conceive, operationalize, and teach it—is a concept that likely plays a significant role in the pedagogy of discomfort, and indeed in many pedagogical frameworks. Regarding Walker and Palacios’ (2016) third criticism, my reading of Boler’s goals of pedagogy of discomfort is not to wallow in despair, but rather it serves as a call 56 to action. The teacher should act as a facilitator to show the students a way forward, to provide opportunities to turn their discomfort into action. Controversy, Dialogue, and Discomfort in Music Education Now I turn to four music education studies to explore themes of controversy, dialogue, and discomfort in music spaces. The first three studies situated conversation as the method for engaging in controversy. The researchers investigated the role of classroom discussions in critical thinking, and social justice. The last study I introduce investigates discomfort from the perspective of music making, rather than discussion in music spaces. Although disparate in approach, the four studies cumulatively frame how I thought about discomfort and controversy in the secondary choral classroom. I summarize the studies and apply a pedagogy of discomfort lens to their findings or methodology. This allows me to consider further what a pedagogy of discomfort can do for music-specific conversations that are difficult or potentially controversial. Controversy and Dialogue in Music Education Engaging in discussions on controversial topics in music education spaces does not necessarily mean discomfort will also be present. Richerme and Miksza (2020) explored the role of constructive controversy within an undergraduate instrumental methods course. They based their research method on the work of D. E. Hess and McAvoy (2014). Using both small groups and full class discussions, students engaged in conversation on a range of peer-decided topics in instrumental music education that the researchers deemed controversial. Questions included: “What role should competitions/festivals play?” and “What role should modern ensembles (e.g., rock band) versus traditional ensembles play?” (Richerme & Miksza, 2020, p. 43). While the topics align with D. E. Hess and McAvoy’s criteria for controversial topics, they are notably discipline-specific and do not necessarily require students to connect to their personal identities. 57 This contrasts with the classroom conversations mentioned above in which a discussion on monuments tied to discussions about race and identity (H. J. Garrett, 2020) and a discussion on the outcome of the presidential election related to the safety of students’ family members (Payne & Journell, 2019). Participants in the instrumental methods course noted that their lack of practical, in- classroom experience hindered them from constructing fully developed positions on these contentious topics. In this homogenous class without much divergent thinking, the researchers noted that most discussions “avoided the messiness of individuals needing to alter their viewpoints” (Richerme & Miksza, 2020, p. 40). I wonder how controversial these topics felt to the students. Applying Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort framework to a study that did not employ it may be unfair. However, examining this study while searching for discomfort in music education spaces makes me wonder about the role of the teacher, as well as the degree to which students integrated their identities into classroom discussions. The example questions in the study seem safe and represent a missed opportunity for professor and students to go on a collaborative journey to collectively witness their positionality on each discussion question. Perhaps students could have engaged in deeper learning and personal growth if discomfort had entered the classroom. Situating themselves in the understanding that teaching is a political act (Apple, 2014), Harry and Salvador (2021) operationalized a pursuit of educational equity through suggestions of engaging preservice music teachers in critical thinking and productive dialogue. They described the emotionally significant process of constructing difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2003) and of upending existing, unquestioned beliefs. They rejected the notion of a safe space “as a way to protect participants from emotional struggle” because they recognized the inherently 58 emotional nature of learning. Instead, they called for “discomfortable discourse.” Like Richerme and Miksza (2020), Harry and Salvador (2021) asked students to consider philosophical problems in music education. However, whereas the former sought class consensus, the latter asked students to notice the “tensions of the polarized viewpoints” and come to a “generative dissensus.” Some of the strategies the researchers suggested to develop listening skills in students intentionally included fishbowl exercises and listening dyads. Both of these studies occurred in preservice music education classrooms. In this dissertation, I utilized the researchers’ attention to planned conversation, yet still considered what that might look like in a performance ensemble in a high school. Choral-Dialoguing I sought literature on leading discussions in choral classrooms to inform the design of this study. Perkins (2019) envisioned a musical experience that decentered performance to focus on building empathy through social justice-oriented critical dialogue. He framed this work in transformative learning (Mezirow, 1990) and Cranton’s (2016) conception of empathy. Perkins designed a one-semester undergraduate course to facilitate social justice dialogue based on choral repertoire. Fourteen students enrolled and engaged with literature “chosen as a catalyst for questioning previously held assumptions” (Perkins, 2019, p. 76). Students rehearsed, read, reflected, and engaged in class discussions. Perkins prioritized relationship-building and individual engagement throughout the semester. Through semi-structured interviews with six of the 14 class participants, Perkins (2019) gleaned information within three categories: relationship building and empathetic engagement, perceptions of choral-dialoguing, and reflections on current music education experiences. Students reflected on the importance of peer relationships that facilitated personal musical 59 growth and considered new viewpoints through social justice dialogue. Specifically, students felt the course materials and activities helped them develop empathy toward individuals with differing identities. Students perceived singing as providing a purpose and a site of application for social justice education. Finally, students experienced increased motivation for rehearsals and became aware of the hierarchical preference for Western music in other ensemble experiences. Perkins (2019) advocated for deemphasizing performance in order to make space for critical dialogue. I contend that critical dialogue can be a crucial part of the rehearsal process that leads to an informed and embodied performance. Perkins reflected on a particular student who did not engage in class discussion. This student expressed that her conservative values were at odds with much of the course material. Within an environment designed for transformative learning, it is possible that students may adopt the beliefs or language of a teacher because of the power dynamics at play in the classroom (Salvador et al., 2020). Boler (2004) identified three categories of students as they respond to engaging in discomfort: those who embrace all aspects of critical thinking, shattering of worldviews, and stewing in ambiguity; those who react with anger to the suggestion that the world is not as they see it; and those who respond only with “vacant and dull stares” (p. 114). Perkins identified a student who did not engage yet articulated resistance to the material, suggesting this student embodied a combination of the qualities Boler identified. I wonder how a teacher might engage such a student. Was she alone in her discomfort because there was no space for it in the classroom? Boler (1999) called for collective witnessing so that all students and teachers can engage in critical inquiry to previously held beliefs, yet Perkins (2019) referred to this student as an outsider. Thus, a framework that “combines choral singing and dialogue for 60 critical and empathetic social justice education” (Perkins, 2019, p. 74) may only work for some students. Whereas the context for Perkins’ study was a collegiate elective purposefully situated to tackle social justice issues, I wonder about the ethics and palatability of such a framework in a secondary ensemble serving students for whom chorus may be their sole music education experience. Perkins dedicated significant time to the discussions in the semester under study, but secondary students may react differently to such lengthy conversations in a chorus class. Examining Perkins’ Choral-Dialoguing influenced the design of this dissertation. Discomfort in Unfamiliar Music I have presented three music education studies that explored critical conversation in music methods courses and ensemble rehearsals which at times included discomfort. J. Hess (2018a) experienced discomfort not through conversation but rather through a musical “strange encounter,” an adaptation of Ahmed’s (2000) concept to the field of music education. She shared three vignettes in which she experienced the inherent discomfort that accompanies the encountering of “musics for which one has no reference point” (J. Hess, 2018a, p. 27). Hess explored the ways the strange encounters can either be an opportunity for growth or can negatively reinscribe power hierarchies. She proposed that to know new music, a listener must approach it through its own epistemological frameworks. She challenged music teachers to “provide musical experiences in the musics with which we are fluent coupled with musics less familiar” thereby providing “a means to trouble students’ particular musical epistemological frameworks” (J. Hess, 2018a, p. 36). By embracing the discomfort that accompanies unfamiliar music, Hess argued that teachers can “engage dissident voices and counternarratives” (p. 35) and “create a space that fosters a multiplicity of voices without the presence of the grand narrative of 61 the teacher” (p. 38). While much of this paper has focused on discomfort stemming from discussion-based inquiry and learning, Hess made plain the ways that listening can produce discomfort. Just as concepts and conversation can produce controversy or unsettled emotions, so, too, can music. Synthesis of Discomfort in Music Education I introduced four radically different applications of discomfort in music education. First, I considered studies that explicitly used dialogue in music spaces, and secondly, I explored discomfort that stems from unfamiliar music. While the first two studies explored undergraduate classes, I endeavored to think through ways to talk about controversial issues or have difficult conversations specifically in choral spaces. Perkins’ (2019) conception of choral dialoguing, while implemented with college students, provided a discipline-specific example of deliberately planning for hard classroom conversations. These three studies shaped how I crafted the observation protocol for the study. I watched for times when the teacher participant in this study chose not to engage in difficult conversation. I looked for times when students appeared to need critical hope to move through discomfort. I asked students about their experiences with shattered worldviews that come from discomforting classroom conversations. I acknowledge the possibilities I see and hesitations I have with a pedagogy of discomfort in a secondary space while leaving significant space for there to be another way to lead difficult conversation. Judiciously and ethically applied, a pedagogy of discomfort has much to offer a choral classroom. Need for the Study The current sociopolitical landscape of the United States makes this a timely project, and the empirical results will add to the discourse on difficult conversation in music education. Given 62 the divisive nature of national politics and the increase in examples of states restricting teachers’ agency, I anticipate the need for teachers to navigate difficult conversations in their classrooms to increase as time goes on. However, some teachers may react to the social polarization in a way that attempts to avoid all contentious conversations. The degree to which a school district supports teachers engaging in controversial public issues would likely impact an individual teacher’s willingness to do so in their classroom. Many of D. E. Hess’s (2002) mastery skills on teaching controversial public issues could be applied in music classrooms with contentious issues and more mundane topics. Hess’s work examined the classroom from the teacher’s perspective, articulating how the teacher can set up a productive discussion. Documented studies of teachers in other disciplines engaging in difficult discussions or controversial issues exist (see for example Flores-Koulish & Shiller, 2020; Garrett, 2020; Keddie, 2021; Payne & Journell, 2019; Watt, 2017), and this study offers empirical results situated in the field of music education. Students can engage in passionate, respectful dialogue when teachers provide space for their emotions within classroom conversation (Garrett, 2020). It is worthwhile to investigate this pedagogical possibility in the music classroom. Students can discuss a wide variety of topics in music spaces and acknowledge their multiple perspectives on an issue. Music teachers can cultivate classroom communities built on respect to allow for such multiplicity, rather than forced consensus on issues. Fostering such an environment could additionally provide space for multiple interpretations of musical pieces, which could be useful in amplifying individuality within a large ensemble. Through this dissertation project, I seek to inquire into not only the teacher’s experience but also the students’ perspectives in the classroom. Payne and Journell did not interview students; student interviews will be a part of the data collection for my study. High school students’ voices in research deepens our understanding of the phenomenon, recognizing 63 that the teacher’s perception of their classroom may not represent all viewpoints. No known research exists that purposefully centers the experience of students and teacher as they engage in difficult conversations in the secondary choral classroom. This study addresses that gap in the literature. Theorizing a Role for Discomfort in the Secondary Choral Classroom Through this inquiry, I investigated ways to answer Sondel et al.’s (2018) call for teachers of all disciplines to prepare students for civic participation and purposefully engage in controversial issues in the classroom. Payne and Journell (2019) demonstrated the possibility of such conversations in elementary schools if done with developmentally appropriate practices. Now, I seek to explore the role of discomfort in the choral rehearsal space, specifically in a secondary classroom. Students can experience discomfort in a myriad of ways. A pedagogy of discomfort focuses primarily on emotions in response to dialogic education. However, listening to and performing music outside one’s way of knowing can be discomforting (J. Hess, 2018a). Adolescents can experience discomfort through singing (Sweet, 2020). Creating music with one’s body can be a personal endeavor; therefore, teachers ought to attend to the potential physical discomfort of singing. There is a fine line between the ways discomfort can lead to learning and discomfort that could be (re)traumatizing for students. As I consider the role discomfort could play in the secondary choral classroom, I remain cautious. A pedagogy of discomfort is not a framework that can be universally applied, nor is there a standard approach that would work for all scenarios. The examples of a pedagogy of discomfort I have presented existed in a college classroom (Ohito, 2016), an independent secondary school’s extra-curricular club (Keddie, 2021) and an elementary school designed to push against an entrenched cultural divide (Zembylas & McGlynn, 2012). I know that Boler’s 64 (1999) pedagogy of discomfort serves as the foundation for my understanding of discomfort in classroom conversations. However, I feel strongly that the ethics of a pedagogy of discomfort resonate differently in a collegiate course, such as the one in Perkins’ (2019) study, compared to a secondary choral ensemble at a public school, which was the site of this dissertation. Therefore, throughout the inquiry, I planned to consider a pedagogy of discomfort as an analytical frame for findings, to watch for the ways the pedagogy may or may not be appropriate in the setting, and to be open to the possibility that the teacher utilized the pedagogy. Summary In this chapter, I presented literature that undergirded the design of this inquiry. I examined literature related to difficult conversations in the general education classroom. Because I anticipated empathy, vulnerability, and caring to be useful constructs in this inquiry, I introduced them here. I examined Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort as a useful framework to engaging in difficult conversations. Literature on controversy and dialogue in music education provided a jumping off point for theorizing a role for discomfort in the choral classroom. This review revealed a gap in the literature on the ways students and teachers experience difficult conversations in the secondary choral classroom. 65 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY This narrative inquiry centered one research question: How do students and a teacher experience difficult conversations in a high school chorus classroom? This chapter details the methodology of the inquiry, divided into six sections. First, through a brief overview of narrative research, I establish Clandinin and Connelly as preeminent researchers whose approach to narrative research informs music education scholarship. Then, I identify the processes and epistemic considerations that define Clandinin’s (2013) conception of narrative inquiry. Next, I explore extant music education literature that utilized a narrative inquiry approach, looking for specific aspects of design and method that informed this dissertation. These first three sections explore scholarship that undergirded this inquiry. I then present the three sections of the methodology for this project, separated chronologically. First, I delineate the steps I took to prepare the inquiry design. Second, I explain how I entered into the relational research with participants and lived alongside them through observations and interviews. Lastly, I discuss the process of moving from field to final research text. A Brief Overview of Narrative Research in Music Education Narrative inquiry is a relatively new methodology within music education. The first Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (NIME) conference occurred in 2006, bringing together scholars to explore multiple perspectives of narrative and what it can offer to inquiries in the field (Barrett & Stauffer, 2006). Music education researchers widely use Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000)methodology and conceptualization of narrative inquiry, either exclusively or in conjunction with other narrative scholars (Stauffer, 2020).9 Music education researchers 9 For a thorough review of narrative inquiry within music education, see Stauffer (2020). 66 commonly cite Bruner (1987) and Barone (1992) in the “polyvocal and contested” (Barrett & Stauffer, 2012, p. 8) field of narrative methodology. I briefly introduce the work of those two researchers, and then I transition to the scholarship of Connelly and Clandinin. Music education researchers drew upon the work of Bruner (1987). He theorized that life is a construction of narrative telling and re-telling. Individuals become the stories they tell about their lives within the cultural context of cognition and linguistic processes. “I have argued that a life as led is inseparable from a life told—or more bluntly, a life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold: Freud’s psychic reality” (Bruner, 1987, p. 31). Music education scholars used Bruner’s concepts to tell the stories of an adult beginner piano student (Kang, 2016), a first-generation college student (Draves & Vargas, 2021), and a novice teacher (Powell, 2016). Narrative researchers often invoke Barone’s (1992) conceptualization of critical storytelling. Barone (1992) aimed “to prick the consciences of readers” (p. 143) by using critical stories as an avenue through which readers reexamine discourses, practices, and policies in schools. The critical story focuses on one character whose experiences illustrate the connections “between an individual life and a debilitating sociopolitical milieu” (p. 145). While Barone argued that critical storytellers are not necessarily employing a systematic method or applying theory, I include his work here because of the usefulness in thinking about the power of stories and the influence he has had on music education scholars engaging in narrative inquiry (e.g., Bartolome, 2016; de Vries, 2018; Draves & Vargas, 2021; Kuebel et al., 2018). Clandinin’s Narrative Inquiry Methodology In music education, as well as other disciplines, there are “rather healthy debates about what narrative inquiry is and even what constitutes a narrative” (Stauffer, 2020, p. 126). I opted 67 to align this project with Clandinin’s (2013) work because I respected the way their scholarship anchored several music education inquiries and I appreciated how the methodology was operationalized. I acknowledge that Clandinin’s (2013) work is an outgrowth of the collaborative work performed with Connelly (see Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Because I situated this dissertation project in Clandinin’s (2013) conception of narrative inquiry, I will expand upon the processes and epistemic considerations that guide Clandinin’s (2013) definition of the methodology. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Clandinin (2013) articulated a philosophical difference between narrative inquiry and other types of narrative analysis or narrative research as being rooted in how the researcher views experience. Narrative inquirers view experience as composed though narratives. From this perspective, narrative is not merely a tool for analysis nor an end product. Experience is seen as embodied narrative. The life one lives is inextricably linked to the stories one tells (Bruner, 1987). Narrative inquirers study the lives of individuals and honor “lived experience as a source of important knowledge and understanding” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 17). Narrative as a phenomenon of an individual’s experience is a flexible entity, and a researcher inquires how temporality, sociality, and place impact experience and relationship (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Experience is the epistemic center of narrative inquiry. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) built upon Dewey’s two criteria—interaction and continuity—to situate experience in narrative inquiry. While individuals need to be understood as their own person, it is imperative to acknowledge the impact of social context. Individuals are always in relationship with people and places. This relationality is the interaction criteria. Secondly, they argued that experiences do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, “experiences grow out of other experiences, and experiences lead to further experiences” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, 68 p. 2), which is the continuity criteria. Researchers must consider the interaction and continuity of experience in narrative inquiry. In narrative inquiry, researchers work within a “transactional or relational ontology” that is fundamental to their methodology (Clandinin, 2013, p. 16). While recognizing the impact of relational interaction of experience as explained above, researchers also attend to their interactions with participants. Without sharing an experience, a narrative cannot be created, therefore a narrative inquiry requires both the storyteller and the listener (Barrett & Stauffer, 2012). Researcher and participant work collaboratively to engage in narrative inquiry. The researcher enters “in the midst and progresses in the same spirit, concluding the inquiry still in the midst of living and telling, reliving and retelling” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 20). The participant can be referred to as a “co-inquirer” to acknowledge the relational aspect of the research process. Some researchers acknowledge co-inquirers by co-authoring journal articles (e.g., Draves & Vargas, 2021; Koops et al., 2017). Clandinin (2013) proposed several design elements and processes to consider before beginning an inquiry. I view narrative inquiries as ever-evolving, never stagnant—almost alive. Clandinin (2013) emphasized “that narrative inquirers understand experience as a narratively composed phenomenon. Narrative inquiry is thus methodology and phenomenon” (p. 16). Situated relationally, people “think with stories” (p. 30) that are influenced by the ever-changing context of their lives. The process is not linear. Many of the elements and processes are ongoing throughout the inquiry. I first describe how Clandinin (2013) conceived each aspect, and then I will discuss how I integrated aspects of the methodology into my dissertation project. 69 Design Considerations Clandinin (2013) outlined several considerations for designing the methodology for a narrative inquiry: engaging in autobiographical narrative beginnings; crafting research puzzles; constantly living, telling, reliving, retelling; acknowledging the research justifications; and attending to the three-dimensional relational narrative inquiry space of temporality, sociality, and place. Clandinin (2013) referred to all aspects of her proposed design consideration as “a helpful guide as one lives out a narrative inquiry” (p. 42). Although what I present below does not represent the totality of Clandinin’s methodology, I introduce these elements specifically because they were useful to the design of my project. Narrative Beginnings Due to the relational aspect of narrative inquiry, the researcher recognizes how their experiences impact the design, process, and product of the inquiry. A researcher engages in autobiographical narratives, called narrative beginnings, to understand who they are in a particular inquiry (Clandinin, 2013). Such personal reflections may reach as far back as childhood to understand what experiences may be impacting an inquiry. This process of self- reflection takes place before, during, and after each inquiry. Clandinin (2013) cautioned that, because this work does not necessarily end up in publications, researchers may be prone to skip this important step. This work encourages a researcher to understand how their histories impact the inquiry. However, it is not intended to center the researcher in the study. Rather, narrative beginnings encourage self-reflection to understand the researcher’s place to support centering the experiences of the participant. 70 Research Puzzles Researchers design research puzzles in narrative inquiry as opposed to research questions. A research question often includes precise terminology and definitions and perhaps has an expected outcome or answer. A research question addresses a problem that can be addressed through a set of measurable variables. The researcher approaches a “particular wonder” with a sense of “search, a ‘re-search,’ a searching again” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 42). The human experience is not a set of fixed variables, therefore, when inquiring into a human experience, narrative thought requires research puzzles. I note many music education scholars do not utilize this aspect of Clandinin’s methodology. Indeed, as I discuss later, several researchers identify specific research questions. Living, Telling, Retelling, and Reliving A narrative inquiry captures moments in someone’s life, but it is not bound by a start and end; rather it is contextually situated through time. The researcher enters an inquiry “in the midst” and moves to “living alongside” participants (Clandinin, 2013, p. 43). Researchers examine the separate ways they and participants are in the midst of their own lives, and then as the inquiry begins, the researcher attends to how those lives are shaped by each other. Narrative inquirers are relational, not objective, in their attentiveness to people and spaces. Researchers “do not stand metaphorically outside the inquiry but are part of the phenomenon under study” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 24). The stories are lived and told. The narrative is constructed in the space between researcher and individual as the stories are relived and retold. Clandinin (2013) noted that “in our western society, we think mostly about stories; we no longer think with stories” (p. 71 29).10 Narrative inquiry calls on researchers to attend to the multi-layered creation of experience through living, telling, retelling, and reliving. Research Justifications Researchers conduct inquiries to share their work and provoke thought. Clandinin (2013) reasoned that researchers must consider justifications for all inquiries on three levels: personal, practical, and social. By constructing narrative beginnings, an inquirer explores their personal justification. Clandinin (2013) suggested that a researcher “ask yourself who you are as you enter the research study, what you bring to it, and how you’ll be in the study” (p. 36). Through continuous examination and return to narrative beginnings throughout the inquiry, a researcher can fully explore their personal justification throughout the process. Considering a practical justification may lead a researcher to engage readers in thinking about changing or shifting practice. Lastly, a social justification can either be a theoretical rationale for inquiry or one rooted in social or policy realms. Commonplaces Another foundational aspect of narrative inquiry is the metaphorical three-dimensional space known as the commonplaces. Inquirers view themselves and participants as existing within the realms of temporality, sociality and place. Inquirers consider how all three commonplaces simultaneously influence experiences. At every step of the research process, inquirers must attend to these commonplaces. Researchers attend to the temporal dimension by studying the past, present, and future of every component and participant of the inquiry. The sociality 10 I acknowledge that Clandinin’s assertion does not apply to indigenous perspectives. For an introduction to the ethics of narrative inquiry and indigenous knowledge, I suggest Azzahrawi (2021) who synthesizes the work of several indigenous scholars and provides a jumping off point to learn more. 72 commonplace encompasses two domains: first, the personal condition, referring to “the feelings, hopes, desires, aesthetic reactions and moral dispositions” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 480) of both researcher and participant; and second, the social condition, which is thought to be “cultural, social, institutional, familial, and linguistic narratives” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 40). Additionally, attending to the social dimension serves as another reminder to the inquirer that they are part of the inquiry as they are in relationship with the participant, and they “cannot subtract themselves” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 41). The final commonplace is that of place, a recognition that stories exist in a specific location. This commonplace recognizes the influence of geography and boundaries on experiences. Researchers are situated in the metaphorical three- dimensional space with participants and attending to all three throughout the inquiry is one distinguishing feature of narrative inquiry. Research Process I previously outlined the unique design considerations for narrative inquiry. Now I turn to the research process. First, a researcher crafts a research puzzle and writes narrative beginnings; I discussed these elements above. Then, a researcher: (a) spends significant relational time in the field alongside participants, (b) creates field texts, then interim texts, and finally research texts; (c) all the while attending to the three-dimensional commonplaces of temporality, sociality, and place. Narrative inquirers spend a significant amount of time in the field though Clandinin (2013) did not quantify “significant time.” Connelly and Clandinin (2006) noted that there are two possible starting points for a study: first, receiving stories from participants, and second, living alongside individuals as they live and tell their stories. Clandinin (2013) asserted that conversations, rather than scripted interviews, “create a space for the stories of both participants and researchers to be composed and heard” (p. 45). Regardless of how a researcher begins the 73 study, they must spend the requisite substantial time in the field to build relationships with participants and hear their stories. Connelly and Clandinin (2000) prefer the term field text over data to signify the experiential and subjective nature of the documents. Field texts can be fieldnotes, transcripts, other writings by participant and researcher, and artifacts, such as artwork, photographs, and other memory box items. Field texts may be co-composed with participants, which allows for diverse representation of experiences and retold stories (Clandinin, 2013). The quantity of field texts can make the transition into interim texts daunting. As researchers, with or without participants, begin to weave field texts into interim texts, they attend to the relational three- dimensional narrative inquiry space. The constant consideration of temporality, sociality, and place leaves room for multiple interpretations and meanings of the same experience, and by drawing in the commonplaces to the research text, the researcher makes plain the multiplicity of experience (Clandinin, 2013). Interim texts are often incomplete or piecemeal, leaving space for researchers and participants to negotiate tensions to be negotiated and trace themes through field texts. The transition from interim text to research text marks the first time researchers share the narrative with the public. Lastly, “final research texts do not have final answers, because narrative inquirers do not come with questions” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 51). Researchers aim not to provide solutions or answers to their readers, but rather to engage them in traveling alongside the participant in ways that causes them to reconsider aspects of their own storied lives. Design Aspects of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education Literature In preparation for this project, I reviewed music education narrative inquiries that appeared as journal articles, book chapters, and dissertations. With an understanding of Clandinin’s (2013) conception of the methodology, I paid particular attention to music education 74 researchers’ adherence to various methodological approaches to narrative inquiry. I felt eager to understand how scholars realized inquiries in order to prepare for my own entrance into the research field. Because of the design elements of my study, I explicitly looked for extant literature that utilized Clandinin’s scholarship and studies that were exclusively narrative inquiries instead of composite methodologies. Clandinin (2013) cautioned readers that the entirety of an inquiry often does not appear in a final research text, oftentimes due to journal page constraints. I remain cognizant of this, especially in any moments of critique I offer. In this section, I present the ways that music education researchers approached the following design aspects: research questions, participant(s), research justifications and theoretical frameworks, relationality, data and time in the field, and final research text. Research Questions Although Clandinin (2013) called for narrative inquiries to have research puzzles, rather than research questions, I found this not to be a common practice in music education scholarship. I found no studies that used the term research puzzle, though some researchers do include broad purpose statements and wonderments. However, some studies have explicit research questions while others include none of the above. “Narratives proliferate in pre-service teacher education, where identities are in transformation and stories are compelling” (Barrett & Stauffer, 2012, p. 159). Guided by broad purpose statements, Parker and Draves (2017) and Draves and Vargas (2021) sought to “re-story” the experiences of preservice teachers. A mistake in an undergraduate class prompted Bartolome (2016) to wonder if their classroom was a safe space for transgender students; this directly inspired the research project with Melanie, a transgender preservice music educator. Researchers also explored themes of identity in music teachers (Abramo & Austin, 2014; Carrillo et al., 2015; Thomas-Durrell, 2019). Similarly, researchers 75 used narrative inquiry to explore the lived stories of a burnt-out music teacher (Paetz, 2021) and a community musician (Rohwer, 2017). In addition to identity, another common theme I found was informal musicking or learning (Abramo & Austin, 2014; Griffin, 2014; Miranda, 2012). However, some researchers included explicit research questions in their publications (Bond & Koops, 2014; Griffin, 2014; Koops et al., 2017; Kuebel et al., 2018). For example, Koops et al. (2017) asked “How did taking piano lessons influence Sarah’s experience of musical parenting?” (p. 211). In the music education literature I reviewed, scholars often crafted specific research questions or let a wonderment guide their research; I found none that used research puzzles. Participants Clandinin (2013) articulated that narrative inquiry is best suited for a small number of participants. The majority of the studies I read had one or two participants; some had three (Cho, 2018; Kuebel et al., 2018; Thomas-Durrell, 2019), four (Carrillo et al., 2015; McCall, 2021), or more (Griffin, 2014; Talbot, 2013). The participants in almost all of the studies I reviewed were adults; exceptions include members of a teenage garage band (Miranda, 2012) and a kindergarten music student (Miranda, 2012). Although the story of Rie focused on her experiences in secondary school music, she was in her early twenties at the time of the study (Nichols, 2013). Researchers explored the experiences of: adult musicians (Bickmore, 2017; Cho, 2018; Kang, 2016; Koops et al., 2017; McCall, 2021; Nichols, 2021; Rohwer, 2017), in-service music teachers (Abramo & Austin, 2014; Carrillo et al., 2015; J. Davis, 2009; de Vries, 2018; Dearden, 2021; Dwyer, 2015; Miranda, 2012; Paetz, 2021; Stringham & Snell, 2019; Thomas-Durrell, 2019), music teacher educators (Bond & Koops, 2014; Kuebel et al., 2018), preservice teachers entering the field (Bartolome, 2016; Draves & Vargas, 2021), and undergraduate music education students (Griffin, 2014; Parker & Draves, 2017; Talbot, 2013). Some studies included 76 the singular participant as a co-author (Abramo & Austin, 2014; Draves & Vargas, 2021; Koops et al., 2017) and one was an autobiographical narrative inquiry (Kuebel et al., 2018). Most of the narrative inquires that I examined had one or two participants, almost all of whom were adults. Research Justifications and Theoretical Frameworks Narrative inquires can encourage the reader to reflect on personal stories and professional practices (Clandinin, 2013). “Without troubling certainty, we would have only sympathetic vibration” (Barrett & Stauffer, 2009, p. 3), an echo chamber of confirmation studies applauding current practice. Instead, narrative inquiry—and other methodologies, to be certain—can represent “counternarratives to master narratives that assert political and often hegemonic control in society” (Stauffer & Barrett, 2021, p. 4). McCall (2021) shared the experiences of four Black music graduate students at predominantly white institutions, and Thomas-Durrell (2019) explored the intersecting identities of Black queer teachers in the Bible Belt. Rie’s story challenged music teachers to consider how school music supports gender variant students (Nichols, 2013). Nichols (2013) purported that the “emancipatory storysharing” could “bring forward the voices of those who are typically unheard in mainstream discourse” (p. 20). However, Richerme (2021) cautioned that not all narratives are inherently emancipatory. Other research justifications included exploring the tensions between classical music training and informal pedagogy (Abramo & Austin, 2014), provoking taken-for-granted music practices (Hendricks, 2021), and articulating policy suggestions to support music teachers with disabilities (Parker & Draves, 2017). By telling particular stories of individuals, researchers can provoke the readers to reflect on “larger questions and problems of the human condition” (Stauffer, 2020, p. 143). Stauffer (2020) stated “The power of narrative inquiry lies in the possibility of troubling 77 certainty and, once troubled, in the possibility of change” (p. 143). For some researchers, a theoretical framework can enhance the power of a story to trouble certainty and create change. Clandinin (2013) did not explicitly advocate for or against using theoretical frameworks. The researchers who included a theoretical framework in their studies typically did so to support the purpose or justification for the research. For example, Parker and Draves (2017) analyzed the narratives of two student teachers with visual impairment through the social model of disability (Oliver & Barnes, 2012) and a transformative paradigm (Mertens et al., 2009) which allowed them to make policy and practice suggestions for the field. Using intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1995) as a theoretical lens, Draves and Vargas (2021) restoried an undergraduate music students’ experience with regard to class and race. Researchers also used the theoretical frameworks of change readiness (Armenakis et al., 1993, as cited in de Vries, 2018) to investigate changing work conditions and double consciousness theory (Du Bois 1903/2003, as cited in McCall, 2022) to illuminate the ongoing racism faced by Black students at predominantly white institutions. By introducing frameworks, researchers were able to draw out specific themes in the participants stories in a discussion that encouraged readers to reflect on personal stories or professional practice. The examples I offered here are some exceptions, not the majority; I did not notice widespread usage of theoretical frameworks in the studies I reviewed. Relationality Narrative inquiries are fundamentally relational. The researcher is aware of their presence in the study and the “stories are co-composed in the spaces between” inquirer and participant (Clandinin, 2013, p. 24). As I reviewed studies within music education literature, I noticed how the researchers attended to the relational nature of the inquiry. Baker (2012) articulated feeling abundantly aware of their adult presence; however, they observed that the teenagers took little 78 time to become comfortable with them in their midst. Baker attended the rehearsals of the teenage garage band as well as public performances. Baker entered into the space of the participants, which is important because “narrative work occurs with living people, over time, face to face, and usually in the places where narrators or participants are” (Stauffer, 2020, p. 139). Miranda (2012) took the approach of being a participant-observer in a kindergarten music classroom. They played alongside the students and participated in classroom activities to build relationships. Separately, the researcher interviewed the kindergarten music teacher to develop a relationship with the adult participant. I noticed both the social and place aspects of the relational work of narrative inquiry. Researchers took varying approaches to developing relationships with participants. Kang (2016) entered amidst and traveled alongside Mr. K as they journeyed through their relationship as a piano teacher and adult student. Kang attended to the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space and articulated what the participant gained from the re-storying of his experiences. Conversely, Cho (2018), after discussing her position as an insider with Korean Americans, purposefully distanced herself and “took on the role of a ‘researcher’ to reconstruct, interpret, and reflect on the narrative data” (p. 162) in her exploration of the role of music in the lives of Korean immigrants. While Kang attended to the relationship between participant and researcher, and Cho distanced researcher from participant, de Vries (2018) took a different approach. In a study with two in-service teachers whose job descriptions changed, de Vries wrote themselves into the narrative as a third, active character. Rather than attend to a co-constructed space between researcher and participant, this approach made for a researcher-centric narrative. The researcher must be aware of their influence in the inquiry, but they should center the stories of the participants. 79 Data and Time in the Field Within the literature I reviewed, there was substantial variation in the amount of data collected and the length of time spent in the field. Some studies span years, in which deep relationships between researcher and participants can develop and which might lead to multiple research texts (Nichols, 2021). Some researchers met regularly with participants over many months, such as Nichols (2013) who held weekly interviews with participant Rie for 10 consecutive sessions. Bartolome (2016) conducted eight 90-minute interviews, observed the participant several times in the field, and read the participant’s school work and personal blog. Collaboratively, Bartolome and the participant constructed the stories that appeared in the final research text, drawing on the extensive time spent together in this inquiry. In contrast, Cho (2018) conducted only one interview with each of the three participants. Cho did not attend to the relational nature of field texts nor research texts. “One-time encounters are flimsy grounds for narrative work, for they afford insufficient time for…developing a collaborative trusting relationship” (Stauffer, 2020, p. 139). Paetz (2021) acknowledged that a lack of time in the field was a limitation to the study of an ensemble teacher choosing to remain in the classroom after experiencing significant burnout. Paetz conducted three interviews and one observation over a one-month period. Not all researchers engaged in significant time in the field. Using the term data rather than field texts, researchers commonly used interviews and observations as sources of data. Using the Seidman (2019) interview protocol, Carrillo et al. (2015) interviewed participants three times. Kang (2016) conducted four interviews, took fieldnotes after the participant’s piano lessons, and the participant kept a practice log, occasionally including photographs of his practicing. Similarly, Koops et al. (2017) conducted six interviews, took videos and notes of practice sessions and lessons, and emailed regularly with 80 the co-inquirer. Rohwer (2017) included journals and pictures in an inquiry of an active, adult community musician in addition to observations and interviews. Researchers ought to develop relationships with participants over time. The amount of data and time spent in the field differed between the studies. Final Research Text Clandinin (2013) situated the reader as an integral part of the inquiry. The final research text should urge readers to reflect and shift their practice. I often wondered how researchers transitioned from data collection to final research text. Researchers that indicated coding as part of their process (Abramo & Austin, 2014; Bond & Koops, 2014) generally did not specify a particular coding method. Addressing the lack of uniformity in analysis within narrative inquiry, Stauffer (2020) stated that “interpretive processes are neither ready-formed nor linear, but rather invented within the context of each study and composed of multiple recursive moves between data, work in the field, literature and theory, and writing” (p. 141). Indeed, Clandinin (2013) spoke more about noticing tensions in stories rather than any structured method of coding. Some research texts were compelling and engrossing reads. Bickmore (2021) presented the story of a fictional freshman music major with super powers in a story that challenged the utility of a traditional white Eurocentric curriculum. I wept when I read about the tragic death of a young singer (Dearden, 2021) and I felt agitated to take action when presented with concrete steps to address racism in predominantly white institutions (McCall, 2021). I felt invested in the success of a first year music teachers, then I reflected on how a music education program might support students from marginalized populations (Draves & Vargas, 2021). The structure of a final research text often lacked the specificity of methodology that I had come to expect in 81 journal articles, which I found to be both freeing and frustrating. “To be clear, there is no standard narrative article, chapter, or dissertation structure” (Stauffer, 2020, p. 141). In this chapter so far, I explored the methodological foundations of narrative research. I discussed the processes and epistemic considerations of narrative inquiry as defined by Clandinin (2013), which, in turn, outlined the methodologic framework for this dissertation project. I explored how music education researchers utilized narrative inquiry to better inform how I will engage the methodology in my own research. Now, I present the design of this project. Design Clandinin (2013) delineated two starting points for any narrative inquiry: living stories or telling stories. Most researchers engage in the latter, listening to stories told by the participant (Clandinin, 2013). I began with living stories by joining the world of the participants. Consisting of two 80-minute classes per week, I observed and participated in one chorus classroom for three months to inquire into how students and teacher experienced difficult conversations. While some potentially difficult conversations can be carefully crafted into lesson plans—contextualizing repertoire, for example—others happen unannounced, such as negotiating a conflict between students or a potentially traumatizing world event. For this reason, and the relational aspect of narrative inquiry, this project necessitated an extended observation period. Connelly and Clandinin (2006) called beginning with living stories “a more difficult, time-consuming, intensive, and yet, more profound method…because, in the end, narrative inquiry is about life and living” (p. 478). Creating and sustaining meaningful relational research partnerships takes time. This supports the rationale to situate the research in only one school. In this section, I expand on the six aspects of preparing for the inquiry. I engaged in narrative beginnings before, during, and after the observation period. These were an influential part of designing the research 82 question. I explore the ethical considerations of engaging in educational research, specifically narrative inquiries with adolescents. I detail the participant selection process and the steps I took to protect confidentiality. Narrative Beginnings Throughout the research process, I engaged in writing narrative beginnings to recognize how my experiences impacted the design, process, and product of this inquiry. Various facets of my identity—teacher, musician, student, Mainer, mother—are parts of the phenomenon under inquiry. By introducing my “stories of experience” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 55) in Chapter 1, I began to reflect on the ways my time as a high school chorus teacher acted as a lens through which I viewed this project. My professional history in education undoubtedly impacted how I designed this project. My values helped form the research questions. I reflected on the past and examined the present to understand the implications of who I am as a researcher. The context and the socio-political environment in which I live shaped my understanding of my experiences and of what I observed. For example, I acknowledge that my experiences as an educated white researcher situate this research within the “ongoing contexts of colonization” and “the protective wrap of white privilege” (Patel, 2015, p. 54). I continued the process of self-reflection during and after the inquiry through the use of a researcher journal. This ongoing commitment to narrative beginnings provided me space to process how the inquiry changed me. My researcher journal was the vessel for my ego. This is one way I walked the tightrope of acknowledging my relational role in the project while simultaneously centering the experiences of the students and teacher. 83 Research Question While Clandinin (2013) advocated for the use of a research puzzle, I was guided instead by a research question. This decision mirrors that of many of the extant narrative inquiries in music education. The structure afforded to me by a specific question set limits and boundaries on the data and themes I highlighted. At the outset of the project, I believed that having a question would allow me to dig deeper into related data and to let go of tangential material. My research question was sufficiently open-ended to serve as the driving force of a narrative inquiry project. This question served me well as I discovered that community was salient to engaging in discussions within the choral ensemble. In Chapter 7, I reflect on the shift from a specific research question to an embrace of the emergent themes that took the inquiry into unexpected directions. The constant engagement in narrative beginnings, use of a researcher journal, and being open to the voices of participants allowed me to be flexible in the journey of this inquiry. Ethical Considerations I drew on the work of several scholars in overlapping disciplines as I prepared to ethically engage in this inquiry. I considered the ethics of each aspect of educational research, narrative inquiry specifically, pedagogy of discomfort, and music education. I do not conflate meeting the standards for IRB with planning ethical participatory research (Nichols, 2016). Additionally, attending to the ethics of narrative inquiry is done throughout the research process, from planning to observing to writing (Clandinin, 2013). Considering the ethics of this project was an ongoing endeavor. Patel (2015) situated educational research and institutions of higher learning as sites of perpetuating racism, white supremacy, and coloniality. Instead of a pursuit of a singular truth, Patel argued researchers should shift their perspective from one of ownership to one of 84 answerability. Coloniality in research privileges the “myth of universal truth” (p. 8). Because all text is “socially and culturally situated,” educational research is never “neutral” (p. 13). Patel’s (2015) rejection of the possibility of neutrality in educational research aligns with the rejection of a possible neutral curriculum or classroom (Apple, 2014; Dunn et al., 2019; Sondel et al., 2018). Understanding “all writing as temporally located” (Patel, 2015, p. 8) is complementary to narrative inquiry’s focus on the three-dimensional narrative space of temporality, sociality, and place. This conception of research decentralizes one “truth” and embraces the multiplicity of experience. Patel (2015) addressed the researcher’s role in inquiry by highlighting the relational aspect of research. In this way, Clandinin’s (2013) and Patel’s (2015) views align, agreeing that the researcher is not a neutral observer. Patel described research as constantly in flux; the design, process, and product are influencing and being influenced by all the aspects of the project. Patel (2015) insisted that researchers attend to the relational and ontological practice by attending to these questions: “Why this? Why me? Why now?” (p. 57). Regarding “why this?”, I considered what the participants could gain from the inquiry, and how the final research texts could engage the field in a critique of the role of difficult conversation in music education. The second is not an invitation to exceptionality but rather to humility. Through narrative beginnings and constant journaling, I engaged in a “humble pause” (p. 58) as I prepared to learn from adolescents and the teacher. Lastly, the highly polarized sociopolitical landscape answers the “why now?” as teachers navigate new terrain of potentially difficult conversations. Participant and researcher negotiate the ethical considerations in narrative inquiries at all points in the process (Clandinin, 2013). The researcher has a short-term responsibility to the participant as they hear their stories and live alongside them. The researcher must suspend their 85 disbelief and listen without judgement. The inquirer has a long-term responsibility to the participant as those final research texts are written and published. The researcher and participant must negotiate the degree to which the participant is involved in the creation of both interim and final research texts. The question of authorship has been a central ethical quandary for narrative inquirers because of the inherent power imbalance between author and participant (Patel, 2015). Some opt to co-author a published work (e.g., Draves & Vargas, 2021) while some participants agree that sole-authorship of the researcher is the most appropriate (e.g., Nichols, 2013). Because of the number of participants and their understanding of confidentiality, I decided against shared authorship for this inquiry. Continuing to engage in reflective narrative beginnings allows the researcher to be attentive to who they are in the project, and how their presence shapes the field. While I discussed many aspects of the ethics of engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort in Chapter 2, I will highlight a few here. A core tenet of a pedagogy of discomfort is to interrogate strongly held beliefs, but who benefits when someone’s world view is shattered (Zembylas & McGlynn, 2012)? Boler (2004) cautioned teachers against engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort if they did not have the time or ability to also offer students critical hope. There are inherent power differences between teacher and student which can dampen either party’s willingness to engage in collective witnessing, unsettling strongly held beliefs, or accepting ambiguity, all of which are key components of a pedagogy of discomfort. It is important for teachers to understand the cultural context of discomfort for the students in class, understanding that not all students will benefit from or react to discomforting practices in the same manner (Leibowitz, 2011). Lastly, and particularly relevant to this study, is Zembylas and McGlynn’s (2012) wonderment about the appropriateness of engaging children in discomforting activities for the 86 sake of student learning. While I did not lead any classes or activities, this was on my mind as I observed and as I engaged in interviews with student participants. Nichols (2016) detailed the ethical dimensions of her 2013 narrative inquiry into a transgender student’s experiences in and out of school music. I highlight Nichols’ (2016) reflection because how she navigated the ethics of narrative inquiry informed how I approached this dissertation project. Nichols articulated how the relational aspect of the inquiry changed her, which reverberated through future projects and how she thinks about all qualitative research going forward. She leaned heavily on Josselson’s (1996, as cited in Nichols, 2016) idea that narrative inquiry should be done “in anguish.” Nichols’ (2016) work was grounded by “three notes of scholarly anguish: cultural competence,…unintentional or unavoidable subjectification,…and the desire to honor her [the participant’s] expertise in her own life and story” (p. 442). I consider how each of these applies to this research project. My insider status as a Maine high school chorus teacher afforded me a certain amount of relevant experience for the research field site, however, there was the danger that any preconceived notions of the place clouded my ability to see the unique aspects of the specific program, school, and students. Nichols (2016) worried that her research agenda would overshadow the participant’s purpose in talking to her. I remained cognizant of the potentially dueling purposes of participating in this research so as to avoid subjectification. For me, this dissertation is the final step in a doctoral degree and the beginning of a research trajectory. I sought to uncover, honor, and prioritize the participants’ purposes in talking with me. Lastly, each participant was an expert on their own story. I highlighted their unique experiences of the shared choral rehearsals. In an effort to honor their expertise in their experience within the conversation, I did not compare participants’ experiences with the hope of 87 finding the “one” true way it occurred. There is no hierarchy of experience. Rather, my goal was to document all of the ways the rehearsal process was experienced. During analysis, I compared their experiences to illuminate how multiple perspectives exist within one single classroom. Narrative inquiries honor experience as knowledge, and researchers restory participants lives to embrace the “particularity and incompleteness” without a goal of “generalizations and certainties” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 52). Nichols’ (2016) detailed account of her experience in her earlier narrative inquiry influenced how I approached the planning of my dissertation research. As I considered the ethical aspects most salient for this project, I looked to the adolescent participants. Student voice is critical to our understanding of how teacher-led pedagogies are experienced. Just as there are power differences between teacher and student, there are inherent power dynamics between researcher and participant. I attended to the adolescents—as students, participants, teens—in this inquiry with great care. I worked to research with the students, not research the students (Nichols, 2016). I aimed to suspend disbelief and listen without judgement (Clandinin, 2013) which allowed me to honor the students’ expertise on their lives (Nichols, 2016). Additionally, I constantly reflected on who I was in this inquiry, how my presence affected the field, and aimed to center the experiences of the participants. Research Justifications I considered research justifications for this inquiry on three levels: personal, practical, and philosophical. Through the preliminary narrative beginnings, I recognized that I am personally motivated to observe a teacher engage in conversations I wish I had had as a teacher and hope to have in the future. Acknowledging this urged me to proceed with caution as I considered the impact this research could have on participants. I hope to share this work with 88 others both in higher education and practicing PK–12 teachers to spark discussion and thought about the role of conversation in the classroom. My research interests lie in navigating classroom conversations and a drive to connect research to practice at a local level. I focused on classroom discussion because I view that aspect of practice as being an overlap of two frameworks that influence my work: anti-racist education and trauma-informed practices. I first learned about the latter in my final year as a high school chorus teacher during a professional development workshop. I immediately saw the potential music connections with a pedagogy that recognizes the impact of trauma exposure on students’ ability to learn. Through a number of courses throughout my doctoral studies, I learned about anti-racist education. I felt compelled to grapple with the ways I perpetuate systemic racism in education, and I aim to make changes, as anti-racism is action-oriented. The research possibilities for a dissertation in either framework are limitless; the challenge lies in narrowing a scope of inquiry to a manageable task for one study. As I considered potential topics that would investigate steps to make a music classroom more trauma-informed and anti-racist, focusing on classroom discussions seemed not only to lie at the intersection of both frameworks, but also is observable and specific enough for a single research study. Teachers who engage in either anti- racist education or trauma-informed pedagogy might prioritize relationships, community, and conversation in their practice. Therefore, in this project, I inquired into students’ and a teacher’s experiences with difficult conversations in the secondary chorus classroom. Participant Selection I recruited the teacher participant using purposeful sampling so as to “best inform the researcher about the research problem under examination” (Creswell & Poth, 2018, p. 148). Because I was interested in observing difficult conversations, I sought to collaborate with a high 89 school chorus teacher who was dedicated to engaging students in potentially contentious topics. I limited my search to a school district within a 45-minute driving radius of my house to facilitate frequent observations. Once I obtained IRB approval through my institution, I reached out to a potential teacher participant. I had a long-standing professional relationship with this teacher, including a recent collaboration on a workshop focused on equity. He enthusiastically agreed to participate (Appendix A). We discussed his teaching schedule and the specifics of each ensemble he worked with, and collaboratively decided that Chamber Choir would be the most appropriate group to observe. I received administrative approval from the building principal for the study (Appendix B). I invited Chamber Choir students to participate in two categories for this project: observation-only and interviewee. One week before the first observation, I Zoomed into the class to introduce myself and explain the research project. All students received assent and caregiver consent forms to take home (Appendices C and D). Students could assent to participate in the “observation-only” group, which meant they gave me permission to write about them in my observations. This assent to be observed is beyond what IRB required of me. Because my research did not change the regular educational experience or instructional material for the students, I had permission from IRB to observe all students. But given my commitment to ethically engaging in educational research, I sought explicit student assent and caregiver consent from the entire class. I received assent and consent forms from 13 of the 18 students in the class agreeing to participate in the observation portion of the study. This discrepancy meant that the contributions and actions of five students are not included in this project, though I acknowledge that the assenting participants were undoubtedly affected by their presence in class. 90 Students could additionally express an interest in participating in a set of three interviews with me. I originally purposed interviewing four students. However, 12 of the 13 “observation- only” assenting students, with caregiver consent, also indicated an interest in being interviewed. Given my commitment to honoring student voice, I developed a mini-interview protocol that I used with all 12 students, which I submitted to IRB. I felt a responsibility to listen to adolescents if they were willing to talk. After the mini-interviews, I sent a Google Form to all 12 students asking them to rate their interest in participating in the full interviews on a scale from 1=no thanks to 4=yes please. I invited the eight students who indicated a 3 or a 4 to participate further, but at different levels of involvement which I outline below. Every student has a story worth telling. In keeping with the methodology of narrative inquiry, I selected two students to feature whose stories might challenge music educators’ philosophies and praxis. Additionally, I invited four of the eight interested students to participate in the full complement of interviews with the understanding that I would likely not focus on their stories in this dissertation. Two students selected this option, and I was honored to speak at length with them. The remaining two students who indicated a 3 or 4 were two seniors who participated in both band and chorus for the duration of their secondary education. We spoke briefly about their time in the music program, but, ultimately, we decided not to pursue further interviews. All of these interviews were in addition to the mini-interviews. Confidentiality Participants’ confidentiality will remain secure by the use of pseudonyms and generic geographic descriptors to mask the identity of the specific research project location. I asked participants what aspects of their identity they felt comfortable including in this final research text. Additionally, I shared the participant description I wrote with the described individuals and 91 invited them to edit. I collected the data and stored it on a password-protected computer, a locked personal office, and a password-protected external hard drive. The identity of the two student participants remained confidential from their classroom peers and these researcher-student interviews took place outside of class time. In this section, I outlined how I prepared to enter the field. Through narrative beginnings, I outlined a research question. I considered the ethical implications of conducting educational research, especially with adolescents. I detailed the participant selection process and explained how I attended to confidentiality concerns. Next, I will explain the data collection procedures. Listening and Living Alongside This project is epistemologically grounded in experience. I studied the lives of students and teacher. I listened to, learned from, and observed the participants’ experiences as members of their school choral ensemble. I honored the lived experiences of adolescents and teacher and inquired into how they construct their narratives. In this section, I outline the details of the observation. Additionally, I present the various conversations I had with participants. Journeying together alongside each other in relational inquiry held the potential to change all of us: student participants, teacher participant, researcher, and reader. Observations I observed Chamber Choir rehearsals for three months, between February 10–May 13, 2022. My observations began right after their winter concert and concluded after their May concert. In an effort to become a “part of the natural setting” (Pellegrini et al., 2012, p. 116), I attended every rehearsal that occurred Tuesday through Friday; I was unavailable for observations on Mondays. Therefore, I attended two rehearsals per week, each 80 minutes long. I followed an observation protocol for every class meeting (see Appendix E). Immediately after 92 each observation, I wrote extensive fieldnotes (Emerson et al., 2011). In the final weeks leading up to the concert, I videotaped the two Monday rehearsals that I did not attend. I took notes on these two videotaped rehearsals using the same observation protocol. Lastly, I observed the May concert performance and took notes. I aimed to live alongside participants. To this end, I sang with the ensemble. I warmed up with them and rehearsed repertoire. Because of the voice parts of the interviewees and because of my own range, I primarily sang with the soprano and alto sections. I observed from various locations in the chorus room to capture different vantage points. I engaged in small talk with students at the beginning and end of class. Whenever class discussions took place, I stepped to the back of the room. Whether the discussion was merely daily announcements or a more substantial talk, I removed myself so as to be exclusively an observer in those moments. I recognized the possibility that no difficult conversations would arise during data collection. In order to mitigate this risk, I chose to observe in one class for a long period of time, rather than following the teacher’s entire school day for a shorter period of time. Additionally, I recruited a teacher who claimed to engage their students in meaningful and potentially difficult conversations. While the exact content of such conversations could not be known in advance, I envisioned several potential subjects that could elicit discomfort: the role of the national anthem, audition procedures for honors festivals, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on music education, and the cultural or historical context of a selected choral piece. Interviews I aimed to live alongside the participants as they lived and told their stories. To that end, in addition to observing in the chorus classroom, I engaged in conversations with the teacher and students. Through conversation and observation, I inquired into the secondary research questions 93 of this project, including the role of discussions, the creation of classroom environment, and how students respond to conversations. In this section, I first outline the interviews with the teacher, including formal interviews and multiple debriefs. Next, I explain the interviews that took place with students, starting with the mini-interviews with 12 students and the extended formal interviews with the two featured students. Lastly, I present the Walkthrough protocol that served as the third formal interview that I conducted with the teacher participant and the two featured students. Throughout the research process, I attended to the metaphorical three-dimensional space of temporality, sociality, and place, noting how all three commonplaces impacted participants (Clandinin, 2013). Through interviews, participants had the opportunity to share their past, present, and future as it relates to the inquiry. Especially with the teacher participant, I relied on my own knowledge of schools, choral music education, and teaching in Maine to guide the conversation. After every interview, I wrote immediate reflections in my researcher journal. As I worked on the transcripts, I identified tensions that I wanted to explore later. Throughout the interview and transcription process, I worked within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space to notice how temporality, sociality, and place influenced stories. Teacher Interviews The teacher participant and I had a series of formal interviews as well as regular debriefs after observations. Narrative inquiries are, by design, emergent. To that end, for the formal interviews (see Appendix F) I was guided by Seidman’s (2019) three-interview series format while also allowing for flexibility to follow the conversation. The first interview was a focused life history, and it took place before I began observations. The second interview captured the details of the lived experience and took place the week of my first observation. Seidman’s (2019) 94 protocol intentionally leaves the third interview open ended so that participants can reflect on the meaning of their experiences. I detail the third interview, which I call a Walkthrough, in a section below. In addition to the formal interviews, I met approximately once every other week via Zoom or in person with the teacher to debrief the week’s classes. Table 1 lists the date and type of conversation with the teacher for this inquiry. The in-person interviews were audio- recorded, and the zoom interviews were video-recorded. I transcribed them and sent the transcripts to the participants for member checks. Table 1–Teacher interviews Date Interview 1/28/22 Interview #1 2/17/22 Interview #2 3/3/22 Debrief 3/9/22 Debrief 3/18/22 Debrief 3/25/22 Debrief 3/30/22 Debrief 4/7/22 Debrief 4/29/22 Debrief 5/13/22 Debrief 5/13/22 Walkthrough Student Interviews I engaged in a variety of conversations with students throughout this inquiry. As explained in the participant selection section above, I had planned to conduct formal interviews with four students. However, when so many students expressed an interest, I felt compelled to include all of their voices in this inquiry. I designed a mini-interview protocol (see Appendix G) based on the originally designed interview protocol. These mini-interviews took place in person at the start of the second month of observations and lasted between 10–25 minutes each. I made an audio recording on my phone. I transcribed the conversation, which I shared with each 95 participant. They were invited to edit as much or as little as they would like. For some students, I used the comment feature on the document to ask clarifying questions. During the mini-interviews, several students identified a particular social studies teacher as leading exceptional classroom discussions. In an effort to follow an emerging theme of teachers and students experiencing education differently, I reached out to him to request an interview. After I explained the project and the context for the interview, he agreed to participate. We conducted one in-person interview which was recorded, transcribed, and sent for him to member check. Although his story does not appear in this inquiry, I appreciate his time and his thoughts certainly added to my understanding of the student-teacher dynamic in classroom conversations. After the mini-interviews, I invited two students to participate in the longer set of three interviews (see Participant Selection for a description of that decision making process). I refer to these two students as featured students, as their stories are featured throughout this dissertation. Just as with the teacher interviews, I utilized Seidman’s (2019) three-interview series protocol for the conversations with the featured students (see Appendix H). The first interview was a focused life history, and the second interview captured the details of the lived experience. One featured student preferred meeting over Zoom and the other in person. I recorded and transcribed every interview. I sent the transcripts to the students and invited them to make any edits or changes they would like. I asked some clarifying questions using the comment function on the document; some of these questions went unanswered while others evolved into robust further conversation. 96 Walkthrough The final interview in the three-interview series (Seidman, 2019) is designed reflect on the meaning of the experience. To capture the narrative dimension of place, I designed a protocol for a Walkthrough (see Appendix I) in which the teacher participant and the two featured student participants took me on a guided tour of the school. Wargo (2018) investigated how one queer youth experienced injustice by asking her to create a sonic cartography of her school. Wargo sought to move away from adolescent research that “compos[ed] inequity from print-based and more visual ways of seeing and knowing” (p. 15) and “relocate it in the lived and felt dynamics of sonic composition” (p. 16). Inspired by how Wargo’s participants mapped their narrative through sound throughout a school building, I asked the teacher and two featured students to tell me their story of belonging based on place. Each Walkthrough started outside the building where the participant entered the school each morning. They walked me through their daily schedule. As Clandinin (2013) articulated, “when we situate our inquiries primarily in the living of stories, we go where participants take us…In living alongside participants, we enter places that are important to participants” (p. 45). At each stop, I asked them to describe to me what they saw and how they felt. Through this process, I aimed to explore the emerging theme of physical (dis)comfort and feelings of connectedness in school. Other Artifacts I collected public documents to provide rich context for the inquiry. I searched for school district policies on contentious issues in class and any commitment to diversity-equity-inclusion measures. I sought the district level and building level mission statements. I worked with the teacher participant to gather relevant music-specific artifacts. These included: district and state music standards, the chorus handbook, lesson plans on prepared difficult conversations, and/or 97 repertoire. The two featured students also shared artwork of theirs to provide further insight into their stories. In this section, I detailed the observation and interview processes of living alongside teacher and students. I aimed to capture their experiences in this moment in time, though I could not fully know their realities. However, by spending significant time in the field, centering the voices of the participants, gathering data from a variety of sources, and providing participants the opportunity to co-construct narratives, I hoped to restory how they experienced difficult conversations in the chorus classroom. From Field to Research Texts As I moved from the field to research texts, I was reminded that “there is no linear unfolding of data gathering to data analysis to publishing research findings” within this methodology (Clandinin, 2013, p. 49). Throughout the observation timeline, I lived within the fieldnotes and transcripts to “inquire into resonant threads or patterns” (p. 132) that I could discern as I made sense of the participants’ experiences. I pulled on the narrative threads through constant journaling, making notes on transcripts, and asking clarifying questions via the comment function on the transcript documents I shared with participants. This interpretive work was underway throughout the inquiry as I lived with the participants in the field. After the observations concluded, I moved away from the “close intensive contact with participants” (p. 47) to begin work on making sense of their experiences and restorying their narrative. Affective coding processes guided the analysis of the data. Although Clandinin (2013) explained a more fluid approach to analysis, I benefited from the structure that coding provided. Affective coding methods attend to the “subjective qualities of human experience” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 124) which aligns with the narrative inquiry goal of holding experience as knowledge. 98 Specifically, I utilized both emotions coding and values coding. Emotions coding attaches labels to participants’ feelings. Values coding integrates a participant’s: values–the importance a person attributes to themselves, another person, thing, or idea; attitudes–the way one thinks or feels; and beliefs–a system that includes values and attitudes, plus “personal knowledge, experiences, opinions, prejudices, morals, and other interpretive perceptions of the social world” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 132). I gathered related codes into categories and looked for themes across the data. I kept the data from the students’ interviews separate from the teacher interviews. After I coded all of the data, I met with the teacher participant to present him with the findings. We had a robust conversation about various emergent themes. He challenged my interpretation in a few categories and provided insight into several more. Our collaborative efforts helped me “to stay awake to the multiple ways to tell and live experiences” (p. 46). We discussed tensions between the student and teacher findings, and we explored possible implications for the field. This narrative inquiry captured a moment in the lives of students and teacher in a chorus classroom. The narrative presented is the product of the relational space between myself and the participants. I documented participants’ stories lived through observation, told through interviews, and relived and retold through collaborative writing. Summary In this chapter, I presented the methodology of this inquiry. I began with an overview of narrative inquiry within music education. Then I explored Clandinin’s (2013) conceptualization of the methodology. In order to learn more about the specific aspects of narrative inquiry I used in my study, I examined extant music education scholarship and synthesized how researchers approached various aspects of the methodology. Next, I presented the scope of my study in three 99 parts: design elements before I began the inquiry, how I entered the field, and how I turned data into research texts. 100 CHAPTER 4: PLACES, PEOPLE, AND EVENTS In this chapter, I introduce the places, people, and events that play key roles in this inquiry. The theme of multiple perspectives emerged from the data—there are as many experiences of an event as there are people involved. Therefore, in this chapter I introduce places and people from multiple perspectives, making the “complexity of storied lives visible” to the reader (Clandinin, 2013, p. 50). For example, I write about Broadport High School11 from my outsider perspective, from the perspective of the teacher, and from the perspective of the students in order to highlight the multiplicity of experience. I introduce Nick Metta, the teacher participant, using his own words, the words of his students, and my own observations to capture how one person can be viewed multiple ways. I describe three key events that took place during the observation period which will all be referenced often in the subsequent chapters. The goal of multiple perspectives is not to pit them against each other, not to determine the one way that is most true, but rather to acknowledge and lean into the multi-dimensionality of places, people, and events. Introduction to Towns Broadport High School (BHS) is part of Regional School Unit 91, which serves the towns of Broadport, Pineville, and Deerston. Broadport is on the coast of Maine, while Pineville and Deerston are neighboring inland towns. At just under 9,000 residents, Broadport is the largest of the three towns. Pineville has about 1,500 residents, and students attend Pineville Elementary school for grades K–5 before joining Broadport Middle School. Deerston has approximately 4,000 residents. Students attend Deerston Community school for grades K–8. Deerston is the 11 All names and places are pseudonyms. 101 most rural of the three towns, and both students and teachers alluded to a noticeable division when students from Deerston join BHS for ninth grade. All three towns are majority white (all more than 90%12), which aligns with the Maine average. The poverty level is below 5% in all three towns. Travelling inland beyond the village center, Broadport blends into Pineville and Deerston as the dense shopping areas turn to farms, fields, and dirt roads with houses few and far between. Students in the BHS Chamber Choir shared their views of the three towns. Common descriptors included small, inviting, rural, and safe. They described Broadport as the fun town, the most iconic, and where one meets up with friends. Deerston is viewed as more conservative with family-run businesses and lots of trees. Students described Pineville as beautiful but in the middle of nowhere. A senior who attended Pineville Elementary commented on the shock of moving from her small, close-knit school to the large middle school, which she said added to her anxiety about school. A junior who attended Deerston Community School all the way until eighth grade rejected the stereotype of Deerston students being “rural hicks.” She loved the small community feel of her grade school, though she experienced a significant adjustment period at the beginning of ninth grade at BHS. When asked to describe the towns, students identify the trees, the community-feel, and the shopping. Broadport High School With an enrollment of 600 students, Broadport High School is small compared to neighboring high schools, but larger than the median Maine public high school student 12 I am not citing sources for these demographic statistics to maintain anonymity for the town and the participants in the study. 102 population of approximately 400. The student body of RSU 91 is predominantly white (91%); approximately 5% of the students are Asian and less than 1% each of Black, Hispanic, and Native American. Approximately 16% of students at BHS qualify for free and reduced lunch. The school profile celebrates the accomplishments of BHS students on standardized tests while also embracing a holistic approach to teaching and learning. Broadport High School, along with other schools in Maine, are seeing an influx of refugees and asylum seekers. Towns are struggling to find adequate housing, and schools have limited resources to support the New Mainers, a term I heard more often toward the end of my time observing at BHS. Students describe BHS as a tight-knit community filled with school spirit and supportive of the arts. There are many clubs and opportunities to be involved in the school. Chamber Choir singers noted the lack of racial and ethnic diversity, and one student suggested I use the pseudonym “Privilege Central” in this inquiry. Students acknowledged the existence of cliques but said for the most part people get along. By and large, students felt positively about their towns and school. Before beginning this inquiry, my knowledge of Broadport was limited to the downtown shopping. My drive to Broadport High School started on the familiar route to the stores, but making one left turn before the cluster of shops took me down a short street that ended at the high school campus. A police car was parked every day in the small drop-off circle outside the main entrance to the building. Tennis courts and athletic fields were nestled between parking lots and the highway, which provided a constant white noise that none of the students registered until I asked if they noticed the din of cars driving 70mph. Seniors and staff parked near the school, but sophomore and junior drivers used the lots behind the shopping center and then walked along a small path to the school. While the entrance to the newly renovated performing arts center 103 included a grand two-story lobby with a rotating display of student artwork, traffic into the building during school hours was funneled in a set of front doors by the main office. Every observation day began by ringing the doorbell to get buzzed into the office, signing the visitor log, and clipping my visitor badge to my shirt. The walk from the main office to the chorus room took me through wide, brightly lit hallways with art on the walls. The chorus classroom felt bright, new, and conducive to learning. There were banks of fluorescent lights in a grid in the tall ceiling. Sound absorption panels were attached high on the walls of the oddly-shaped room, which had one straight wall that abutted the auditorium and one curved wall to create the exterior of the building. The grand piano and auditorium staging were stored along the back walls. Seven tall windows flooded the room with natural light on sunny days. Evidence of past teachers existed on the dust-collecting bookshelves filled with sight reading madrigals and stacks of theory workbooks. Posters advertised the school wide standards as well as the district mission statement. Above the small whiteboard Nick used to write a daily agenda hung five neon orange pieces of paper advertising the classroom norms: “1. Music ✓ Pencil ✓ Water ✓ 2. Food Gum Drinks. 3. Encourage each other. 4. Embrace healthy risks. 5. Respect the voices and lived experiences you encounter in this space” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Nick Metta Nick Metta is the Broadport High School chorus teacher. I entered this inquiry alongside him, acknowledging our preexisting friendship and professional relationship. I knew him before, and I will continue to know him after. Nick is a mixed-race, life-long Mainer in his mid-30s. At the start of the school year, he and his husband welcomed a beautiful baby girl into their family. This is Nick’s third year at BHS and his 12th year teaching. He teaches Chamber Choir, Concert 104 Choir, and Beginner Piano Class at the high school, and he travels to the nearby middle school to teach chorus and general music. Journey to Music Teaching During the first interview for this inquiry, I asked Nick to share his journey through PK– 12 music and how that shaped his decision to become a music teacher. His story is one of a small-town kid who loved music and took advantage of every opportunity presented to him. I grew up in a really rural part of northern Maine. I attended a really, really small school; I was one of 23 kids in my class. I was always eager to be involved in music ensembles. We didn't have a lot of course offerings. It was actually just band for a long time. It was a dwindling program. But I was excited to be a part of it starting in, I guess, third grade. I would go to the high school basketball games, not to watch what was happening on the floor, but to watch the pep band and think I couldn't wait to be a part of that. So I joined fourth- or fifth-grade beginner band as a flute player. And that was my musical identity for a huge chunk of my schooling. I played all through high school and eventually into college. We had gotten a new music teacher my freshman year of high school who just was rejuvenating for the program, for the students in our school and for our community in so many ways. And one of the things that she did to really breathe life into the music program was to start a chorus, which eventually blossomed into a couple of choirs. It was a new opportunity for our school that hadn't existed before. (Interview, 1/28/22) Nick was hesitant at first to join the chorus, fearing that “somebody would hear me!” While he enjoyed singing, it was at that point only in the privacy of his own home. Nick remembers the moment when he caught “the bug” and knew that music was a lifelong passion. 105 He carries that feeling of discovery into his teaching and hopes that he can provide those opportunities for his students. Fast forward to junior year of high school: like I said, my teacher started a chorus. I had a lot of friends who were in it and I happened to be in a study hall and peer pressure can be a good thing, as we know, sometimes. And so they said, “Oh, you should come join chorus. You know you love the teacher, you've loved music, just come do it. What are you doing besides sitting in a study hall?” So I went and I thought, “Okay, I'll do it, but I'm going to sing very quietly. Nobody will hear me. And she just won’t even know.” I didn't get away with that for very long. [laughs] I was curious but hesitant… We were singing Battle Hymn of the Republic [laughs] and there was this little [solo] opportunity. And I don't know what possessed me. But I said, “sure, I'll audition for that.” And I did and I got it and sang it in the concert. And I just remember that was the first time I had this feeling of like, “Whoa, this is addictive.” People talk about sort of catching the bug and that's exactly how that moment felt for me. And I was like, “I can do this.” I became a sponge after that. I wanted to learn as much about music as I could, specifically about singing as I could. I wanted to take advantage of every opportunity that existed. I was a relatively sheltered kid in northern Maine who didn't have a very good sense of, like, how competitive music was in the rest of the world. [laughs] Or like how trained other people my age were in other places, even within the state of Maine. I just knew that I loved to sing. (Interview, 1/28/22) Nick’s music teacher recognized potential and asked him if he had considered becoming a music teacher. “And I just laughed and said, ‘no’ [said in a matter-of-fact manner] and went about my day.” Nick had his eyes set on the Ivy League, of “a high-paying job, a fancy office in 106 the city, and all of those kind of big material dreams.” After two years at Harvard, though, he “had an identity crisis and didn’t know where my professional life was going.” An ever-present voice in his head reminded him that “I love music and I love teaching.” He transferred to a state school in Maine and began his journey toward music education. Nick’s early experiences set him on a path to a fulfilling teaching career. The first nine years of his career he spent as a high school choir teacher in Maine. He then earned a master’s degree in policy and leadership. Following one year working for state government in education, he returned to the classroom at Broadport High School. He is passionate about helping students discover a love of music and offering students every possible tool to be independently successful outside of the music classroom. Nick’s Perception of the School Nick’s experience at Broadport High School has been largely positive. He lives in a neighboring town and was surprised to learn of the wide range of student socioeconomic status in RSU 91 when he began teaching there. Broadport is Nick’s geographical hub, and he acknowledged the feeling that Deerston was a “bubble” that existed on the periphery, the town’s rurality isolating it politically and geographically from the other two towns. In Nick’s job interview, the administration presented the district as supportive of the arts, and indeed, he has found that to be true. Parents are vocally supportive of the music department and are “the right amount of involved” (Interview, 1/28/22). He has felt little pressure to continue preexisting musical traditions, and therefore he views his position as a blank canvas with significant creative license to do what he feels is best for students. Nick values connecting with colleagues and building community with coworkers. In his previous district, he served as a club advisor and on leadership committees, and he had a regular 107 group of teachers with whom he ate lunch. At BHS, he previously served on the newly founded equity team but withdrew due to time constraints. Because he teaches at both the middle school and high school, he has struggled to feel truly integrated into either professional community. However, he does enjoy camaraderie with the band and theater teachers at BHS. Administration Tackling Difficult Conversations A few years ago, Broadport High School underwent an equity audit. Administration impressed Nick with its “willingness to look at specifically issues of equity in our district and tackle them head on” (Interview, 1/28/22). As a faculty, they discussed action steps, created an equity team, and incorporated equity into the district’s strategic plan. A schoolwide value is for students to be able to “have an honest but civil conversation about things that may not be so easy to talk about” (Interview, 1/28/22) which Nick fully embraces. While Nick feels supported by administration to engage in difficult conversations as a faculty, he senses that some of his colleagues do not share either a similar level of comfort that he does or his sense of urgency. BHS administration’s explicit support of difficult conversations is certainly noteworthy in the context of this inquiry. Their willingness to engage in critical conversations around equity, access and inclusion stands in stark contrast with the national “anti-CRT” movement. Misalignment of Values at Previous District Nick has personally experienced working in a district that did not support addressing contentious issues in the classroom. The political polarization of the 2016 presidential election created tension for many teachers, especially those who felt at odds with their school’s administration (Sondel et al., 2018). Nick recounted the instructions he and his colleagues received leading up to the election: 108 I remember the topic coming up at a faculty meeting and our principal said to us, “so elections are right around the corner. This is really contentious. Everybody has a lot of different views for a lot of different reasons. So essentially if it comes up in your classrooms, squash it and move on.” (Interview, 1/28/22) This approach is a direct contrast to BHS’s commitment to students having civil conversations in which there are differing opinions. “People, place, and stories are inextricably linked” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 41) and therefore, place plays in integral role in this inquiry. The misalignment of values that Nick felt in his previous district speaks to the possible influence of place on experiences. As a narrative inquirer, I attend to the place commonplace by noticing the ways that past and current institutions and geography impact the participants. Nick believes wholeheartedly in addressing issues that arise in his classroom. In response to his previous administration’s direction to ignore the topic of the presidential election, Nick explained: This doesn't fit at all into what I believe as a person, as a teacher, and what I'm trying to accomplish in my classroom. If we can’t help students learn how to talk about these things and hash this stuff out in school, where on earth are they ever going to learn to do it? (Interview, 1/28/22) Therefore, Nick’s teaching philosophy was in contrast with his employer’s. Working for a district whose philosophy is misaligned with one’s own can lead to an increased risk of burnout for teachers (Nápoles, 2021). Teachers are already at a breaking point from the upheaval during the pandemic compounded with the school mass shootings (Mervosh, 2022). Nick experiences significant stress at his current job from teaching in two buildings, having a new baby, and 109 teaching during a pandemic. If he were still teaching in an unsupportive district, the results of this inquiry might have been different. Multiple Roles of Nick Nick is multi-faceted. Well-respected among music educators across Maine, he has conducted numerous local honors festival choirs and has volunteered for professional organizations. He maintains an active performing schedule as a baritone soloist. He is at times charismatic and outgoing, while also pensive and an active listener. His expressive face is equally adept at conveying compassion and perfecting a Cardi B impression. I observed him trudge into school from the parking lot, carrying his two totes between the middle school and high school, looking utterly exhausted. Mere moments later, he transformed into a high-energy teacher, fully engaging the students in front of him. At the May concert, he embraced the role of emcee between solo acts, performing to a degree I had never witnessed. In our debrief after the concert, I asked him about the on-stage versus off-stage personas he holds: I don't know that I think about it too much. I think I just am myself onstage. I'm a different facet of myself and I'm really aware of that. I think as teachers and performers, there's definitely the sort of extroverted—at least for me—there's the extroverted part of my personality and the introverted part. I think the extroverted part comes out when I am standing in front of an audience, and I want to make them excited about what we're getting ready to share with them and make them feel like they're a part of all of it. And then there's the introverted part of me where when the show was done, I just want to run off stage and go hide my car and get McDonald's [laughs] and just eat it by myself and be quiet. And I think both of those parts are equally and authentically me. It's just the 110 context sort of determines when which part comes out. But I don't really think about it too hard. I just sort of am myself. (Interview, 5/13/22) Student View of Mr. Metta I asked Nick how his students would describe him as a teacher. After initially deflecting, he answered with honesty and humility: I hope they would say—aside from being crazy [laughs] and energetic—these are things I hope that they would say, and things that students have said to me about how they perceive me over the years that I think I've meant the most: That it's obvious that I love what I do, musically and just as a teacher, interacting with them every day. And that they feel like our classroom is a place where it's safe to be who they are. I think that was one of the greatest compliments that I received from multiple students over the years. Just, “I always feel like I can breathe a little easier when I'm in your class, I can be who I am. People can call me what I prefer to be called. And I just, I get to be myself.” Yeah, and I think those are the two things that I really hope that students would say about me as a teacher. Also, that I set the bar high. But they feel supported and like every one of them can get there and achieve it. (Interview, 1/28/22) When surveyed about their perspectives regarding an ideal music teacher, secondary students were more likely to rate personality traits and student-teacher relationships as more important than a teacher’s pedagogical and subject knowledge (Stavrou, 2020). This ranking aligns with how Nick hoped students perceive him: personality first and musical expectations second. Indeed, Mr. Metta has gained the Chamber Choir’s respect through his compassion, his high standards, and going above and beyond his job. The students describe Mr. Metta as relaxed, cool, chill, not strict yet structured. They feel they can tell him anything and that it is okay not to 111 know something in his class. Mr. Metta is open-minded, aware of the outside world, and he does not distance himself from his students. He demonstrates that he values students by including everyone’s ideas and using their exact words when writing on the white board. They notice that he checks in with them when they are having an off day. The students in Mr. Metta’s class value his leadership and the environment he has created in the classroom. Broadport High School Chamber Choir At Broadport High School, students have multiple elective music course options: Concert Choir, Honors Chamber Choir, Beginner and Intermediate Piano Class, Guitar Class, Music Theory, Concert Band. While all of these courses exist as regularly scheduled classes within the school day, chorus at the middle school takes place at the end of the day during a period that is often used for remediation. Nick and his band colleague are actively looking for ways to meet the needs of the high school students through expanding their course options, though are encountering scheduling challenges due to Nick’s split status between buildings. COVID-19 Pandemic Nick’s time at Broadport High School has aligned with the three school years affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. When schools went virtual in the spring of 2020, Chamber Choir met online and “did as much as we could” (Interview, 1/28/22). At the start of his second year (fall 2020), they were not allowed to sing indoors, and outdoor singing was only permitted with masking and 14 feet between students to avoid the spread of the coronavirus. Nick recognized that the common approach to choral music was not feasible, so the goal he set for that year was simple and not really musical at all. It was just: if I can make everybody feel like we have a sense of community that they want to be a part of and that they want to come back 112 to when all of this is over and when we can sing again, then my job will have been accomplished. (Interview, 1/28/22) Nick spoke often about the freedom he felt that year. Without the expectation of performance, he had time to explore other aspects of music making and relationship building with students. Students engaged in discussions about current events and explored independent musical interests. The fall of 2021 brought the return of ensemble singing for Chamber Choir. The mask mandate was in place from September until March, when masks became optional. The winter concert in February 2022 was the first in-person choral concert since December 2019. Jacquelyn, a senior who participated in band and chorus since elementary school, mourned the loss of music making during the pandemic, but she appreciated the virtual community building that happened through conversation when singing was not possible. It’s strange. I feel like we’ve only really started having discussions in class, like, over the past two years. And it’s partially because of the pandemic that we have been able to have that opportunity. But then, the group also feels partially broken because of the pandemic. (Interview, 3/24/22) Members of the Chamber Choir The 18 students in the Broadport High School Chamber Choir encompass a range of ages, musical experiences, and interests outside of choral music. Ten of the singers are seniors, while only one is a freshman. The seniors are leaders both musically and in discussion, and Nick anticipates the next few years to be building years after the seniors graduate. A majority of the singers live in Broadport. Two students who do not live in Broadport mentioned their towns as integral parts of their identity. Some members have been active participants in the BHS music department for years while others are new ensemble singers. There is a large contingent of 113 theater kids in the choir which was apparent when half the group wore the same t-shirt advertising that evening’s production of the competition one act play. Students are gymnasts, swimmers, and rowers. Chamber Choir is some students’ favorite class and other members consider dropping the course, yet they keep re-enrolling. The 18 students in Chamber Choir, while all unique individuals, worked together enthusiastically under the direction of Mr. Metta. See Table 2 for an introduction to the 12 students who participated in interviews. Table 2–Broadport High School Chamber Choir Members Self- Date of Student Self Pseudonym Grade Gender identified Mini- Town Descriptors Race Interview President of the Eva 11 F white 3/22/22 Broadport Chamber Choir Golf team. Used to Freeman 9 M white 3/22/22 Broadport attend a Catholic school in Florida George 10 M white 3/24/22 Broadport Theater Gibby 12 M white 3/24/22 Broadport Swim team Jacquelyn 12 F white 3/24/22 Broadport Actor Middle Jimin 10 F 3/16/22 Deerston Loves to sing. Eastern Hopes to get a PhD in Jordyn 11 F white 3/16/22 Broadport physics Lucy 12 F white 3/24/22 Broadport Dancer. Loves math Participates in theater Nicki 12 F white 3/22/22 Pineville and sports Regina 11 F white 3/18/22 Deerston Involved with theatre Nerdy art kid, ice Spring 10 F white 3/22/22 Broadport hockey player Teresa 12 F white 3/18/22 Broadport Lacrosse player. Featured Students There is no “typical” BHS Chamber Choir member just as there is no monolithic experience of high school. A goal of a narrative inquiry is to challenge a reader’s practice or thoughts by sharing stories of individual experience. To that end, interspersed with the 114 synthesized themes from 12 student interviews in Chapter 6, I highlight the experiences of two students, Jimin and Spring, with whom I held three additional interviews and exchanged several emails. Jimin and Spring’s stories at times align with each other or with their classmates, and at other times, I offer their experiences as examples of contrast. In my restorying of the two sophomores’ experiences, I stew in the messiness of identity and call upon the emergent theme from the students: we often see one another as two-dimensional until we get to know each other. What follows are the ways that Jimin and Spring described themselves, and then an adult compilation of how Nick knows them as students and how I observed them. One aspect of ethically engaging in narrative inquiry is to “realize that we, as teacher researchers, have already composed interpretations of each of the children” through observations and fieldnotes (Clandinin, 2013, p. 152). In an effort to be transparent about which thoughts are mine and which thoughts come from the students, I present the students’ voices separate from my own. Jimin Jimin is a 15-year-old sophomore. Her parents and five siblings moved to Deerston in 2017 after living in a variety of other Maine towns. Everyone in the family works at her father’s restaurant and store. As the youngest in her Middle Eastern family, she exasperatedly called her older siblings still living at home as “honestly, so sad and depressing” (Interview, 5/3/22). However, she and her siblings have a good relationship despite routinely stealing each other’s clothes. Jimin adores fashion, decorating her room with shopping bags from high-end stores. Even though Broadport offers several shopping options, Jimin bemoans the lack of appealing stores. Jimin is an avid BTS fan. Her self-selected pseudonym is an ode to one of the singers of the South Korean boy band. Jimin gushed when she described attending a BTS concert recently 115 in Las Vegas. “It was so fun! Oh my God. I just died, like, I just died there…All of the people there were fans so I actually felt like I belonged” (Interview, 5/3/22). While Jimin is quite social—she enjoys interacting with customers when she works at the cash register at her father’s store—she experiences limited feelings of connectedness to Broadport High School. Instead, she chooses to connect with people internationally via social media. She eagerly explained to me how TikTok and SnapChat work, holding her phone up to the computer screen while we Zoomed to show me a map with the locations of her friends lit up all around the world. She often connects with likeminded BTS fans on social media and vigilantly follows the band’s various social media platforms. There is limited racial and ethnic diversity at Broadport High School. Jimin wishes she could attend the high school in the town where her dad’s store is because that school has a much more diverse student body. Jimin has experienced bullying and racism, especially in middle school: “So I was on the bus. This kid was like, ‘You should go back to your country. You should go back to your country. I don’t want you bombing us. You should go back to your country’” (Interview, 5/3/22). She was teased for wearing traditional clothing and for the contents of her lunch packed from home. Jimin responded by “act[ing] as if I was a ghost and didn’t listen to them or hear them.” She explains that “words don’t hurt. I mean, unless you think about them.” Middle school was a rough period during which she described living two lives. While at school, she distanced herself from her home life, explaining “I wasn’t that girl that was from Iraq. I didn’t speak Arabic. Oh, I don’t know her. I don’t do that.” After spending all of ninth grade online, Jimin now participates in theater, chorus, visual art, and piano class at BHS. She joined Chamber Choir halfway through her sophomore year. Throughout the pandemic, she dedicated significant time to teaching herself how to play the 116 piano. She plays exclusively by ear. She struggles to follow the music notation in Chamber Choir and she excels at karaoke, a longtime family pastime. Art is a passion of hers, and she enjoys her visual art class at school as well as painting at home. During one of our Zoom interviews, I asked if she would like to share a piece of art that expresses who she is. “Oh my god, there’s too many” (Interview, 5/5/22) she exclaimed. She held up several pieces of art to the camera to show me her work and instructed me to choose which to include. I asked her to tell me about Figure 1, a paper and paint piece, and she responded “I don’t think it means anything. It’s just there because I was bored and I made it” (Interview, 5/5/22). Figure 2, which served as her lock screen for her phone, represents a soul. “It’s like gold. It’s a cracked person. Broken. The lines were supposed to be shatter, but I didn’t have the right materials to do it, but I did it anyways” (Interview, 5/5/22). Jimin expresses herself through singing and creating visual art. 117 Figure 1–Jimin's first piece of artwork 118 Figure 2–Jimin's second piece of artwork Adult Perspective In offering the adult perspective on both featured students, I lean into the multidimensionality of individuals. I do not intend to discredit the students’ perspectives nor their expertise in their lived experiences. More than two decades have passed since I was in high school, and through this inquiry, I came to know the multitude of ways that I have forgotten what it is like to be a teenager. I shared this observation with Spring, and she retorted, with a smirk, “lucky” (Researcher journal, 3/22/22). 119 Jimin is enrolled in both Chamber Choir and Beginner Piano with Nick. Within the individual context of piano class, Nick noticed how receptive Jimin is to feedback. While she would initially apologize before playing, she has grown more confident in her skills throughout the semester. She expresses a fear of asking a question or completing a task incorrectly, however, Nick has found that she eagerly tackles new skills and exhibits an innate love for music. As the newest member of Chamber Choir, Jimin’s unique perspective is a valuable addition to this inquiry. Jimin is a multi-layered teenager, exhibiting incredible strength and determination while simultaneously shrouded in self-doubt, seeking my confirmation repeatedly. She is vibrant and passionate in her like and dislike of various elements of her life. In our first interview, before I finished even the first question, she interrupted to ascertain if there were correct answers to what I was asking. While I assured her there were not, I cannot be confident that she believed me. She challenged my interview skills by asking several times for an example or a definition of a word I used. While speaking, she often narrates her way through losing track of commonly used words. After I turned the recorder off at the end of our first interview, Jimin exclaimed “I always want to say hi to you in the class, but I’m afraid I would mess up” (Researcher Journal, 3/16/22). This display of self-consciousness contrasts with a confident interaction with a favorite teacher I observed in the hallway at school. I reminded myself several times during our interactions that my role as inquirer is to listen openly and centralize her expertise in her life. Her role as student felt familiar to me as a former high school chorus teacher: she is a passionate singer who is hesitant to believe in her own abilities. However, I was caught off guard by her experiences outside the classroom, first that she was willing to share them with me, and second that they were so far outside my realm of 120 experience. In our discussions of her social media use, she joyfully shared that over a school vacation week, she spent 46 hours on a single social media app. She is a digital native, and I am a luddite in comparison. Additionally, as a white woman pushing 40, I cannot possibly know what racism feels like as a Middle Eastern teenager in Maine, therefore, I “have a responsibility to educate [myself] about experiences beyond the scope of [my] own [life]” (J. Hess, 2021c, p. 104). Jimin is an expert in her life. Spring Spring is a 16-year-old sophomore who lives in Broadport. Her parents are amicably divorced; she and her younger brother spend equal time in both households. She identifies herself as “incredibly white” and her family as “mixed-race…my grandfather, he’s not white” (Interview, 5/4/22). Spring describes herself as greatly involved in the school’s civil rights team and as a combination of “a nerdy art kid and an ice hockey player” (Interview, 3/22/22). She plays tenor saxophone in band and sings in Chamber Choir. While she enjoys creating art on her own, she expressed a complicated relationship with her school art classes currently. To add to the reader’s understanding of her multi-dimensionality, I invited Spring to share a piece of her art for this dissertation (Figure 3), about which she wrote: I choose this piece because it shows what I am really passionate about. It is also one of my stronger technical works. As an artist, it says that I care about the world around me, and the world that will be in the future. The piece comes alive in a way that shows some part of me. For some background about the work: one of the groups that climate change affects greatly is the animals of the oceans. Particularly the animals that have been around for so long, and who are as alive as the water is itself. In this work, I represented the wisdom and the ancientness of these animals as they have had a 121 relationship with the water for so long. The red lines symbolize the cut that is happening as we let our hands kill these animals and turn a blind eye to our own effect. They are also there to show what will be lost. The intricacies of the way these animals communicate with one another, and the ocean isn't something I don't think humans can ever understand. It is beyond our scope of understanding how the world works for our view right now. (Personal communication, 5/28/22) 122 Figure 3–Spring's artwork 123 School is important to Spring. She pushes herself to excel in her classes, and the opinions of her teachers matter to her. For junior year, she has enrolled in several Advanced Placement classes, noting that she puts the pressure on herself to do well. After high school, she hopes to continue her education at college in a field that combines environmental activism and a commitment to social justice. One of our interviews took place shortly after the draft supreme court opinion leaked putting the future of Roe vs. Wade in jeopardy.13 Referencing the fear that this also put gay marriage in peril, Spring exclaimed “I don’t feel as safe in America anymore. As I think about college, my list of states keeps getting smaller. I want to be able to date people and get an abortion if needed!” (Interview, 5/4/22). Spring lives a happily local life. The town library is one of her favorite places; she fondly notes that the librarians have watched her grow up. Her primary social interactions outside of school come through family get togethers with her neighbors. While she video chats with school friends and uses an online discussion board to stay connected to summer camp friends, she is not an avid social media user. Though that sometimes leads to her being in the dark about something at school with her friends, she is relatively happy without social media. “I know it’s a trap and you just spend a lot of time on there. And feel bad about yourself all the time, which I can do without social media. I’ve got that covered!” She exhibits a self-awareness in which she acknowledges her strengths and the areas in which she would like to improve. Spring spoke often about the lack of diversity in Broadport. She noted the large gap between the wealthy and the poor, explaining that “there’s a poor side to town that often gets 13 On May 2, 2022, Politico published an initial draft majority opinion that indicated the Supreme Court of the United States had voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. A right to an abortion would then fall to the states, overturning almost 50 years of precedent (Gerstein & Ward, 2022). 124 hidden” (Interview, 5/4/22). Spring is eager to help welcome the New Mainers to town, though she is frustrated by the town’s lack of action on issues of racial equity. “It feels like we like the idea of activism a lot. But not the uncomfortability and the dirty work” (Interview, 5/4/22). She and her mom often engage in discussions about racial equity; she cites those home conversations as how she came to recognize microaggressions that occur in school. She recognizes that some teachers are “doing the work” of embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, but she notes a lack of whole-school commitment that would be necessary for changing the culture at BHS. Adult Perspective Nick’s appreciation for Spring is evident. He spoke of the adjustment period that took place in their teacher-student relationship during his first year, as Spring had been quite close to the previous music teacher. Nick appreciates her unique outlook on the world. Her quiet, reserved nature is punctuated with articulate observations during classroom discussions. By Nick’s estimation, Spring has the respect of peers at all grade levels because of her ability to think outside-the-box. For our second interview, I waited for the bell on a school bench by the lost and found. Spring approached me and grabbed a jacket off the top of the pile of misplaced clothes. I looked at her curiously. “No one uses the lockers,” she offered as an explanation. “This is a much better place to keep my stuff. And hey, if it’s gone, then someone needed it more than me” (Researcher journal, 5/4/22). Spring is a delicate weave of being a free-spirit and being hyper-aware of the social order of high school. She was quick to point out the significant impact of the social groups in classes. Yet, she teased me with ease in our time together, even though I was a new adult to her. 125 Major Events There were three significant events that occurred during the inquiry that I will discuss often in the forthcoming chapters. Here I share what I observed during a classroom discussion on the Super Bowl Halftime Show, a debate over the ending mask mandates, and the final spring concert. I offer teacher and students’ perspectives in the findings chapters. Super Bowl Halftime Show Discussion Super Bowl LVI took place on February 13, 2022, in Los Angeles, and its halftime show featured Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar, and 50 Cent (Ganz, 2022). This marked the first halftime show that spotlighted hip-hop, despite the genre being a central element of American pop music for more than three decades (Robinson, 2022). The performance was a tension between “censorship and protest, the amplification of Black performers on this stage and the stifling of Black voices in the various stages of protest against the N.F.L.” (Caramanica, 2022, para. 7). The week following the Super Bowl fell between BHS’s winter choral concert and February vacation. Nick dedicated a majority of one class to discussing the halftime show. After about 15 minutes of announcements and sharing plans for the upcoming break, Nick shifted gears by acknowledging the pendulum shift of discussion and singing from last year to this. “Last year, we were a choir who couldn’t sing together” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). He acknowledged that was hard for the ensemble but pointed out the gift of time to dedicate to musical exploration and conversations that went deeper than simply song preference. After playing a three-minute clip of Dr. Dre’s portion of the halftime show, Nick asked the students what they saw. Immediately, students brought up the cultural significance of hip-hop and the intricate ways the performance paid homage to the history of the genre. A handful of students enthusiastically 126 offered their overwhelmingly positive thoughts on the performance, while others did not speak at first. In a lull, Nick deliberately and explicitly invited conflicting opinions at which point one student shared “I just don’t like rap.” Before launching into the planned discussion for the class, Nick reminded the students of their conversation norms (see Figure 4), which were developed previously by the students. Figure 4–Whiteboard at the end of the Super Bowl Halftime Show discussion On the whiteboard, Nick wrote a summary of various reactions to the performance shared on social media “The SuperBowl halftime show was terrible…too bad they didn’t showcase real music.” He let the students grumble for a moment, then challenged them to consider the inherent assumptions in such a statement. As the students spoke, Nick wrote a list on the board, capturing 127 the essence of their ideas. While he primarily wrote the phrasing the student spoke, I noticed that he wrote “unfamiliar=bad” when the student had actually said “foreign=bad.” He let students dictate the direction of the discussion, explicitly waiting for the majority-white group of students to bring up race. When a student said “rap doesn’t meet the white standard for music,” he replied “oo, I just got tingly!” Nick urged the student to elaborate on what “white standard of music” means to them. From the long list of inherent assumptions generated by students, Nick selected “the artist and the art are the same thing” to dive into further. He asked the class “to what extent should we separate artist and art?” Students had a thoughtful discussion about the relationship between popularity and power, and the implications for one’s personal behavior on the reception of their product. In the last branch of the discussion, Nick asked students to connect this to a novel situation outside of music. Students offered Amazon, the Ukraine/Russia conflict, and Joe Biden as examples. Nick summarized for the class at the end of the period: “What did we just do? We took a real-world example of inherent assumptions. Talk about them. Then applied it to a new situation. We’ll have time to do this again in written format next class” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Nick led the class in a discussion filled with student input about the Super Bowl halftime show in which he acknowledged the impact of social media and the influence of music on popular culture. By dedicating class time to such a topic, he signaled to students that he is aware of current events and discussing current events is a worthwhile use of time. Being able to recognize and critique implicit biases in statements could serve the students well in analyzing a variety of future discussion topics. 128 Mask Mandate Ending Debate Throughout the pandemic, health and safety protocols were constantly in flux and even in real time, it seemed hard to keep track of the current recommendations and requirements. Here, I provide a brief timeline to situate the conversation around masking that took place in class. On March 1, 2022, there was a small anti-mask protest outside Broadport High School. On March 2, the state announced that universal masking would become optional for schools in Maine (Stockford, 2022). With the decision left to local leaders, many school districts lifted the mask mandate, including RSU 91. Administration announced masks would be optional indoors starting one week later, on March 9. On March 3, Nick dedicated an entire Chamber Choir block to a structured debate around the mask mandate ending. Masking was a hot topic in the community, at the school board meetings, and among the students. As I walked into the building on March 1, a handful of high school students were exiting school to join the small protest of about 20 people holding signs that read “unmask our children,” “let them breath [sic]” and “our children our choice.” My pulse increased as the adults aggressively yelled at me “Take off your mask! Take off your mask! Join us! Take it off, sweetie!” (Fieldnotes, 3/1/22). Once inside the building, I saw students gathered by the large front office windows overlooking the sidewalk to watch the spectacle outside. They appeared to find the protest ridiculous and amusing, laughing at the missing “e” in “breathe” and exclaiming “I have college coming up; I’m not going to do something stupid!” Walking away from the office, however, the school day appeared to be continuing as usual. Nick did not mention the protest during class that day. On March 3, the Chamber Choir students engaged in a structured debate over the impending end to the school mask mandate. Nick situated the class activity by acknowledging 129 the turmoil of the past three school years and the profound impact that COVID has had on music making. With the upcoming shift in masking protocol, Nick stressed to the students that he wanted to hear their honest feedback on their feelings about safety and comfort in the classroom. He solicited individual feedback via email and Google Classroom, which provided students an avenue to share their thoughts exclusively with him, though neither option was anonymous. Nick transitioned to the full class activity by first defining stakeholder then asking students to identify the stakeholders in the decision about masking in schools. Looking at the list of 10 groups the students generated, Nick asked them to identify the three groups most impacted by the mask mandate ending. When the students could not agree on just three, Nick expanded the list to four. The students counted off by fours and Nick assigned them to be either administration, parents, teachers, or students. A majority of the seniors were on a class trip leaving only 11 students in class. He gave students 20 minutes to think about the issue from the perspective of their assigned stakeholder. As students discussed, Nick wandered around the room, periodically stopping to listen in on a conversation while sipping on a Dunkin’ coffee. The two students in the parent group called him over and exclaimed “We’ve run out of ideas!” After listening to their ideas so far, Nick prompted them to think deeper about the phrase “supposed to” and questioned who should be prioritized or listened to. He reminded them “there’s not a right or wrong answer. I want you to think about how you would approach this. Start there and see where it takes you.” (Fieldnotes, 3/3/22). After ten minutes, Nick asked all the students to pause briefly. He summarized what they had done so far: identified stakeholders in this discussion and brainstormed the questions and concerns their group may have. He then challenged them to “think like a lawyer: if someone is arguing against one of your points on your list, how would you rebut that argument?” The next 130 10 minutes, students adopted a specific identity within their stakeholder group and decided how their character felt about masks. Nick started the active debate portion of the class by outlining his role as a moderator. “My role is to stay out of the debate…I am not afraid of silence, and I can give you time to marinate in your thoughts” (Fieldnotes, 3/3/22). After each student introduced themselves as their adopted character, Nick opened the floor for discussion. Almost every student participated, actively engaging with their peers’ thoughts and ideas. Singers in both the administration and teacher stakeholder groups asked the student group for their thoughts on specific details, seeming to indicate a desire for their voices as students to be listened to more actively in the school community. Just as Nick was about to transition to a debate reflection, the drama teacher poked her head in the classroom and said “Class is over! Did you know we’re on alternate schedule today?” Students grabbed their belongings, still chatting about the multiple perspectives on mask mandates as the left for their next class. In this class period, Nick allowed student voice in the discussion to determine the stakeholder groups, time for students to brainstorm and collect their thoughts, and then facilitated a discussion. He guided students’ participation but did not have a preset intention on how the debate should end. May Concert Two concerts bookended the observation period for this inquiry. My first day in the classroom was immediately following Broadport High School’s February concert and my last observation was the class after the May concert. Nick described the February concert as a quiet, contemplative return to the stage. After the pandemic-induced pause on performance, singers in the winter concert reflected on the meaning of music in their lives through choral music, poetry, and recorded interviews. From the outset, Nick’s goal was for the May concert to contrast with 131 the quietude of February’s concert. The May event was Nick’s first in-person spring concert at BHS and his intended theme was “joy overboard” (Interview, 2/17/22). The two BHS choral ensembles performed three combined pieces they had prepared throughout the semester, and about a dozen soloists performed primarily Broadway showtunes. The music room buzzed with excited energy as members of both the Chamber Choir and Concert Choir gathered 45 minutes before the concert. Singers interpreted the concert attire instructions of black with a splash of color in a variety of ways. Uniformity existed only in the exuberance and individuality expressed in their outfits. A scratchy-voiced Mr. Metta struggled to get the attention of the singers to begin warmups, but he efficiently hit every spot check on his to-do list. In his pre-concert pep talk, he commended soloists for stepping outside their comfort zones, and he thanked seniors for their efforts over the past several years. Mr. Metta encouraged ensemble members to recollect everything they had worked on this year, and he asked them “What is one thing you’re going to commit to tonight onstage?” (Fieldnotes, 5/12/22). His effective motivational speech harnessed the energy of the adolescents before Mr. Metta sent the singers to their places for the start of the concert. The visual art department collaborated with the instrumental and choral teachers to put together the BHS Arts Night. The audience viewed student artwork displayed in the expansive BHS Performing Arts Center lobby before moving into the auditorium for the music portion of the evening. The high school band performed first for a modest yet enthusiastic crowd. A group of BHS teachers sat behind me, and I overheard them marveling at the multiple talents of the students they had in their classes now performing onstage. Mr. Metta effortlessly connected with the audience with jokes about his lack of ability to move his arms in his ill-fitting suit coat. 132 The choral portion of the evening started and ended with full choir pieces. The pianist vamped traveling music for the singers to move on and off stage, adding a musical theater vibe to the evening. When the singers were not performing, they were enthusiastically listening from the front row of the auditorium. They cheered on their peers and did not hesitate to join in on a final refrain when the soloist encouraged audience participation. The range of musical ability demonstrated by the soloists was met with equal applause and encouragement from the front row. Mr. Metta invited any chorus student to perform a solo, which allowed for students who normally would not successfully audition for a solo to be featured. The evening showcased the accomplishments of BHS students’ visual and musical artistry. Summary In this chapter, I introduced the places, people, and events that are part of the inquiry. By using multiple perspectives, I leaned into the narrative inquiry premise that one’s experience is one’s truth. There are multiple ways to know and to be, and no way is the right way. Regional School Unit 91 served the Maine towns of Broadport, Deerston, and Pineville. Broadport High School served a majority white student body with a low percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunch. Nick Metta was a mid-career chorus teacher in his third year at BHS. The BHS Chamber Choir served as the field site for this inquiry. I introduced Jimin and Spring as two featured students and in Chapter 6 I use their stories to expand upon themes from 12 student interviews. Finally, I introduced three major events from my perspective to set up discussion in following chapters. 133 CHAPTER 5: TEACHER’S EXPERIENCES In this chapter, I present a synthesis of findings about the teacher’s perspective. During this inquiry, Nick Metta and I had formal interviews and several post-observation debriefs, exchanged emails and text messages, and conducted a Walkthrough of the school. I used my fieldnotes from three months of observations to supplement the data for this chapter. Nick and I agreed that we share a similar worldview on teaching shaped by more than ten years of experience in the Maine secondary choral classroom. Clandinin (2013) called researchers to embrace the ways their voices are in the study: “We are not objective inquirers. We are relational inquirers, attentive to the intersubjective, relational, embedded spaces in which lives are lived out. We do not stand metaphorically outside the inquiry but are part of the phenomenon under study” (p. 24). When I presented my analysis of the data to Nick, we had a lengthy and robust discussion about the emergent themes from this inquiry. That conversation, as well as numerous short exchanges, shaped how I present these findings, as “stories are co-composed in the spaces between us as inquirers and participants” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 24). I felt comfortable adding my perspective to either support or provide a contrasting opinion to Nick’s perspective. The findings from the teacher experience are divided into four themes. I begin by introducing teaching practices followed by the impacts of stress. Nick suggested pairing these to highlight the dichotomy between ideal teacher practices and the reality of how stress impacts his teaching. I then discuss themes around community and classroom environment. The final theme is the ways Nick described classroom conversation in Chamber Choir. When I looked at the corpus data from this inquiry, I was struck by how little dealt directly with difficult conversation. The research question guiding this inquiry started from my desire to investigate how a teacher and his students experience difficult conversations in the chorus classroom. The teacher data led 134 me to conclude that in order for meaningful conversations to occur, a sense of community within the ensemble must be established first. A goal of narrative inquiry is “to create research texts that allow audiences to engage in resonant remembering as they lay their experiences alongside the inquiry experiences, to wonder alongside participants and researchers” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 51). Nick’s experiences with ideal teaching practices existing in tension with the stresses of present life may evoke readers’ reflections on how their ideals have been impacted throughout the pandemic. Nick’s careful attention to community and conversation could spark readers to “rethink and reimagine the ways in which they practice” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 51). Ideal: Teacher Practices This first theme of the teacher experience relates to the non-musical traits of being an educator. This was not an inquiry into rehearsal strategies, though as I discuss later in this chapter, Nick is a masterful choral pedagogue with consistently high standards. The literature on effective music teacher traits often separates personal, musical, and teaching skills (e.g., Teachout, 1997). In recent literature, personality characteristics are given less attention than musical competency or teacher skills (Stavrou, 2020). The focus of this inquiry is not what traits Nick exhibits that make him effective, but rather, more specifically, what he does that allows for students to have whole-group conversations in the classroom. What emerged through our many conversations and observations was a set of practices that was the foundation for everything he did in the classroom. Now, as he pointed out, this first theme is the ideal, and I deliberately pair it with the theme of stress to highlight the impact of stress on a teacher’s performance. I begin this section by articulating what I observed about Nick’s teaching personality. I then present the various elements that fuel his passion for teaching. Additionally, Nick is reflective and flexible in his practice. The final categories explore these characteristics: first, in how his philosophy of 135 music education has changed over his career; second, how he constantly reflects on his teaching practice; and third, his fluid approach to teaching. A teacher’s pedagogy is shaped by their cultural values and beliefs (Mateiro & Westvall, 2013) which in turn shapes students’ experiences in the classroom (Dwyer, 2015), therefore I present the teacher findings first before the students’ experiences. This also is in line with my research process: I entered the inquiry aware of my teacher lens and became increasingly aware of how that lens framed my ability to see the students’ experiences. Through the multiple categories presented, I explore the teacher practices that emerged from this inquiry. Observed Teacher Traits Nick Metta is an optimist grounded in realism. Not only did he exude an infectiously enthusiastic demeanor during class, but he also focused on the positive impact of remote learning before discussing the hardships brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Having a positive attitude is thought by some university professors to be one of the most important personality characteristics in an effective music teacher (Rohwer & Henry, 2004). In class, Nick regularly recognized the growth in students’ performance while still providing constructive, attainable feedback. After the May concert, he recognized that there will always be room for musical improvement and aspects he wished could have gone better in performance, but he chose to focus on the positive, “just letting that stuff go and appreciating the things that went well” (Interview, 5/13/22). Nick’s glass-half-full attitude applied to teaching during the pandemic as well. He felt fortunate for the opportunities that performance restrictions provided him, resulting in the time to explore other aspects of music making and thoroughly building relationships within the ensemble. Nick’s optimistic outlook on teaching and realistic student expectations are at the forefront of his practice. 136 Nick was gracious in his interactions with students and in our participant/researcher relationship. He routinely thanked me for asking a question when it prompted him to think of something about his practice in a new light. Even in his moments of behavior redirection with students, his affect was positive. Most days, he began class by inviting students “to shift [their] focus forward, tuck away technology” as a way to “ease into” the rehearsal process (Fieldnotes, 3/16/22). In the three months I spent observing, I never heard him raise his voice. I admit that teacher-me was at times frustrated with the level of student chatter during rehearsal. However, there were no significant behavior issues, or even minor issues aside from the din of teenage talking, that he had to contend with. The students in the BHS Chamber Choir likely had all of their basic needs met (Maslow, 1943), making it more possible to focus on learning. The lack of discipline issues could be place-based. Fuel for Teaching For Nick, teaching is more than a vocation; it is an integral part of his identity. His philosophy for teaching and his personality are intertwined in his professional self-concept. Nick feels called to be a music teacher. While he spent the first two years of college as a French major, he realized his passion for education and transferred to study music education. My journey to becoming a music teacher was not a very direct one. It took me a little while to come to the realization that music education was where I not only wanted to be, but where I felt like I needed to be. (Interview, 1/28/22) Nick’s journey to the profession solidified his decision to become a music teacher. Working with students fuels his passion for music teaching, and he feels compelled to provide them with ample opportunities. He is dedicated to and takes pride in “broaden[ing] students’ minds. That’s my job. That’s why I’m here. It’s what I’m passionate about” (Interview, 137 1/28/22). Through repertoire, discussions, and experiences, he hopes music can be a venue for students to expand their horizons. He is especially attuned to students who may be “slightly different” than the majority of their peers, as he remembers what it felt like growing up in his “very white town” (Interview, 1/28/22). Because of the limited scope of his own secondary music education, he is driven to teach students fundamental musical skills, such as music literacy and vocal technique. I want to make sure that my students love music and that they feel like they’re set up for success, and that they can continue to pursue music independently, be well-rounded music learners and people who are passionate and feel like they have the tools to keep doing it beyond their high school years. (Interview, 1/28/22) Some directors feel students need to master music fundamentals before teachers can expect them to be musically independent in a large ensemble (Weidner, 2020). Nick approached these goals simultaneously: he taught students music fundamentals while also expecting students to make independent musical decisions. Nick spoke with obvious joy and love for his work with singers, both in musical and non-musical avenues. For Nick, teaching and learning is a two-way street. Regarding education during the pandemic, he expressed to students multiple times “thank you for your patience. Thank you for your grace as we navigate this together” (Interview, 1/28/22). Just as he values community with colleagues, as discussed in Chapter 4, he feels sustained and “buoyed” (Interview, 1/28/22) by the community of students in his classroom. “It’s really been the students and my face-to-face time making music with them that has been a huge source of support through” the pandemic (Interview, 1/28/22). He demonstrated respect for students as whole beings, not merely singers in a choir. He took an active interest in their lives outside the chorus room and regularly checked in 138 with them during class. Nurturing community within the ensemble not only benefited students, as demonstrated in Chapter 6, but also helped sustain Nick’s love of teaching. A Shift in Philosophy Throughout his teaching career, Nick’s philosophy shifted from being music-centered to student-centered. As an undergraduate studying the necessary pedagogical skills to become a music teacher, Nick’s philosophy was focused on producing quality music. That continued into his early career because he wanted “to put the best possible product out there” (Interview, 1/28/22). Over time, though, as he worked with more students, he recognized the meaningful role music and membership in chorus can have in students’ lives. Nick has seen music be an avenue for students to cope and rejoice, to mourn and to celebrate. This, combined with his deep commitment to building community, encouraged him to continue to set a high bar for music excellence, but for a new reason. He watched students’ confidence grow when they strove for excellence. The students began realizing, as Nick explained, “I’m capable of achieving things that I didn’t necessarily think I could when I started this” (Interview, 1/28/22). The benefits to students for having teachers set high expectations for them and providing them the tools to succeed “go so far beyond making pretty music” (Interview, 1/28/22). Now, Nick is committed to letting students’ needs drive his pedagogy. The wide range of singing proficiency among the soloists at the May concert was a testament to his shifting from a music-focused to a student-focused philosophy. In our post-concert debrief, he reflected “you know, old me would have been like, ‘Nope, we’re only showcasing the best of the best’” (Interview, 5/13/22). However, in this May concert, he was pleased with his decision to forgo solo auditions when he saw what a unique opportunity it provided for students who did not usually step into the spotlight. Another way student need influences his practice includes his 139 willingness to “give up” rehearsal time for conversation if it became evident that students needed a space to talk about something. While he may try to relate an unplanned conversation back to the music lesson for the day, he would still view it as “time well-spent” if a connection was not possible. He aspired to provide students with a space to “air things out” (Interview, 5/13/22). In the two planned discussions I observed—the Super Bowl halftime show and the mask mandate ending debate—students practiced skills they could apply to both their music making and their lives beyond the choral classroom. Students identified implicit biases within a social media statement regarding a national issue, and they analyzed the viewpoints of local stakeholders to understand multiple perspectives on one issue. These are examples of classroom activities being meaningful to students. Additionally, I observed several choral techniques that actively engaged students, such as asking questions, encouraging student feedback, using kinesthetics while singing, and having students rehearse in varying standing formations. Nick believes strongly that the skills students learn in his ensembles must be relevant to their lives outside of school. “If what we do in these four walls only stays in these four walls, and we can’t transfer any of the skills we’re learning outside into the rest of the world, what are we doing?!” (Interview, 2/17/22). To that end, Nick wanted students to learn skills to become independent musicians both within the ensemble and outside of school. While this included an emphasis on notational literacy, Nick also applauded informal music making and encouraged students to transfer musical skills across genres. He hoped students recognized their own growth as they developed new independent skills to “add to their toolbox” and become “energized by the fact they’re able to [accomplish] that” on their own (Interview, 2/17/22). A mix of teacher- moderated instruction and student-led activities can lead to musical independence within the large ensemble (Weidner, 2015). Several times, Nick stated that the best day for a music teacher 140 is the day their students no longer need them. He hoped that students can work their way through a problem by utilizing the skills learned in class: You’re in the weeds. You need to be able to stop and say, “Ok, pause. What am I struggling with right now? What’s the skill that I’m struggling with? What are some tools I have in my toolbox to be able to address that skill and strengthen that skill? Or, what resources do I need to find to help me problem solve?” (Interview, 2/17/22) Not only was Nick committed to students learning independent musicianship skills, but he was also dedicated to providing students with opportunities to practice conversation skills. During one interview, Nick became impassioned about the prevalence of adults in government who cannot have a productive conversation on topics about which they disagree, which furthered his commitment to students learning this skill in school. “If we’re not teaching them to do this stuff in school and our classrooms, how on earth do we expect them to be able to do it when they leave?” (Interview, 1/28/22). One of Nick’s core beliefs was that the concepts and skills learned in class must be relevant to students beyond the classroom walls. Nick held high expectations for students, and he gave them the tools to be successful. In line with one way Parker (2016) noted choral teachers can create community, Nick buoyed high expectations with verbal encouragement. He recognized that success looks different for different students. For example, success for Jacquelyn, a senior heavily involved in the music program, meant acceptance into the All-State Chorus every year while success for one of the Concert Choir singers meant making it to the end of her solo at the concert without tears. He celebrated student success and acknowledged their hard work at the concert, during rehearsals, and one-on- one with students. Nick truly saw the individual student and set appropriately matched high expectations for all. 141 I observed a consistency in his high musical standards during my months in Chamber Choir. Through every warmup and during every step of the learning process, he insisted on healthy vocal technique and independent artistry from the singers. Even on the days when he appeared exhausted or distracted before class began, he held students accountable to the standard they had established. He regularly explained his thinking process to allow students to understand his decision making, a practice in transparency that was demonstrated at the end of the Super Bowl discussion, as well. He allowed space for students to experience a concept, then he explained the concept, and lastly asked them to apply it to a novel situation—a process that occurred in both musical settings and discussion-based classes. Nick gave Chamber Choir “explicit permission to be intelligent, independent artists, which they are, but that’s the expectation, that they come in and I don’t have to dig it out of them” (Interview, 2/17/22). Having the solid foundation of choral pedagogy imbedded in his practice made it possible for Nick to either operate on auto-pilot when he was under pressure or allowed him the bandwidth to attend to the non-musical goals he had for the ensemble. Whether he was operating under ideal or realistic conditions, Nick provided students the tools necessary to reach his high standards. Reflection and Flexibility Two of Nick’s strengths are his flexibility and his constant reflection. After I presented to Nick the findings from the data, I asked him if his level of reflection on his practice was at all influenced by his participation in this inquiry. He felt that the explicit manner and dedicated space to reflect was unique to his time with me. However, reflecting on his practice began in earnest in his student teaching experience and he carries that with him today. He recalled his cooperating teacher constantly asking him how things could improve. In every interview Nick and I had, he reflected on his teaching and was especially keen to point out weaknesses in his 142 practice. Two such examples, though I could offer many: Nick referred to his process for selecting repertoire as “kind of a mess” and his assessment practices are not “reflective of someone who’s been teaching for as long as I have” (Interview, 2/17/22). Nick’s propensity for reflection worked in tandem with the flexibility in his teaching. He was responsive to the needs of his students in both planned and unplanned situations. He described concerts as “always morphing as I go” as he adjusted the expectations for the final event based on “what can realistically happen” in the remaining rehearsal time (Interview, 5/13/22). The timing of the mask mandate conversation was another example of planned flexibility. He selected a class period that more than one third of the singers were absent, which perhaps could have precluded a productive rehearsal, and he chose a date when the topic was certainly on the minds of students in the community. These two examples demonstrated Nick’s ability to adapt lesson plans to accommodate the needs of students. Nick spoke throughout the inquiry about being open to unplanned conversations. He explained that he tried to honor and acknowledge “those teachable moments when they happen” (Interview, 2/17/22); he felt the students in Chamber Choir were likely to ask questions in the moment, which can create opportunities for meaningful unplanned discussions. However, he reflected that he could “probably plan more for that” because he tends to rely on “seiz[ing] those moments when they arise” (Interview, 3/18/22). While I observed a lengthy side conversation between Nick and two students about “the realness of performance anxiety” (Fieldnotes, 4/5/22) during solo auditions, there were no unplanned full-class conversations that fundamentally altered the rehearsal plan during the inquiry. He values his flexibility because it allows his teaching to grow. He is a lifelong learner who does not want to become stagnant in his practice. However, he acknowledged there is a 143 downside to “always wondering if there’s some way to do this better” (Interview, 2/17/22). He likes to “try things on the fly” (Interview, 2/17/22) which results in a lack of consistency year-to- year in his teaching. Through adaptive practices and constant reflection, Nick is striving to hone his craft based on the needs of the students in front of him. He is a success story for professional growth through personal reflection, one of Polk’s (2006) oft-cited top ten traits of effective teachers. Nick exhibited many desirable teacher traits that led to success in the classroom. He described teaching as an integral part of his identity, both personally and professionally. He is fueled by his work with students. Over his career, his philosophy has shifted from product- focused to student-centered. He is constantly reflecting on his practice and remains flexible in his teaching which allows him to adapt to the needs of the moment. These are fundamental aspects of Nick’s teacher persona, though Nick was adamant that this is how he operates in ideal situations. The reality of life has a significant impact in the classroom. Reality: Stress The COVID-19 pandemic upended education (St. George et al., 2021). The past three school years have been monumentally affected by remote learning, hybrid teaching, stressed teachers, not to mention the physical and mental costs of the actual health crisis caused by the coronavirus (Gewertz, 2021). However, the pandemic is not the only source of stress for teachers. I did not intend to inquire into the stressors or stress levels of music teachers, but it became an undeniably present theme in the data. Learning effective stress management techniques is the second highest-rated item ranked by university professors when considering most important teacher traits for a successful student teaching experience (Edelman, 2021). 144 Although Nick is well beyond his student teaching years, I observed highly effective teaching during a stressful period in his life, which suggests he has learned effective coping mechanisms. In this section, I review the pandemic-related stress Nick experienced then introduce the impact of new parenting on time management. Another source of stress was the return of concert season. I present the findings on how the pressures of performance affected Nick and his teaching. Lastly, I explore how Nick was stretched by teaching both at the middle school and the high school. Through these stress-related themes, I offer a contrast to the ideal of Nick’s teaching practice. The Pandemic Has Changed Us: “Have Grace” Through his reflective and flexible teaching practice, Nick recognized that what worked in his classroom before the pandemic would not work in COVID times. He characteristically took an optimistic look on the situation and used the singing restrictions as an opportunity to “really delve into things” and “have more of those conversations” about issues they normally would not discuss (Interview, 1/28/22). By recognizing the logistical and health barriers to his status quo of choral rehearsals, Nick adapted his practice to expand music education for his students. However, he also recognized the significant impact the pandemic was having on mental health for students and teachers alike. Everybody was “going through this pandemic together. The word grace has popped up so much…just remember, have grace” (Interview, 1/28/22). He felt his school was more cognizant of the “negative things happening because of the experience we’ve all just collectively shared in the last couple of years” (Interview, 4/7/22). Nationally, teachers are not doing well in 2022: more than 90% are experiencing feelings of burnout (Jotkoff, 2022) and with only 46% of teachers feeling valued, morale is low (Will, 2022). To 145 Nick, the world felt uncertain, but he sensed a greater awareness within Broadport High School of the impact of such uncertainty on daily lives. Teaching through the pandemic has exasperated an already-stressful profession, pushing some teachers to their limits. More than three-quarters of the music teachers surveyed in the U.S. reported some level of depression in the fall of 2020, and choir teachers, specifically, reported lower qualities of health than other teaching areas (Parkes et al., 2021). This finding can be contextualized within Nick’s experience in the 2020-2021 school year in which there were significant limitations on singing. Music teachers expressed frustration with changing modalities, adapting their teaching practices, and managing their expectations in an increasingly stressful situation (Knapp, 2022). Music teachers faced instability in their schedules and physical teaching space, changing curricular and grading expectations, and extended work hours (Kuebel & Haskett, 2022). Nick was in his first year at Broadport High School when the pandemic started, so he was navigating a new job along with pandemic teaching. “Good Enough is Good Enough” During this inquiry, Nick was navigating the third school year affected by the pandemic. Nick referred to the “flexibility fatigue” he experienced by the constant adaptations he had to make. “I’m so tired. Don’t ask me to be flexible anymore. Don’t ask me to be creative anymore. I don’t have the energy to do that” (Interview, 1/28/22). Nick sensed a resolution by the school to move past the pandemic. He felt a “strain of pretending like everything’s normal and getting back to normal pacing in school. But it’s not” (Interview, 4/7/22). This year, he felt stretched to his limit. I think the biggest adjustment for me professionally has been not feeling like I’m ever doing the best that I can do. And being okay with being good enough. Good enough is 146 good enough. And that is not normally how I feel comfortable operating. (Interview, 4/7/22) From Nick’s observations, morale in the high school was especially low for teachers, with many of them operating in survival mode. Teachers were trying to provide positive experiences for students, but the reality of teaching during the pandemic led to widespread feelings of physical and mental exhaustion. The manner in which he spoke with the students about the May concert contrasted with how he talked about it to me. In class, he commended students on their growth as independent musicians and as an ensemble over this school year. He shared that “the word joy keeps popping up” in much of the feedback he had received from audience members (Fieldnotes, 5/13/22). He was enthusiastic, supportive, and positive when speaking with students. In our conversation after the class, Nick exclaimed “I’m just really glad that a concert happened…I’m glad it’s done” (Interview, 5/13/22). This statement encapsulated his views on ideal versus the reality of teaching during a pandemic: good enough is good enough. Pressure of Performance When Nick explained the hectic nature of school with “it’s just that time of year” (Interview, 4/7/22), I knew what he was referring to. Being a high school choral teacher in the time between April vacation and the annual Maine All-State Music festival held in the middle of May typically means upcoming spring concert, graduation performances, awards nights, ensuring accepted students are ready for the honors festival, all the while battling with the schedule disruptions of AP testing, impending end-of-the-year finals, and an advanced case of 147 senioritis14 among many grade levels. The weather is often beautiful which can be tantalizingly distracting to a high school student—or teacher—stuck inside a building for an entire school day after slogging through the long Maine winter. What I described reflects my pre-pandemic “that time of year” experience. During this inquiry, Nick was navigating the expectations of normalcy and the return of public performances competing with the reality that COVID has not gone away; the pandemic is not over. The pressures of public performance impacted Nick’s teaching during this inquiry. While he enjoyed the performance-free 2020-2021 school year because of the time he could devote to new activities in Chamber Choir, he felt the familiar pressure of performance deadlines in the spring of 2022. Now that the ensemble was “back to singing,” he found it difficult to make space for classroom conversation while still “rehearsing at the pace” necessary to be prepared for the concert (Interview, 1/28/22). Working toward being concert-ready dominated the majority of the rehearsals that I observed. This took the shape of almost exclusive focus on the musical aspects of the pieces the ensemble was performing: notes, rhythms, artistry, expression, etc. While he had a vision and a timeline for the concert, the realities of the season led to a less strategic approach: “I just sort of cross my fingers and hope that it lines up [laughs]” (Interview, 4/7/22). He feared that the compounded timeline caused by the quick turn turnaround from the February concert to the May performance would make it impossible for students to be prepared. After the concert, Nick confessed “I was worried. I was stressed. My stomach was regularly in knots…especially the last two weeks” (Interview, 5/13/22). If he had more time, Nick would ideally have incorporated more student voice in the rehearsal process. “I try to be pretty 14 Senioritis is the decreased motivation toward academics during one’s final year of high school. 148 intentional about letting them into my head…I always love when it’s more our vision as opposed to just mine” (Interview, 4/7/22). Nick aspired to involve students in the process; he believed that students can “make musical decisions that matter,” but the pressures of performance outweighed fostering musical independence and collaboration, which is common for secondary ensemble directors (Shieh & Allsup, 2016, p. 30). I noticed a conflict in philosophical goals between setting students up for successful performances and valuing more than the performance aspect of an ensemble. Nick was committed to preparing students for a performance that they would be proud of afterward. Because of the tight timeline of the final concert of this year coming so close on the heels of the delayed winter concert, Nick was worried the students would not learn the music in time. This commitment to successful concerts—and I am leaning into his definition of success; something students would be proud of, not an arbitrary measure of musical achievement—co-opted any available time to dive into the literature in meaningful non-performance ways. For example, he expressed in January an enthusiasm for using repertoire as a jumping off point for learning about a diverse range of topics and for students to have the opportunity to connect individually to the songs in ways that might enhance their performance. Throughout my time observing, and confirmed through our conversations, Nick did not do this with the three pieces Chamber Choir performed for the May concert. The focus was exclusively on performance-oriented goals. New Parenthood Nick’s work-life balance changed when he welcomed a baby at the beginning of the school year. Prior to being a father, he commonly “devote[d] whatever time I needed to and energy I needed to to my job” (Interview, 4/7/22). He felt autonomy over his ability to improve his teaching because “it was within my control to make it better.” However, after becoming a 149 parent, he learned his limits and aimed to say “no” more often. He stepped back from committees and passed on professional opportunities. A national survey of educators conducted in early 2022 found that teachers worked an average of 54 hours per week (Najarro, 2022); Nick expressed a realism is the amount of time he had available to dedicate to his job outside of the school day. Now, his reaction to wishing a part of his praxis had gone better is “Sorry, this is what I can give. This is what I’m able to do right now. It’s gonna have to be good enough.” Split Between Two Buildings In addition to experiencing stress caused by the pandemic, performances, and new parenthood, Nick also felt pulled between two buildings. Most days, he traveled between Broadport Middle School and Broadport High School to teach classes in both locations. The schedule was such that on days when he had Chamber Choir, he arrived at the high school after the period had begun feeling “a little frazzled…flying into rehearsal with very little time to transition” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22). Because he was not in either building full time, Nick struggled to develop strong collegial connections with other teachers and did not feel like an integral part of either school community. Aware of the possibility of being geographically “stuck in my bubble” of the music wing, Nick made “it a point to venture out into other areas of the school just so that I don’t become that invisible guy that lives at the back part of the back corner of the building” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22). The schedules at each building reflected drastically different ideas of how music is valued within the school day. This discrepancy extended to the space as well. While the classrooms at both schools were shared between multiple teachers, the physical space “gives an impression of how much you value what happens inside of that space” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22). The music wing at BHS is “nice, clean, recently redone” and 150 “refreshing” to teach in while the middle school choir was relegated to rehearsing in a overheated, dimly lit classroom. The stress of teaching in two buildings was unsustainable for Nick due to the physical and pedagogical demands of his job. His daily schedule required “a lot of shuffling” as he “zoom[ed] between buildings…basically liv[ing] out of a tote bag” (Interview, 1/28/22). Because he shared teaching space in both buildings, he felt a lack of ownership in his classrooms. While consistent space could provide stability, he only felt “settled” at the high school because of the dedicated choral room. He struggled being his own feeder program because he did not feel equally adept at teaching both age groups. “I’m kind of caught in the middle of rejoicing at how things are currently going at the high school level and also trying to make sure that I can hold this middle school program together” (Interview, 1/28/22). It was a mental adjustment to adapt pedagogy to be age appropriate. Nick described his teaching at the middle school and the high school as “two different experiences and, really, two different jobs” (Interview, 4/7/22). Nick was committed to community in the classroom and believed that the physical space played a significant role in community’s creation. His years of choral singing and teaching has resulted in Nick feeling “at home” in just “about any choir room” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22) and he grew fond of his current teaching location at the high school. Ideally, students in Nick’s classroom felt like it was a “place where it’s safe to be who they are” (Interview, 1/28/22). It was imperative for there to be a shared sense of ownership and belonging; the space belonged to the students as well as to the teacher. The choir rehearsal room at the high school functioned also as a French classroom and an advisory meeting space, therefore there was a great deal of furniture shuffling that took place throughout the day. Nick shared that a space should have “soul” (Interview, 1/28/22) and he felt his current classroom was a contradiction of who he was as an 151 educator. The walls were mostly bare, and the classroom felt sterile in its sparse decorations. The rehearsal space provided the structure for productive rehearsal, but the building schedule and the shared space did not allow for Nick to personalize the classroom. Nick turned an erstwhile practice room into his personal office. Because of the shuffling between buildings, Nick carved out a small “feeling of consistency” by having a space to be his home base. “I feel the most grounded when I’m in this office” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22). To the right of his desk, thank you notes from students were suspended by teal and white polka ribbon craftily adhered to the gray wall. The notes served as motivation to get through the “crappy days,” reminding Nick that what he “does matters” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22). Two colorful pieces of art that he bought at Goodwill hung on the wall in front of his desk opposite a bulletin board of schedules and teacher reminders. A stack of choral music occupied one corner of the floor, and a slew of papers are strewn on his desk. Though he described it as “currently a disaster” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22), Nick’s office was homey and personalized, and, yes, a bit cluttered. Teacher stress is not a new phenomenon. The familiar pressures of performance, new parenthood, and traveling between two buildings were exacerbated by the stress of teaching during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nick adopted an attitude of “good enough is good enough” to make it through the school year. The realities of teaching under all these compounded stressors exist adjacent to and in tension with the ideals of his teacher practice. Community and Classroom Environment I entered this inquiry interested in the experiences within difficult conversations. What I spent much more time discussing with all participants was the sense of community within Chamber Choir and how that provides the foundation for any conversation, difficult or not. In this section, I synthesize Nick’s approach to community and the classroom environment. I 152 explore the ways that relationships act as the foundation of his practice and the way that investment builds community. I then explore how he creates a safe environment conducive to healthy risk-taking by being attuned to the social aspect of the classroom and using discussion norms. Community, Relationships, and Investment Community is the bedrock of Nick’s choral program. Nick fostered community in a manner similar to the choral teachers in Parker’s (2016) study: by cultivating a sense of belonging and tending to relationships with students. A sense of community among the students and with the students has supported the program through the pandemic and kept it afloat for the past several school years. Community is “the basis of the rest of the work that happens” (Interview, 2/17/22). Nick tends to the relationships he has with students, which he describes as being “the root of everything I do as a teacher” (Interview, 1/28/22). In his interactions with students, Nick exuded the quality of teacher care, which Cooper and Miness (2014) defined as “the teacher’s concern for students’ wellbeing, and… an orientation that teachers hold toward students and that they express through various actions and dispositions” (p. 276). Meaningful relationships take time to build. Every class began with announcements, which included a time for students to share news with their classmates. A handful of times, Nick instructed students to turn to a neighbor to share upcoming vacation plans or travel across the room to talk with someone new. He brought them out of such an activity with “Thank your partner for the conversation” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Nick recognized how rehearsing could be different than the “headspace of …doing this community building thing” (Interview, 2/17/22). Therefore, he consciously scattered community building activities throughout the rehearsal process. 153 Nick believed that one way to build a sense of community was through enhancing students’ investment in the ensemble. He strengthened investment through student voice, paying particular attention to the voices of the younger or quieter students in the ensemble. He provided opportunities for leadership through student-led warmups, a chorus officers program, and a newly established Tri-M Honors Society. Fostering investment also played a practical role in keeping students enrolled year after year. “I wanted them to walk away feeling invested in the program and like they had a role in building it” (Interview, 1/28/22). Safe Environment Nick aimed to establish a safe environment for students in his classroom. To Nick, safety meant a place where students can “be who they are” (Interview, 1/28/22), where they “belong” (Interview, 3/18/22), and where they feel “supported” (Interview, 4/7/22). He tended to those elements of safety by nurturing student-teacher relationships. He checked in with students one- on-one outside of structured rehearsal time as well as constantly checking in with the group during active music making. Nick’s absolute acceptance of students’ personality-filled concert attire was a testament to his commitment to making choir be a place where students could be themselves. From my seat as an observer, rehearsals under his direction were filled with laughter, camaraderie, and high-quality music making. I trouble the notion of “safety” in the classroom in Chapter 7. Risk-Taking By carefully tending to the environment in the classroom, Nick hoped that students would feel comfortable taking musical risks during rehearsals and especially during solo auditions (Parker, 2018). “Take healthy risks” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22) was one of Nick’s classroom norms and I saw evidence of this regularly in rehearsals. He adeptly harnessed the energy of the tenors 154 and basses in the room. “I tried to take advantage of the fact…that they’re so willing to just sing and do it and make a mistake. And if it totally is a wreck, they’re like ‘oh, well!’” (Interview, 4/7/22). By explicitly giving singers permission to make mistakes, perhaps he helped students feel emotionally safe (Shouldice, 2019). I saw teenage boys try almost everything their teacher asked of them seemingly without self-consciousness. Within the three full chorus pieces to be performed at the May concert, there were a number of opportunities for solos. At the beginning of the rehearsal during which auditions took place, Nick polled the students to find out who was interested. Students hesitantly raised their hands. I wrote during the observation, “Were students undecided whether they wanted to audition? Or were students nervous to let their peers know that they wanted to?” (Fieldnotes, 4/5/22). Nick coached all of the singers to be prepared for the audition selection. In the end, all but one boy auditioned for a solo, but only half of the girls tried out. The auditions happened in front of the class in an atmosphere I perceived to be supportive. Nick told the students, “I hope that it feels supportive in this environment. I’m always amazed at your voice in between solo auditions” (Fieldnotes, 4/5/22). I discuss the possible gendered aspects of risk taking and vulnerability in Chapter 7. Nick hoped students felt like they could take musical risks as well as non-musical risks. he wanted students to “be willing to take a risk in the conversation and to say the wrong thing” (Interview, 1/28/22). He knew the value of healthy risk-taking because he had seen students “carr[y] that confidence into other facets of their lives” (Interview, 1/28/22). Nick exhibited a pedagogical thoughtfulness that was responsive to the needs of individual students creating an environment in which risk-taking was possible (Blair, 2009). 155 Attunement In many ways, Nick felt like he had a finger on the pulse of the students. He was attuned to how they were feeling, how they were responding musically, and what was going on in their lives. He used this awareness of the individual students to differentiate his instruction to the ensemble. When navigating the transition to masks being optional, Nick provided space for students to engage with multiple perspectives on the issue through the class debate. He hoped that playing the role of a stakeholder would “make it feel a little safer for them to be a part of the conversation” (Interview, 3/3/22). He also provided a private avenue for students to share their personal thoughts with him exclusively. Within the context of rehearsals, even with masks on, students’ faces broadcasted their emotions. Nick watched for reactions during rehearsals, especially when an exciting musical moment just occurred. “It’s tangible, like it’s something that’s palpable in the room…even with masks on, their eyes get really big” (Interview, 2/17/22). He commended the Chamber Choir students for being ready to work right when class began, but noticed when Concert Choir singers were more affected by weather, events, and moods. He gauged the second ensemble to ascertain “what kind of a vibe is today going to be” (Walkthrough, 5/13/22) and adjusted his teaching accordingly. Nick was attuned to the social aspect of the classroom. Choir enrollment can reflect a wide variety of students at Broadport High School. Over his three years at BHS, Nick felt like some ensembles were comprised of students with mostly similar interests, and other years he saw more of a melting pot, “a hodgepodge [of students]…a motley crew of personalities, of experiences, of backgrounds” (Interview, 3/18/22). He was cognizant of the power dynamic between younger students and older students. Holding the mask mandate debate on a day when most of the seniors were gone provided the younger students an opportunity to have more time to 156 speak in class. Nick recognized that who was in the room could have a significant impact on students’ comfort level speaking. “They’re high school students, they’re teenagers, sometimes just answering a question, not even a contentious question…is a big deal for some of these students” (Interview, 1/28/22). By and large, Nick believed that students left interpersonal conflict at the door allowing them to focus on the rehearsal. In these ways, Nick tried to consider the impact of sociality on the student experience. Discussion Norms Nick carefully created a safe environment so that students could have conversation in the rehearsal space. He strove for his music room to be a place where tough conversations could happen. He believed that the use of norms could establish expectations that would go a long way in maintaining a safe environment. While I never observed him reference the permanent classroom norms attached to his wall, on the day of the Super Bowl discussion, he listed the discussion-specific norms (see Figure 4). Students co-created these norms at the beginning of the school year, and it appeared they were well-versed in using them during the discussion. Nick viewed norms as a “framework” that students can “grasp onto” and the norms helped create a safe environment and place where it was okay to take risks (Interview, 2/17/22). While Nick felt like Chamber Choir members, as a group, were “pretty forthcoming with their thoughts” (Interview, 3/3/22), he also recognized there were some quieter members of the ensemble. In light of his observation that some adolescents are hesitant to speak in class, Nick found that using discussion norms helped created a safe environment. Nick operated from a foundation of relationships and community within his practice. By tending to these, he worked to create a safe environment in which students could possibly feel 157 free to take risks. He was attuned to the social milieu of the students in his classroom. He utilized discussion norms as one concrete way to tend to the community within Chamber Choir. Conversation in Chamber Choir For this inquiry, I explicitly sought a teacher who believed that classroom conversation can enhance a secondary choral experience. Unsurprisingly, then, the theme of “music education naturally aligns with having tough conversations” emerged from the teacher data. Nick believed that tackling difficult topics was “just embedded in what we do” (Interview, 1/28/22). Programming diverse repertoire can expose students to music and cultures they would not otherwise encounter. Nick felt strongly that “to do justice” to the music and to serve the students’ educational needs, he had to have conversations about the repertoire. Such discussions can probe students to think in new ways about unfamiliar experiences; the goal is for students to start thinking about it, not to “settle on a concrete answer” (Interview, 1/28/22). One such example he provided was preparing a gospel selection for the February concert. He explained how he led students through the stylistic differences between spirituals and gospel, and then they explored the “experiences that led to the creation of those styles” (Interview, 1/28/22). “Identity is such a huge part of the music that we’re singing” which is why Nick feels compelled to program diverse repertoire and purposefully talk about the pieces during class. However, paired with this intention is his self-described tendency to wait for things to arise “organically” (Interview, 3/18/22) instead of purposefully planning for such conversations. This aligns with what I witnessed during observations. I was present for two planned conversations that were not directly related to the repertoire, and there were no significant unplanned conversations that were literature-based. 158 In our debrief after the mask mandate debate, I pressed Nick on why he would dedicate an entire class to a seemingly unrelated topic. He passionately expressed a desire to students to learn skills that are relevant beyond the four walls of his classroom so that they can be prepared to have civilized conversation now and in the future. I think a lot of it goes back to my personal philosophy of music education and just education in general. I have always believed, and I’ve always said explicitly to my students, if we can’t take what we’re doing in these four walls and translate it to life outside of these four walls and outside of this building, it’s a waste of time. What are we doing? What are we here for? We spend so many hours, days, years of our lives in school, in formal school settings, that if we can’t translate the skills, the concepts, the content, to our lives beyond these walls, beyond these institutions, and it’s not relevant. I have really strong philosophical issues with that, because I don’t think we would be doing a service to our students… Part of what… attracts me to the profession and to this job is feeling like I’m actually preparing students for the—not even to the next stage of their lives, but like just to be better in their life right now. To be able to go out and have civilized conversation and talk about things that are happening…outside of music in school and in their community. So no, [the mask debate] does not have to do strictly with music. And I think that is why it’s important to make the space. Because sure, I could spend every hour that we are in this room talking about notes, rhythms, and musical concepts. But I think that relevance piece would be missing. (Interview, 3/3/22) Nick believed that school should be relevant to students’ lives and responsive to current issues in the world. Nick was open to difficult conversations in the chorus classroom and he would welcome an active discourse on controversial public issues (Sondel et al., 2018). He consistently 159 attended to the sense of community that he felt was necessary for such conversations, and he carefully structured limited numbers of conversations throughout the semester. Role of the Facilitator In his role as facilitator, Nick attended to both the environment and the conversation in the classroom. He expressed a willingness to address tough topics, feeling like it was important for teenagers to have a space to talk about what was happening in the world. He demonstrated this on a national and local level with the discussions about the Super Bowl halftime show and the ending of the mask mandate at Broadport High School. As the teacher, Nick felt that simply acknowledging the potentially contentious topic can be the hardest step, but he believed in facing them “head on” (Interview, 1/28/22). The goal for Nick was the conversation, not a predetermined conclusion, not consensus, and sometimes not even concrete answers. He believed in transparency so that students could use their awareness of the discussion process to transfer skills to other settings, including their music making. Nick developed these facilitator skills primarily through his training to teach a critical thinking course, which was part of the International Baccalaureate program at his previous job. Whereas that course’s mission was to engage honors students in critical thinking skills, Nick regularly applied those techniques to Chamber Choir, a mixed-grade class. It was important to Nick to explicitly invite contrasting opinions from students. Within the Super Bowl conversation, after students exuberantly expressed their adoration for hip-hop, Nick asked if anyone felt like hip-hop “wasn’t their cup of tea” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Over the course of the year working with Chamber Choir, he noticed the students’ tendency to feel similarly with each other about topics. A challenge for him as the facilitator was moving students beyond their status quo of everyone agreeing, at least out loud. At the beginning of his time at 160 BHS, this caught him off guard. He expected to have to navigate differing opinions or heated arguments, but when confronted with mostly agreement amongst students, he changed tactics. Instead, he gave them “explicit permission to be honest” (Interview, 1/28/22) and invited students to “offer a contrasting opinion if anyone feels differently” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). He expressed comfort with silence to provide students time to process their thoughts or reflect on the conversation thus far. Nick utilized his honed facilitator skills in Chamber Choir discussions. Difficult Conversation Nick and I discussed two ways he defined difficult conversations. First, he explained one in which “there may be different viewpoints presented where some level of discomfort may arise in one or more people involved” (Interview, 1/28/22). Nick’s definition allowed for multiple viewpoints—more than two sides of an issue, potentially—and a recognition that what was uncomfortable for one person may not be uncomfortable for another. “Different realities” (Interview, 1/28/22) impact how people experience conversations. The second definition he offered was a conversation not difficult because of disagreement, but difficult because students were afraid to misspeak or offend (Interview, 1/28/22). In tackling potentially difficult topics, Nick wanted students to encounter discomfort, which he felt was not usually on the surface. His goal was for students to think about and question the topic at hand. To do this, Nick thought that students needed to feel comfortable taking risks which required a sense of community built on strong relationships. Conversations about Race Nick is uniquely positioned to engage in discussions about race, however, I never observed him talk about his mixed-race identity explicitly into the classroom. Rather, he spoke privately with me in our interviews about the perspective his upbringing gives him as a teacher. 161 He felt committed to engaging his students on race-related topics, but expressed that at times it felt “tricky…because of who I am and my identity…that I sometimes live on that line in between those [identities]” (Interview, 1/28/22). Part of what fuels his commitment to having conversations about race with his students is their hesitancy to engage; Nick perceived that they were worried they would “say too much or say the wrong thing” (Interview, 1/28/22). Nick acknowledged that, with his mostly white students, it was not part of their lived experiences to “know what it feels like to be looked at as a brown person in life” (Interview, 1/28/22). In their discussion around gospel music and spirituals, he explained how he asked students to “put themselves in someone else’s shoes” but that engagement seemed to remain surface level, lasting only as long as the class period. He recalled how at the end of class, “the bell rings” and students shrugged, expressing “that’s too bad” as they went about the rest of their day (Interview, 1/28/22). During the Super Bowl discussion, Nick waited for students to bring up race. He prompted the class to brainstorm possible implicit biases in the social media post lambasting the halftime show for not showcasing “real music.” As an observer, I felt the issue of race bubbling at the surface immediately, though I also recognized that is my anti-racist lens. Nick encouragingly engaged students in the brainstorm session, and when one student did mention race, he leaned in and asked for more. He did not shy away from race once students brought it up. He exuded a level of comfort talking about white standards of music with high school students I could only wish for the teaching profession at large. Takeaways for Students Nick expressed musical and non-musical takeaways he hoped students would glean from conversations in Chamber Choir. In discussions, he paused every so often to articulate the 162 processes and skills students were utilizing. Nick applied this “meta approach” to rehearsals as well (Interview, 2/17/22). Through discussion, Nick asked students to employ empathy, a practice he hoped students would do in rehearsal and performance as well. Regularly engaging in this practice can begin to “create a deep understanding of someone else’s reality” which can be expanded through repertoire (Interview, 1/28/22). Nick aimed for discussions to be a way for students to engage not only with new concepts but with classmates they might not otherwise talk to during regular rehearsals. Especially during the mask mandate discussion, I observed students thoughtfully pose questions to their peers and they continued the conversations after the bell ended. Nick hoped conversations would help foster relationships and community. Summary In this chapter, I paired Nick’s ideal teaching practices with the reality of teaching under stress. By examining his path to becoming a music teacher, his fuel for teaching, the shift in his philosophy of music education, and his constant reflexivity and flexibility, I explored the teaching practices that are the foundation of what Nick brings to the classroom. Next, I discussed the various stressors in his life, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the pressures of performance, new parenthood, and teaching between two buildings. As a result, he adopted a “good enough is good enough” attitude. I then presented the ways in which Nick carefully tended to the sense of community in his classrooms, specifically by investing in relationships with students and creating a safe environment during rehearsals. Lastly, I explored the role conversation has in Nick’s classroom, specifically difficult conversations around race. Nick is an experienced educator who cares deeply about providing students the tools they need to be successful, independent musicians. He is committed to teaching skills in music courses that are applicable beyond the classroom walls. 163 CHAPTER 6: STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES In this chapter, I synthesize interviews with 12 members of Broadport High School’s Chamber Choir as I sought to understand how students experience conversation in the chorus classroom. I provide examples by sharing stories from Jimin and Spring, two sophomores in the ensemble, with whom I held additional interviews. From all of these interviews, the following themes emerged: the environment in Chamber Choir, belonging versus fitting in, the role of peers in classroom conversation, how members feel about the conversations in Chamber Choir, and how those conversations impact the music making. My worldview as an adult is different than the student participants’ perspectives in this inquiry, though that is not to suggest that all teenagers are the same. Therefore, it is with great hesitancy that I integrate any fieldnotes from observations into this chapter. I recognize the teacher lens through with I observed the Chamber Choir rehearsals. Similarly, while I integrate new literature into this chapter, it is with a modicum of skepticism as I recognize the irony of using scholarship written by adults to support my efforts to center the adolescents’ voices. Part of being transparent about the journey of this dissertation is noting where I fell short. As I planned for this dissertation (detailed in Chapters 1 and 2), I did so with a decidedly adult mindset. Therefore, the scholarship on the adolescent perspective is scant up until now so it is necessary to add it here. In this chapter, I integrate scholarship and my fieldnotes in a way that I hope preserves the adolescents’ expertise on their lived experiences (Nichols, 2016). The Temporality of the Adolescent Experience Before I present the synthesis, I first further acknowledge how my role as the researcher influences what is to come. In doing so, I push back against the notion that narratives are “almost always regarded as having a degraded epistemic status; if the reality we seek to describe is 164 presumed to be independent of our representations of it, then there is no need to tell the story of how our representation of the world emerged” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 40). I am writing about the experiences of the students under inquiry, but in my selection of what I share and how I contextualize it, I am shaping how the reader encounters the students’ stories; my adult- perspective is unavoidable. The adolescents’ experiences are “more than we can know and represent in a single statement, paragraph, or book. Every representation, therefore, no matter how faithful to that which it tries to depict, involves selective emphasis” (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 39) by the author. I endeavor to be explicit and reflective about my selection process for the stories told. Two short vignettes with Jimin and Spring illuminate our generational differences. Broadport has several shopping options, however Jimin regards the population of stores with disdain. “There’s no Vans. There’s no Hollister. There’s no H&M. No, you can’t go shopping here. What… [major retailer]? Who wears clothes from there?!” (Interview, 5/3/22). With amusement, I surveyed my outfit in that interview. I could have been featured in a catalog for that exact major retailer, which she either did not notice or the fact did not stop her from labeling the store as undesirable. I similarly felt out of touch with the teenage participants when Spring exclaimed how obsessed she was with the Netflix show Heartstopper (Walters et al., 2022). “Oh my god!” She slammed the table with both hands, and even behind her mask I could see the adoration and enthusiasm in her face. “You have to see it!” (Interview, 5/4/22). I urged her to tell me about it. What I include in this Adolescent Experience section are not thorough investigations, but rather stories that sparked my listening ear to the ways that life is different for today’s teenager compared to adolescent life more than two decades ago, which is my perspective. I offer 165 thoughts on how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted home and school life, and I briefly explore how the teens interact with social media. I share their perspectives on the adults in their world and explore what they think about school. I end this section with various demonstrations of binary thinking that emerged throughout the interviews. These vignettes, when viewed as pieces of a whole, let the reader into the world of the adolescent participants. COVID-19 Pandemic The inquiry took place from February–May, 2022, during the third consecutive school year affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Singers spoke of the months spent in virtual classrooms, isolated in their bedrooms, relying on social media to keep in touch with friends. They longed for the high school milestones that were cancelled, like prom, concerts, and indoor graduation ceremonies. The 2021–2022 school year was primarily held in person, and the mask mandate was removed in March 2022, during the observation period of this study. Jimin and Spring’s experiences during the pandemic align in their reflections on personal growth but diverge in their response to so much time with their families. Jimin spent the entirety of the 2020–2021 school year online. While she thrived in the self-paced math courses, she longed to make music and therefore decided to teach herself how to play piano. With her dad’s restaurant shut at the beginning of the pandemic, all eight of them— Jimin, her parents, and her five siblings—were home all the time. “I don’t want to see anybody in the house. Quarantine sucked. I saw them every single day” (Interview, 5/3/22). Due to the sibling aggravation, Jimin spent most her time in her room on her phone. Jimin’s reflections on her friendships with peers were complicated. She painted a bleak picture of middle school, rife with bullying and racism. She lived two lives, trying to separate her home and school personas to avoid the harassment she faced at school. Jimin admitted she was lonely during the pandemic, 166 and yet she later expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be away from peers to focus on herself. I explore Jimin and Spring’s evolution and periods of self-growth later in this chapter, within the context of belonging versus fitting in. Spring struggled to delineate specific grades as she reflected on her pandemic school experience. The years blurred together, months of virtual and in-person schooling seemingly endless and lacking predictability. She tried hard in school, however, she ended up dropping both math classes during her freshman year, admitting there were “areas I just gave up and didn’t really care” (Interview, 5/4/22). This attitude contradicts her dedication to schooling that I explore later, which speaks to the pressures of pandemic learning. Spring did not “necessarily [have] a social life beforehand” (Interview, 5/4/22) when the pandemic began her eighth-grade year, so she felt that part of her life was unaffected. Her two households reacted to the threat of the coronavirus differently ranging in “free-flowing and doing everything” to extremely “cautious,” which made it difficult for Spring and her brother to travel between the two (Interview, 5/4/22). There were some overlaps in the ways that Spring and Jimin experienced the academic, familial, and social aspects of the pandemic and other points of diversion. Social Media One line of questioning I introduced during the set of 12 interviews with the BHS singers was asking if they felt comfortable voicing their opinions in school. Students dutifully answered the question I asked. In the second-to-last interview, Lucy—a senior member of the ensemble— spoke at length about the dichotomy between “real life” in which people “are much more held back” and online, in which people flaunt, “Here’s my opinion and I am very stubborn…this is what I believe. Deal with it” (Interview, 3/24/22). She viewed the screen as protection, a shield behind which people can hide, whereas speaking out loud is “more vulnerable” (Interview, 167 3/24/22). This is one of many examples in which I felt my pre-digital adolescence come in conflict with the inquiry. A study of over 20,000 middle school students in New Jersey demonstrated that students who are more integrated into the official social life of the school are more likely to adopt more social media platforms. “Social media provides a space for community members to be in the know and to be known, both of which are more valuable with greater social integration” (Shepherd & Lane, 2019, p. 1, emphasis in original). How social media has changed the academic culture and experience for students would be a fascinating study; this study is not that. Instead, I learned about the community that existed within the classroom with the people in the room. Jimin and Spring have decidedly different approaches to social media use. While Spring sparingly uses Instagram and regularly texts with friends, Jimin spends a great deal of time on her phone, as I discussed in Chapter 4. Adults in Their World The adolescents viewed the adults in their world as sources of knowledge. Some students based their opinions regarding masks on information from home. As Lucy, a senior, explained, “I just purely relied on asking my parents” (Interview, 3/24/22). There was an air of unknowable knowledge that adults had that they could not possibly have yet because of their age. In the mask mandate debate, Jimin was relieved to be assigned the role of student, because she would have felt unsure of how to speak on behalf of parents or administrators: “they are more experienced in some way. They’re older so they can make better choices” (Interview, 3/16/22). During the Super Bowl conversation, a few students appeared to assume that the author of the social media post at the root of the class discussion—“too bad they didn’t showcase real music”—was an adult, suggesting that they, in the class, would not hold such biased opinions. The goal of the 168 class, in their eyes, was to make sense of the “older individual’s known viewpoints” (Nicki, Interview, 3/22/22). In some ways, Jimin and Spring have contrasting relationships with their parents. Spring’s mom served on various DEI committees throughout the community. From conversations with her mom, Spring learned about microaggressions, a critical lens she applied to what she witnessed at Broadport High School. Jimin, on the other hand, “sav[ed] them a headache” (Interview, 5/3/22) by not telling her parents about her experiences with racism at the school. She preferred to “take care of it by myself.” Spring leans into her relationships with her parents, expressing to me that “I really love my family and I trust them a lot, and I make sure they can trust me. Trust matters a lot” (Interview, 5/4/22). As she spoke with me, Jimin highlighted the distance between her parents and herself. School I entered this inquiry alongside the students in their 13-year-long path through RSU 91. They were at varying stages of that education journey. I met Freeman, a freshman boy new to the district, who had a quiet demeanor in class and constantly readjusted his baseball cap as we spoke. I met Jacquelyn, a senior girl eager to start her journey as a theater major in college, whose quiet leadership and confidence drew the respect of teachers, but sometimes the ire of peers, Mr. Metta shared. Every student had their own connection to school, and ways they felt successful or not. As students shared their desire for course material to be relevant and useful, I noticed that some students felt frustrated by the graduation requirements mandating they enroll in courses that did not interest them. All students elected to participate in Chamber Singers. While Mr. Metta made an effort to differentiate for Chamber Singer students, it seemed like the students felt that was not always the case in their other classes. 169 Students displayed a fixed mindset of their ability to school, to be a student. At the point of this inquiry, students had moved through at least nine previous years of schooling. What they wanted out of school and their feelings about what school gave them differed. This speaks to the variety of learner experience sitting in conflict with the potential uniformity in an education experience. I reflected on this discrepancy especially this year as I taught kindergarten general music. This age group was new for me; I had always previously worked with middle school and high school aged students. By seeing students on the very first days they entered the public school system, I watched them learn how to school. They were indoctrinated into the importance of straight lines, quiet walking, raising your hand, asking permission, and speaking in turn. The kindergarteners’ experiencing the newness of school provided me a different lens to the school pipeline. I had primarily worked with high school students before this, and I often encountered students who felt like a failure before the first day of the school year, or, contrastingly, had learned to function in the school the way the systems were designed. Students learn how to do school. Through my teacher-lens, I saw this in the students of this inquiry. The concept of socialization has come in and out of favor among social scientists (Guhin et al., 2021) and specifically Bourdieu’s concepts as applied to education have been critiqued (Nash, 1990). Nevertheless, for the purposes of this discussion, I situate Jimin and Spring’s experiences within Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. The public education system functions as a reproduction mechanism of the dominant culture. “By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the educational system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 494). Students are socialized into what it means to be a student. Other students shared both Jimin and Spring’s experiences, and I weave together what I heard from all 12 members of the Chamber Singers. 170 Jimin held polarized views of different aspects of her school experience. She cared deeply about Chamber Choir and Piano Class. She exhibited perseverance in achieving skills she valued. “When you love something enough to be determined to do it, then you’ll do it…You will struggle, but you’ll be like, ‘I want to do this. I’m going to do this.’ And you end up doing it” (Interview, 5/3/22). When teachers gave her time to figure things out on her own, she felt empowered. When they lectured at her, she disengaged. Just don't talk at me. Let me figure it out myself. If I need help, I'll ask you for help. If you're going to talk at me, I'm not gonna do it. It’s annoying. It really is. Like I learn best doing it, or trying it out first. And if I don't understand it, I'll ask you for help. But if I'm like lectured for like half an hour. Whatever you said, I was not listening to it. I was probably thinking about something else because I want to figure it out myself. (Interview, 5/5/22) This contrasted with junior Jordyn’s preference for lecture-style classes: I really like lecture style classes. I think that's the way that my brain works. Like if I can see it and hear it, I can do it. I like to see examples of what I'm supposed to do and do them…just teach me how to do it. (Interview, 5/4/22) From Jimin’s perspective, school is “one size fits all…And I don’t like that because not everyone’s brain works” the same (Interview, 5/3/22). With her career aspirations set on music or fashion, she was skeptical about why she needed the classes she was required to take. She expended minimal effort in some classes, explaining that: grades don’t define who I am…grades are not going to come to the grave with me, are they? I don’t care about school. I get an F? I get an F. But I do really try hard in the classes that I enjoy, but not for the grades. (Interview, 5/3/22) 171 She expressed resigned recognition that a racist public school experience was her reality, but she tried not to let it bother her. “Honestly, public schools are hell. Straight up hell” (Interview, 5/3/22). Spring described herself as a good student. She completed homework, though admitted to procrastination. She enrolled in several Advanced Placement classes for next year “to keep up with my friends” (Interview, 5/4/22), despite her mother’s concern for increased anxiety attacks. She pushed herself to try hard and did not allow herself many breaks. She had her sights set on “as much financial aid as possible from merit scholarships” (Interview, 5/4/22) so she can pursue a college degree leading to a career in environmental activism. Her artwork shared in Chapter 4, along with her description of its meaning, demonstrate her commitment to this area of work. Shaped by discussions in her U.S. government class, Spring viewed the goal of compulsory public schooling as “to have an educated population.” In light of the national events of 2022, her view of the U.S. is that it is “going [in] some crazy directions lately” and it “feels really out of control.” She pondered about the competing goals of the government to provide the means to a “well-educated population” yet “the population [is] supposed to be able to think critically about that government. It just poses an interesting situation.” She expressed an awareness of her privileged global position, living as a white, educated student in Maine who is “so used to these rights,” when we talked about conflicts in other parts of the world. Spring values the education she receives and has learned how to successfully participate in schooling while maintaining a critical eye to her position in the world. Jimin and Spring come to their education differently. Jimin lived two lives throughout middle school to keep separate her home culture and her school persona. She did not feel like school provided her enough opportunities to pursue what she was interested in. She thrived when 172 given time to wrestle with concepts on her own, and she shut down when teachers lectured. Spring approached school from a place of gratitude, I believe, because her home experiences aligned with school. She possessed the cultural capital that was the currency of her educational environment. Both students arrived at school with their unique lived experiences. How to Be a Student Over the course of the interviews with the 12 singers, they shared several attributes of how to be a student. Students desired to be informed before participating in classroom conversations, to which they were generally eager to contribute. Several students expressed an attitude that they can learn, and that they are responsible for their own learning. Within the context of Chamber Choir, Jimin shared a determination to try new things “even though you’re scared of it, because that’s the only way to get through stuff” (Interview, 3/16/22). Similarly, freshman Freeman admitted that asking questions can “make you feel kind of dumb” but by not asking, “you’re hurting yourself” (Interview, 3/22/22). Some students valued the ability to speak on the fly while others disdained being put on the spot. For some, a lecture style class was ideal and others preferred activities that physically engaged students and allowed them to move around the classroom. There were similarities to how students described their preferences about learning or the attributes of a successful student, but there was no universal description of either. Several singers commented on existing student-teacher dynamics within the classroom. Within class discussions throughout the building, students thought that some teachers “just want to hear you talk” (Interview, Jordyn, 3/16/22). The content of a student’s thought was less important than the fact they participated in the discussion. Some students could “tell that a teacher is looking for a certain answer” (Interview, Jacquelyn, 3/24/22). If a student offered an answer, and the teacher rephrased it incorrectly, students did not challenge them. It would be 173 “awkward if you’re like ‘no, that’s not what I meant.’” (Interview, Jordyn, 3/16/22). Students learned what teachers expected and were aware of the power dynamics in the classroom. Political Identity I include political identity here, in this section on striking differences of the adolescent experience compared to my own experience growing up. However, I expand upon the theme later when I explore the role of peers in classroom conversation. I was struck by the fact that more than half of the singers brought up political identity or politics as playing a major role in their student experience. I did not expressly ask about politics, but perhaps I should have. As one student pointed out, the country feels politically polarized, and wearing a mask or not wearing a mask was a visible indication of which side you were on. Politics came up in a variety of ways. Regina, a junior, felt hesitant at first addressing the way political identity is made apparent in different classes at school. “In my Chamber Choir class, the conversations are more, I don’t know if I should say it like this, but I guess liberal, if that makes [sense]. And in my American history class, they’re more conservative” (Interview, 3/18/22). Senior Jacquelyn had no qualms making her political views known in her history class discussions on women’s rights and abortion rights. Students expressed an awareness of peers’ political identities in a way that was shocking to me. George, a sophomore, explained to me that political views are “defining everyday life right now” (Interview, 3/24/22). Several students expressed some variation of everything is so political, using “political” as a negative descriptor, a reason to avoid a topic. Binary Thinking The final aspect of the adolescent experience I introduce is the binary thinking that appeared throughout the inquiry. I continue a thorough discussion on the contrast of the fluid thinking of Mr. Metta and the binary thinking of adolescents in Chapter 7. Political identity was 174 certainly a primary context for binary thought. Jordyn expressed “We have quite the split of very liberal people and very conservative people” (Interview, 3/16/22) when describing Broadport High School. She also defined a controversial topic as one in which “people might have two strong opinions that contradict each other.” Here are other examples of binary language: “it was very strong with both sides” (Interview, Lucy, 3/24/22), “harsh means very, like, one way” (Interview, Regina, 3/18/22), “people are kind of able to see both sides” (Interview, Nicki, 3/22/22), “the two sides of the argument” (Interview, Gibby, 3/24/22), “somebody who is on the same side” (Interview, George, 3/24/22), “I’m not sure if it’s been a good or bad thing” (Interview, Lucy, 3/24/22). While examples of binaries exist throughout nature, “binary thinking is also understood as a source of oppressive hierarchy and unnecessary polarization” (Four Arrows, 2021, p. 3). The natural tendency to categorize and differentiate “also includes the implicit hierarchical assumption that one of the two is inherently more valuable than the other” (Robbins, 2015, p. 1) During interviews and in class, in an effort to express an understanding of different viewpoints, students were quick to mention “both sides” or “the other side” of a topic. This suggests a tendency for several students to view the world in binaries. In Chapter 7, I explore how binary thinking can be an aspect of white supremacy. In this section, I introduced a few aspects of the adolescent experience that contrasts starkly with how I experienced my teenage years. I do this as a means to identify my worldview and to make plain the lens through which I present the following themes in the rest of the chapter. When I was a teenager, I did not experience a global pandemic, nor did social media exist. My high school memories have largely been superseded by my time spent teaching, therefore I explored how the participants explained being a student and what school meant to 175 them. The political climate plays a significant role in today’s culture and is one example of binary thinking that students exhibited. Environment in Chamber Choir As a precursor to understanding their experiences with difficult conversations, I asked students to describe the environment in Chamber Choir and how Mr. Metta cultivated that space. What I learned was that difficult conversations, or conversations of any sort, can only happen when there is an established sense of community. This community is dependent on both what the teacher does and the peers in the room. The impact of peers played an important role in how students experience all aspects of the music classroom (Adderley et al., 2003). I asked students about actions Mr. Metta took to create the environment, and while the students spoke highly of Mr. Metta, several conversations led me to believe that it is more often the other students in the room that made a bigger difference. In this section, I synthesize how the students experienced the environment in Chamber Choir. Singers described a supportive environment that felt like family in which they could say anything. This is a synthesis of several conversations with students, and I provide counter examples within each section when they arose in the data. I then present the consistency of community building activities and explore how conversation can act as such an activity. Students shared how the environment in Chamber Choir differed or aligned with other classes in their schedules. The students noticed the deliberate steps Mr. Metta took to cultivating a “protected space” and they “embrace the specific norms of their choral context” (Parker, 2014, p. 29). Through these findings, I present the students’ experiences of the environment in Chamber Choir. 176 Supportive Students described the environment in Chamber Choir as supportive, chill, accepting, and safe. Mr. Metta established a supportive environment from the moment he arrived, and he has continued to foster that over the three years he has been at Broadport High School. Students noticed that Mr. Metta explicitly outlined expectations of safety and demonstrated them by his actions. Theresa, a senior, explained “He’s always like ‘this is a totally safe environment, blah, blah, blah, it doesn’t leave this room.’ But I feel like it’s just a feeling at this point…it’s like a community” (Interview, 3/18/22). Eva, a junior, echoed her classmate’s observations: “Whenever we have discussions, he’s very accepting of any ideas. And he usually says at the beginning ‘this is an open, safe environment. Ask any questions’” (Interview, 3/22/22). Students noticed how Mr. Metta set clear expectations of safety. They also noticed his attention to including and valuing everyone’s ideas. Students appreciated the supportive environment because it felt like a safe haven from the peer judgment that existed outside of the choir room. In addition to how Mr. Metta attends to the supportive environment, students mentioned each other as sources of support, referring to their peers as “accepting and kind” (Interview, Jordyn, 3/16/22). Spring expressed a feeling of “closeness” to her peers and Jimin felt “more connected” to choir classmates than students in her other classes. George, a sophomore, noted that Mr. Metta did “a good job of making the students feel safe in the classroom” (Interview, 3/24/22). Spring described a safe environment as one in which she can show who she is. While paying particular attention to how students define the concept, in the next chapter I will trouble the notion of safety, which is common in the literature on community. 177 Like Family Parker (2014) found the experience of “team” to be central to the social identity development of secondary choral singers. Similarly, several BHS singers used the term “family” to describe the Chamber Choir. They expressed that they are all individuals, and yet they “can all be a group together” (Interview, Spring, 3/22/22) and act like a “family of kids” (Interview, Regina, 3/18/22). Resembling a sibling-like familiarity, singers expressed annoyance with their peers for goofing off during rehearsals. Some seniors held a sense of responsibility to the younger students, committed to “carrying on what the seniors when I was a freshman had because that was really good for me” (Interview, Jacquelyn, 3/24/22). The commitment to peers comes from younger students as well. Spring noted “I don’t always enjoy chorus. It feels like a lot of work, you know. But it’s like, I do it for the people there” (Interview, 3/22/22). Smaller ensembles lend themselves to social cohesion because it can be easier than a larger chorus to interact with all members of the group (Adderley et al., 2003). The 18-member Chamber Choir functioned as a cohesive unit, even if that connection did not extend beyond the rehearsal space. Freeman explained that while he was not close friends with any singers outside of the class period, “once you get inside the class, we’re all pretty close” (Interview, 3/22/22). Singers note that the connectedness they felt took time to cultivate, growing both over the course of each academic year and over the course of their high school experience. A sense of “family” is felt by students through the established environment in Chamber Choir. Along with troubling safety in Chapter 7, I will also discuss the use of “family” as a metaphor in classrooms through a trauma- informed lens. 178 Comfort and Confidence The membership of Chamber Choir encompassed not only all four grades in the high school but also first year members sang alongside veteran choral singers. Some seniors reflected on their growth over their four years in high school in the ways they felt more comfortable sharing their opinions during class. Teresa exclaimed “at this point, I feel like I could say anything in there” (Interview, 3/18/22). With a similar sentiment, when Nicki, a senior, said “I felt very comfortable” participating in the Super Bowl conversation, I asked if she would feel uncomfortable had the conversation taken place in another class. She responded, I don’t necessarily feel uncomfortable in other situations. I might have a few years ago when I had more anxiety, and I was just scared to talk in front of people. And that might have been the same in Chamber Choir. But now that I’m a senior, I feel everything is not as difficult. (Interview, 3/22/22) Another senior, Lucy, also acknowledged her confidence growth throughout her time in high school, but still felt hesitant sharing many opinions because “I don’t really talk in class anyways” (Interview, 3/24/22). Some students appreciated the opportunity to formulate their thoughts before being asked to share them in front of the class, indicating that preparation makes them feel comfortable. Others felt free to ask questions because it is understood that students in Chamber Choir have varying amounts of knowledge about subjects. This contrasted to experiences in other classes where “you’ve all read the book about it” and were expected to have the same knowledge (Interview, Eva, 3/22/22). Jimin and Spring are sophomores. While they both spoke about their individual growth during the pandemic and indicated they had both matured since middle school, I do wonder to what extent their age within the mixed-grade environment of Chamber Choir plays a part in their 179 comfort in the class. Jimin felt like she could offer her opinions during structured conversations, but said she would not be willing to share what type of music she likes for fear of judgment from peers. Spring was hyper aware of the social hierarchy in all classes and Chamber Choir was no exception. Seniors like Nicki and Lucy spoke about how they had matured over the course of high school. Jimin and Spring are in the midst of their high school careers. I inquire into their experiences as I journey alongside them in this moment, acknowledging that if I were to revisit them in six months or six years, their experiences would be changed by the passage of time. Community Building Practices After asking students to describe the environment in Chamber Choir, I asked them what Mr. Metta does to cultivate that sense of community. Some had a hard time putting their finger on any one specific practice or activity their teacher did. “I don’t know if I have anything specific besides, just kind of, everyday practice” (Interview, Gibby 3/24/22). Students pointed to the consistently “supportive, kind environment” (Interview, Eva, 3/22/22) having more of an impact on the sense of community rather than anything Mr. Metta explicitly said, noting that developing meaningful relationships takes time. Students appreciated the time to bond and chat with fellow singers in both unstructured and structured times. The unstructured conversations that happened when Mr. Metta traveled to the high school from the middle school as well as the time in-between songs during rehearsals made them feel “more closer knit” (Interview, Spring, 3/22/22). The structured conversations, such as the Super Bowl discussion, provided avenues to better know their peers. Regina, a junior, “was just excited to hear everyone’s personal opinions on [the half time show]” (Interview, 3/18/22). The regular incorporation of student-led sectionals strengthened the feeling of “team” in the ensemble (Parker, 2010). Lastly, Mr. Metta created student officers for Chamber Choir. The Social Chair was in charge of organizing social events 180 outside of the school day for their peers. I am unclear how the pandemic affected the ability to plan and have social events beyond the school day. There was, however, a trophy on top of the folder cabinet proclaiming “Choir Olympic Champions: ALTOS!” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). While difficult to articulate, the environment in Chamber Choir was positively impacted by opportunities to talk with peers, a consistent tending to community from students and teacher, student-led sectionals, and social events. How Chamber Choir is Different Than or the Same as Other Classes I asked students to compare the environment in Chamber Choir to that of other classes in which they are enrolled. At this point in the inquiry, directly after the Super Bowl and mask mandate conversations, I was curious to know if these types of conversations took place in other classes. The responses fell generally into two categories: no, Chamber Choir is the only place I talk about these things; or yes, we have similar conversations in my history class, specifically honors level classes. In this section, first I explore how students describe the environment in their other classes, and then I synthesize the two responses, and provide an illustration of each from Jimin and Spring. Comparing Environments Among the students who felt comfortable sharing their opinions in Chamber Choir, there was a general feeling that the supportive environment of Chamber Choir was not present in other classes. Some of that had to do with Mr. Metta’s ability to structure open-ended conversations. The students did not feel like Mr. Metta had a predetermined conclusion or expected path for the conversation. Senior Jacquelyn explained, “With Mr. Metta…I don’t feel like I’m trying to answer someone’s question. I just feel like I’m speaking my mind” (Interview, 3/24/22). It was socially acceptable to ask questions that might reveal a lack of knowledge, whereas Freeman 181 provided an example of that not being the case in another class: “Like, in math class, for example, you ask the question, but you can feel dumb for not knowing it because you feel like if everyone else knows it, I should probably know it. So I’ll just sneak back into the shadows” (Interview, 3/22/22). Chamber Choir was a place where many students felt uniquely able to share opinions, in part because of the sense of community with their peers. Spring explained that this contrasted with her experience in other classes where she felt a need to fit in for social survival: “In other classes, you have to find your people so that you have a group” (Interview, 3/22/22). Broadport High School had an advisory program that, according to the program of studies, was intended to complement the curriculum by providing “a strong support network for each individual student to help develop interpersonal skills” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Each student was assigned an advisor “who is responsible for helping him or her manage the multiple demands on time and energy.” They meet with the same advisor and approximately a dozen peers for all four years of high school. Advisory was designed to “increase aspirations and build strong relationships with students.” I heard several negative views on advisory and zero positive reports. For Chamber Choir students, the chorus room was their place to “understand themselves and others better, identify their interests and abilities, and develop skills for lifelong learning,” not advisory. Only In Chamber Choir For some, Chamber Choir was the only class in which they had discussions on current events or were asked to share their opinions about current events. In this school system, I think a lot of us don’t feel like we’re given an opportunity to talk about things. So you can go a whole day without taking about what’s happening in Ukraine or the whole Super Bowl halftime show. Or you can go a whole day without a 182 teacher asking you what you think about the new mask mandate. (Interview, Jacquelyn, 3/24/22) Jacquelyn’s experience was not unique; other students also felt a lack of opportunity for student voice in classroom discussions. While current events may have been discussed in other classes, George felt stymied in trying to share his opinion. In music classes, he could share his personal feelings, but in other classes, he felt the message of “We’re talking about the events, not how you feel about it” (Interview, 3/24/22). Both George and Freeman expressed surprise that so far this school year, Chamber Choir had been the only class in which they had experienced current-event driven conversations when students were asked to share their opinions. Jimin described a range of discussions she experienced in other classes with two common themes. First, she preferred the environment of Chamber Choir because she felt connected to her peers and she believed she would not be judged. While she didn’t necessarily feel comfortable sharing her opinion on music-preferences in class, she admired those students who did. Second, she expressed boredom with discussions in other classes. She preferred more doing and less listening. I asked her to share an example of a recent conversation where students might have held differing opinions. In her American government class, they began each day with a 60- second news highlight video which leads into a discussion. The one she shared was about how Kim Kardashian lost “like 16 pounds just to fit into the Marilyn Monroe dress.15 Like, people all had different opinions [on that] but everybody kept their own opinion” (Interview, 5/5/22). 15 For the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala on May 2, 2022, Kim Kardashian wore the dress that Marilyn Monroe famously wore when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Since the dress was vintage, it could not be altered and Kardashian purportedly lost 16 pounds in three weeks (Yuan, 2022). 183 My researcher interview skills failed me as I tried to dig into what it would take for students to change opinions as a result of a class discussion. Instead, Jimin and I discussed the details of Kim’s diet and dress maneuvering. Even in—or perhaps especially in—conversations situated in popular culture, Jimin felt the impact of her peers in the room. “Sometimes, you can share your opinions [in that class] and I guess not get judged…It depends on the students and the people you’re with” (Interview, 5/5/22). “An AP Kind of Vibe” A number of students noticed the similarity between discussions in Chamber Choir and discussions in their history classes, especially honors level courses. Mr. Metta demonstrated that he was “aware of the news and everything that’s going on in the world” (Interview, Theresa, 3/18/22), which Theresa felt was going above and beyond his job description. She continued, “The same discussions I have in my AP history classes, we end up having in Chamber Choir. It’s so weird. It doesn’t seem like it would fit, but it does.” I heard this sentiment from multiple students. Notably, it was mostly the juniors and seniors referring to their honors-level or Advanced Placement classes. However, they also took note of the different collection of students within their classes with whom they were having similar conversations. “Being able to do that [have conversations] in two classes that are so different from each other is something that’s really interesting to me” (Interview, Regina, 3/18/22). Students seemed to struggle a bit navigating the words to describe the different student bodies, saying very different group of kids or academically geared and I’m not trying to be offensive. Music classes can bring together students of diverse interests and backgrounds from the larger student body of the high school. Students noticed the heterogeneous grouping of students. In Chapter 7, I discuss students being encouraged or required to share opinions primarily in honors level courses, and the possibilities 184 within mixed-grade music education courses Mr. Metta’s approach in Chamber Choir can demonstrate. Spring’s experience in her sophomore history course was an exception because it was a class that regularly had conversations about difficult topics, and it was not an honors-level course. The teacher, Mr. Wilson, created an environment in which Spring felt comfortable engaging regularly in conversation. He “talks to us like we’re people,” she explained (Interview, 3/22/22). Mr. Wilson showed genuine interest in students’ ideas and thoughts, which encouraged Spring to speak up. “He actually cares [what I have to say], he’s not just asking” which demonstrated a belief that students “might have intelligent things to say.” He “used language we use” but not in a “trying to be cool” way; Spring perceived that Mr. Wilson had a “younger lens, a little more open-minded lens, and he knows he might not always be right.” Spring shared this experience from Mr. Wilson’s class: Last year, we were having a discussion about the Holocaust. And like, people from all ranges of like… the um… social hierarchy or whatever… were participating. Like, you had your jocks, you had the people who always participate, you had the really shy kids. Like, everyone’s participating. And it made it the most memorable conversation ever. I still remember what the kids said to this day, and it makes me feel closer with them. Because [I realized] “Wait, you’re something beyond your label. And yes, you can be a jock and kind of an asshole, but you actually have these really intelligent thoughts, and I just haven’t ever seen that side of you.” So it made us closer. I mean, maybe I didn’t still talk with them. But, the next day, [I] felt closer because we’d shared something more. Like we’d gotten past our identities in a way. It really meant something. (Interview, 3/22/22) 185 Spring’s experience in Mr. Wilson’s history class resembled how other students felt about their AP classes and about Chamber Choir. This is noteworthy because Mr. Wilson’s class was heterogeneously grouped. However, Jordyn described the possibility for conversation to lead to misunderstanding and contention among students: Sometimes you have a heated discussion with someone in another class, and you don’t like them from now on, because you don’t know a lot about them. And that’s the only thing you have is this memory of this time either when maybe they made you feel bad or they said something that you really don’t agree with and you don’t have any context around them other than that. (Interview, 3/16/22) Conversations that engage students’ emotions or strongly held beliefs benefit from a sense of community. Lacking a connection to her peers, Jordyn experienced ostracization as a result of a heated class discussion. Generally, students described the environment in Chamber Choir as supportive and family-like. Especially the older students expressed a comfort and confidence that had grown over time, though still some students felt shy about voicing any opinions. Both Mr. Metta and the students in the class contributed to the sense of community. This allowed for students to feel comfortable tackling potentially difficult conversations, which for some students felt similar to other classes and for other students was a unique experience in their school day. Belonging vs. Fitting In As presented thus far, the students’ experiences in Chamber Choir seem overwhelmingly positive. I purposefully present the themes in this order because it mirrors how the students spoke to me. At first, when I asked about the environment of Chamber Choir, I heard almost entirely positive feedback. I was following my interview protocol, and asking about what Mr. 186 Metta did to either support or diminish their feelings of comfort in discussions. What I learned to listen for, though, was the way students talked about peers both in and out of Chamber Choir. Students repeatedly told me that it “depends on who’s in the class” (Interview, Eva, 3/22/22) and it had less “to do with the teacher…it’s just about other kids” (Interview, Jacquelyn, 3/24/22). I heard time and time again that, yes, the teacher matters. However, their comfort level in a discussion is determined less by the topic and more by who is in the room. Peers matter. By leaning into the sociality commonplace of narrative inquiry, researchers attend to how “our emotions, our aesthetic reactions, our moral responses…are shaped by familial narratives, family stories, as well as by institutional narratives, such as stories of school, as well as by cultural and social narratives” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 40). In this section, I think within the sociality commonplace to notice what is happening within the lives of the adolescents and how the people around them shape their experiences. First, I look at the ways students experience belonging and then contrast that with fitting in. Brown (2021) summarized the words of eighth grade research participants to capture the difference between belonging and fitting in: “Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else. If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in” (p. 163). The findings I present are within the context of having conversations in the classroom. I explore the ways students express the sociality of high school. Lastly, using the data from the Walkthrough, I present Jimin and Spring’s experiences in Broadport High School. Belonging “True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are” (Brown, 2021, p. 158). Parker (2010) investigated how secondary choral students experienced belonging within their school ensemble. While Parker set out explicitly to examine 187 belonging, I stumbled on its importance in this inquiry. Four of the five themes from that study exist in this data: choral experience as elected and uncompetitive, sectional bonding as social bonding, singing as shared experience, and chorus as safe space (Parker, 2010, pp. 344–348). The fifth theme of trips as bonding experiences did not occur during my time with Broadport High School Chamber Choir. Much of what I have presented already can be examined through the lens of belonging, as Parker (2010) introduced. For example, singers actively chose to be in the ensemble, and they were open to creating relationships with others in the group. They experienced a supportive and non-competitive environment in which they felt safe. Singers worked collectively and collaboratively toward a goal, whereas some felt a sense of academic competition in other classes. Mr. Metta utilized student-led sectionals during rehearsal. In these ways, the community the students described to me could be viewed as cultivating a sense of belonging. In most of the high schools Milner (2016) analyzed, the student body had a hierarchical system of social stratification. Theresa, a senior, explained to me that Chamber Choir “had every group…the theater kids, the varsity baseball players…and it’s got all different age levels freshman through senior.” She situated herself as existing on the outskirts of the ensemble socially because she did not “do theater,” but she felt “a level of comfort” because of the “mix of kids” (Interview, 3/18/22). Spring acknowledged the different cliques in Chamber Choir, but explained that the students “overlap and we talk…There are our individual identities that still exist, but they co-exist better in chorus” (Interview, 3/22/22). Chamber Choir was not immune to the social hierarchy of high school, but at least some of the students perceived the barriers as permeable. 188 Because of the variety of personalities and interests in the room, students felt a sense of belonging. “Everybody’s different. So it’s kinda like, if you’re different, it’s fine” (Interview, Theresa, 3/18/22). They felt Chamber Choir was a place where they could express contrasting opinions during classroom discussions and that would be tolerated by their peers. Part of that acceptance was a result of how Mr. Metta facilitated class: “[he] is very good at structuring conversations in a positive way so that opinions can be shared, but people aren’t going to be put down by their opinion” (Interview, Jordyn, 3/16/22). Additionally, peers’ respect for each other built acceptance within the class. There was an expectation that students listen to each other and seek to understand their peers’ perspectives. “Everyone in Chamber Choir tends to be really respectful and cognizant of other people’s thoughts and feelings, which is not always the case in my history class” (Interview, Eva, 3/22/22). Regina, a junior, expressed that she felt comfortable sharing her opinions because she had several friends in the class who already knew her opinion. Jordyn, also a junior, shared that she is not particularly close with any of her fellow singers, and yet she consistently said she felt comfortable participating in conversations. I wonder how the constructs of friendship and belonging overlap, especially within a choir in which friendships exist between some members but not others. Fitting In “Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else” (Brown, 2021, p. 163). Within the context of my questioning, students experienced fitting in when they felt comfortable expressing opinions only when those aligned with others’ opinions in class. They felt safe sharing when they knew in advance their opinion would not be an outlier. Lucy described herself as “very anxious socially” and admitted that she would be “very afraid to go against my peers” (Interview, 3/24/22). Within the context of the Super Bowl halftime show, Jordyn shared that she 189 felt “a little out of place” when her classmates were talking in great detail about the performers (Interview, 3/16/22). However, she was quick to assure me that even though she did not know anything about the artists, she liked rap. “I really like it! I just… I don’t know any of those people specifically” (Interview, 3/16/22). Two subsets of fitting in arose from the data: a fear of being judged by peers and the assumption that everyone in the room holds identical opinions. Judged By Peers Students indicated, either directly or indirectly, that their peers’ opinions mattered to them. Students described being hyper vigilant of others’ reactions to their thoughts during discussions. In Chamber Choir, Jimin was hesitant to express opinions on “what songs I like or what type of music…I feel so judged with that” (Interview, 3/16/22). Regina and Jordyn expressed that, in other classes, they feared being dismissed by their peers or judged for the opinions they held. However, in Chamber Choir, they felt accepted because of the respect between singers. Contrastingly, I do not believe Lucy, a senior, had the same experience. It felt socially risky for her to share a contrasting opinion. “If I was going to say something, I wouldn’t have anymore because there’s some people in choir especially that feel so strongly about wearing masks. I was not about to go against them because it just felt too political” (Interview, 3/24/22). Lucy was one of a handful of students who invoked political as a catchall phrase for what I understood to be contentious. “We Are On The Same Side” A few students expressed a feeling of safety in agreement, which I understood to be related to fitting in and being judged by peers. Nicki felt that the Super Bowl discussion “was a productive conversation because we all thought the same thing as students…We are on the same side” (Interview, 3/22/22). Gibby agreed stating “we all pretty much felt the same way” 190 (Interview, 3/24/22), as did Spring who stated, “we mostly agreed on things” (Interview, 3/22/22). Theresa shared that “it makes it easier to voice your opinions because someone’s gonna agree with you” (Interview, 3/18/22) whereas when Eva espoused a contrasting opinion, she felt “outnumbered” (Interview, 3/22/22). In Chapter 7, I put the students’ feelings “we are on the same side” in conversation with Mr. Metta’s awareness of the students’ tendency to agree. Of all the singers, George, a sophomore, held the most extreme views in this category: “I feel like everybody in the class has the same opinions that I do, whether it’s political or about common topics in the U.S., like masks and stuff. So I didn’t feel uncomfortable in class at all” (Interview, 3/24/22). George assumed that “most of us in the class are Biden supporters.” He believed that the “very opening community” was a result of “everybody in the class [having] the same opinions that I do.” He reasoned that it is easier to “get more in depth with someone who’s on the same page as me” which is why conversations “happen in music class, because everybody in there is on the same page.” Regarding the possibility of a rogue Trump supporter in the midst, “we wouldn’t have really attacked them or anything. We wouldn’t have made them feel bad about it… We wouldn’t have thought too positively of them, but we wouldn’t have done anything to their face about it.” George felt that if the membership of the choir were more politically diverse, “it would probably affect the rehearsal process. When I stand next to certain people, you want to be on the same team as them…I think I’m lucky that I’m in this community where everybody is on the same team.” George saw the perceived political homogeneity of the group as beneficial to conversation and music making. Eva mused that if classmates held “starkly different opinions, [perhaps they] don’t tend to come straight out with them” (Interview, 3/22/22). George’s assertion that “we wouldn’t have done anything to their face about it” makes me wonder if students were aware of the possibility 191 of an acceptance facade. Would students be more likely to adopt the consensus belief or at least withhold an opinion to fit in? Gibby, a senior who had participated in band and choral ensembles throughout high school, shared George’s belief that there was more liberal political alignment in the arts at Broadport High School. Visual and performing arts students “tend to be more [of] a similar political standpoint…I feel like there’s some kind of correlation” between arts enrollment and political affiliation. “If you go to other classes, it’s just a super broad spectrum” (Interview, Gibby, 3/24/22). Politics was one arena that Chamber Choir students assumed their classmates “were on the same side.” Walkthrough The stories of Jimin and Spring unfold within Broadport High School. To attend to the interconnectedness of place and belonging, I asked both girls to walk me through their school schedule. We started outside where the bus dropped them off, and we toured the building, visiting each classroom and hallway they occupy. I inquired into the mundane and ordinary, for that is where the essence of their experiences lie. What I heard from both of them is that there is not one singular feeling of belonging within the school building, but rather it is place-dependent. Their enjoyment and comfort in a class comes more from the peers in the room and the relationship with the teacher than the subject being taught. I heard that lighting matters and that hallways are of high consequence. I walked alongside Jimin and Spring, separately, and they showed me their high school. Jimin’s High School “This does not feel welcom[ing], not at all” (Walkthrough, 5/10/22). Jimin raises an eyebrow as she describes the back entrance of Broadport High School. The students who ride the bus in the morning are dropped off by the “plain, boring” door closest to the cafeteria, a stark 192 contrast to the front of the school by the office and the grand entrance by the lobby of the performing arts center. I ask if she felt like she can be herself as she walked into the building each morning. “Yeah, ‘cause nobody’s around.” Jimin’s bus drops her off 40 to 50 minutes before school begins. Each morning, she grabs breakfast from the cafeteria and walks past the tables and booths filled with friend groups, but she does not sit there. Instead, she and another girl from her bus take refuge in a carpeted hallway upstairs by the library. “It’s so quiet and no sound, no teachers out here, too.” There, they talk about “the weirdest and random things ever” until the bell rings to head to their first class of the day. At BHS, students have an alternating block schedule with four 80-minute classes on A day and four different classes on B day. Jimin’s A day schedule begins with study hall. BHS has a designated study hall teacher who has their own classroom. Jimin exclaims it “sucks, because it’s quiet, like, I can’t talk to anyone.” Instead, Jimin usually spends her study hall period in the library’s Zen Room to “chill, make bracelets, watch TikTok, do something on my phone.” She enjoys having study hall first thing in the morning because it “clears my mind” before teachers expect her to engage in schoolwork. After English class, which she generally enjoys, she has advisory, a time to meet with the same set of kids “for forever…till you graduate!” Jimin finds advisory boring and devoid of friends, therefore, she spends most of it on her phone, watching movies. She finds respite in piano class with Mr. Metta, and she mostly sleeps through Health class. The health classroom has no windows to the outside, so the florescent lights are either “up on the brightest thing or off when it’s pitch black.” At the bell to end the school day, she rushes out to the buses. There’s no time to collect her things, ask a teacher a question, or use the bathroom: you’ll miss the bus “if you’re one minute late. Yeah, you’re done.” Her B day schedule consists of science, Chamber Choir, history, and math. When she describes her feelings 193 about each classroom, she relates how she feels to who is in the room. “It’s bio, I love [the teacher]. I don’t love her homework but I love her.” Having friends in class increases her enjoyment of the period, as well. Jimin’s class experience is influenced by social opportunities, whether they happen chatting with peers in her class, arranging to meet friends in the bathroom, or engaging in social media as a way to pass the time. As we walk Jimin’s schedule for both A and B day, I ask her to describe her experience in the hallways. She notices the abundant student artwork on display and wishes her work could be included. She mentally goes through her day, and wonders “How much time do I have to get out of class…when can I meet my friend in the bathroom.” She laughs, unapologetic about plotting to get out class. The hallways are busy and crowded during passing periods, and Jimin describes them as her most hated place to be. Students chaotically jostle by each other with complete disregard to those around them. I ask her if students are allowed to use the outdoor courtyard visible from the enormous hallway windows. She has never been out there. Our Walkthrough ends abruptly as Jimin realizes the block is about to end. She has to return to class to retrieve her belongings; students do not use lockers and the buses wait for no one. Spring’s High School Standing outside on the windy May afternoon of our Walkthrough, I am hyper aware of the buzzing highway that runs past the school, but Spring does not “even realize that’s there anymore…I kind of tune it out” (Walkthrough, 5/10/22). Spring, like Jimin, takes the bus to school and is dropped off at the back entrance by the cafeteria. She enters the building under a “weird overhang” next to “a bunch of tables that aren’t used, overturned” and “some garbage-to- garden buckets that are never used.” In the morning, Spring appreciates the quietude before most other students arrive. 194 I think it would feel almost more official if I went through the front door. But I really like going through the back… I get to have a slower entrance into the school. The front door says like, “You’re here! Have a good day. Good luck!” The cafeteria is the holding space for students before the school day begins. Spring appreciates the circular theme in the architecture and décor. There is a variety of seating: tables and chairs, large booths, and what looks to me like bar seating complete with purse hooks. In the morning, “there’s a sea of people. People in every booth, at every table, groups of kids. People usually sit in the same spots every day. My spot’s changed over time, because I hang out with different groups.” Spring typically has about 20 minutes before classes begin after she is dropped off by the bus. Spring’s feelings of belonging are influenced primarily by peers in her classes, as well as how she perceives the teacher feels about her. From our previous interviews, I knew that band was her favorite class, that she did not like study hall, and she had a mixed relationship with art class. As we stop by each of those spaces on our Walkthrough, she explains how she feels when she is in those classrooms during her school day. Band is her first class on our tour, and I ask her if it feels like a place that she could be herself. She replies: Yeah [hesitantly]. Yes. Okay. I think, you know, there’s an aspect of not being yourself everywhere in school. Everywhere in general. But, for the most part, yeah. I have the most friends in band that are my really good friends. I love band so much. Spring also has a study hall, but she aims to avoid spending time in the study hall room because “there are loud boys who talk about sexual jokes that I probably don’t understand and don’t really want to.” I follow up on this comment later, and she tells me that sexual jokes are “fairly prevalent” within the school, and some teachers address them. “It depends on the teacher and the 195 day. There are a lot in certain classes, so the teachers get tired of addressing them all.” On the infrequent days that she does have to stay in the study hall room, she chooses one of “two attitudes” to adopt. The first is: “quiet girl in the corner” so I don’t get attention. Nobody talks to me. Or, I’ll do a more “tough quiet girl in the corner” and people just don’t talk to me [lowers voice/more intense] because like, no one’s gonna make a joke about me. No one’s gonna do anything, ‘cause I don’t give them any reason to. Basically, a lot of the time I am trying to get not noticed by the wrong people, and get just slightly noticed by the right people, you know? Instead of remaining in the study hall room, Spring often chooses to go to the art room. Her sense of belonging has shifted in the art room. “If I feel okay making mistakes, then I often feel more like I belong.” Her perception of what her teacher thinks of her also heavily impacts how she feels in the art room. I stopped doing my work in that class, [which] meant that I got behind very quickly. It made me not feel that the teacher liked me anymore, so I stopped trying. It makes me sad that this beautiful thing like art could be taken to a thing where I don’t feel like I belong. As we physically visit the spaces in Broadport High School, Spring and I explore areas where she feels various ranges of belonging. Her experiences in other classes are also impacted by the presence of peers. Regarding math, she told me “I feel totally comfortable in here. I really do like math, and it’s because of the teacher and the people.” Just as Jimin initially skipped over advisory, Spring expresses a similar disregard for that block in her schedule. She “usually leaves” advisory. English is the first period of B day for her, and it is where she finds out how her “choice of outfit” is “received” by her 196 friends. “The only people who tell me it’s not good are my friends. Like, ‘you look like a grandma!’ Thank you! I’ve heard that so many times before [laughs].” Spring’s friends play a large role in how she feels in classes. Similar to Jimin, Spring has a lot to say about the hallways of Broadport High School. She describes walking through during passing periods as defensive and comfortable…a lot of times I put on my headphones and…it feels like I’m just trying to hold my own. I’m not going to care about what anyone else thinks, which in turn is just me caring a lot about what everyone else thinks…But then like, with friends, it can feel totally comfortable. Like, I can relax if you guys are around. We take a sudden detour down an unexpected hallway at one point during our Walkthrough. After intensely studying a display cases of marching band trophies from the 1970s, Spring admits “I have to be entirely honest with you. I did send us down this hallway to avoid the kid who’s walking because I don’t like him. And does creepy things to girls so that’s why we avoid him.” The walls of most hallways are covered in lockers that “nobody uses.” Before turning down the final hallway of our Walkthrough, Spring pauses, inhales audibly, and says “And then, we come to the Popular Kid Hallway. Let’s do it, shall we? [faux enthusiasm] Maybe I just judge people too much. That’s not a maybe; that’s a yes.” Spring strongly feels the social dimension of the hallways of BHS. Spring often includes wall colors and lighting in her descriptions of classrooms. She notes the large circular light fixtures in the cafeteria and the abrasively bright florescent lights in most hallways. In each classroom, one wall is painted an accent color. “They’re all like green, bright orange, purple. It’s odd.” She feels especially comfortable in her history classroom with its “Christmas lights and skylights, so the light fluctuates.” While peers most heavily influence 197 Spring’s experience in the building, the physical environment also plays a role in how she feels at school. At the end of the Walkthrough, she apologizes for how confusing she imagines the transcription process will be for me without the context of what we were looking at with each stop. “Do you want me to just make a map?” she asks. I eagerly accept her offer and wonder aloud about the difference between how she feels in classrooms versus in the hallways. “I feel like artistically I could capture it, but I don’t know if…how I can use my words to capture it.” Language “may miss much of what the participant recognizes as important in a particular experience” (J. Hess, 2021c, p. 93) and Spring opted instead to communicate her experience through a visual medium. Figure 5 is Spring’s map of Broadport High School. She charts where she feels most comfortable (purple) to least comfortable (navy). At first glance, I misread her color rankings, so I confirmed with her my interpretation of her map. While there is gradation within some rooms, in order from most comfortable to least comfortable, she listed: purple, pink (chorus), red (English, math, science, library), orange (band), yellow (American government and economics), green, blue (cafeteria, art), navy (stairs). 198 Figure 5–Spring's High School Map Jimin and Spring are both sophomores at Broadport High School, but they occupy different spaces in the school. Jimin tucks herself away on a quiet bench for breakfast while Spring stays in the cafeteria. They both had only disdain for the Study Hall room, but for different reasons. Lighting played an important environmental role in how they felt in the building. The hallways were rife with social interactions, few of which were positive. Most salient was the role that peers play in the girls’ feelings of comfort and belonging in school. Students’ Reflections on Conversations in Chamber Choir This inquiry began as an exploration of students’ experiences with difficult conversations. I learned though listening and living alongside that students’ comfort levels were 199 more impacted by who was in the room rather than the topic under discussion. In this section, I share the students’ reflections on the two discussions I observed—the Super Bowl Halftime Show and the mask mandate ending. They reflected on what they learned through the conversations and highlighted the importance of having a space during school to have such conversations. I explore the hesitancy and discomfort some students felt specifically discussing race in the halftime show and the politicized nature of the mask mandates. Lastly, I offer their takeaways from these conversations, including the impacts the discussions had on ensemble music making. It Was Important To Have These Conversations Students viewed discussions in Chamber Choir as a welcomed break in routine and they appreciated Mr. Metta’s structured approach. Several students commented that one of the reasons they liked having the Super Bowl conversation or mask debate was that the full-length discussion was a break in their normal routine. They assured me that they enjoyed singing and the rehearsal process. Although discussions may be common in other classes, they are not something that occurred every choir class and therefore were viewed as “more refreshing” (Interview, Jordyn, 3/16/22). By and large, students appreciated the structure Mr. Metta brought to the conversations. They appreciated being able to formulate their thoughts in small groups during the Super Bowl conversation before sharing with the class. However, one dissenting voice found that aspect of the class boring and preferred the active debate style of the mask conversation. Students noticed how Mr. Metta facilitated the conversation, used questions as guides, and asked students to think about topics from an alternate perspective. Overall, Chamber Choir appreciated the break in routine the structured conversations provided their rehearsal process. 200 All 12 students I spoke with agreed that it was important to have the conversations. The Super Bowl halftime show and the ending of the mask mandate were timely topics and students appreciated having a space to talk about them with other people. They trusted Mr. Metta’s decision to halt rehearsals in order to have a discussion. “If [Mr. Metta] decides that he needs to dedicate a whole class period to this discussion, it has to be important” (Interview, Theresa, 3/18/22). They repeatedly expressed a desire to talk about current events in school and they want to know what is going on in the world. “This is important in our world. This is affecting our lives. We can talk about it” (Interview, Theresa, 3/18/22). I heard several iterations of “other than my history class, we don’t really talk about current events” (Interview, Eva, 3/22/22). Some members who were in the ensemble last school year recalled the “whole new experience of being able to talk about these important issues that were going on…like the Black Lives Matter movement” (Interview, Regina, 3/18/22). Because of the virtual learning and the extensive restrictions on singing during the 2020–2021 school year, Mr. Metta led several discussions on current events as they related to music. Overall, Chamber Choir students valued that they “are able to talk and have a real conversation” as a class (Interview, Spring, 3/22/22). Topic-Specific Hesitancy and Discomfort When I spoke with students about the Super Bowl and Mask conversations I observed, I chose my words carefully. I labeled them “significant” conversations, indicating that they had occupied an entire class period each. I purposefully did not call them difficult, challenging, potentially controversial, or any other word that may have led the direction of the students’ answers. I am, of course, aware of the power imbalance between researcher and participant, adult and teenager, (former) teacher and student. I tried specifically in this set of questions to let the students’ experiences of the conversations guide the language we used to talk about them. Some 201 students expressed no discomfort around any topics while others experienced discomfort all the time, regardless of topic. The experiences I highlight in this section are the students who felt topic-specific hesitancy or discomfort. They were uncomfortable, to varying degrees, talking about race and about masking. It is worth noting that all of the codes for this category came from female participants. I acknowledge that among the 12 students I interviewed, there were nine girls and only three boys. Regardless, the awareness of race and privilege, and the hesitancy to speak because of those identity sites, was expressed by girls. The students felt unqualified to talk about race within the context of the Super Bowl halftime show conversation. Two girls explicitly identified their whiteness as a reason they were uncomfortable, while others said something more vague, like, “something you have no experience on” (Interview, Lucy, 3/24/22). This suggested that the students felt that race was a topic they, as white teens, should not express an opinion about or were not qualified to talk about. Jordyn, a junior, stated it this way: People are less afraid to say things in music classes, to bring things up. A lot of times, at this school where we have a very majority white population, sometimes people are worried to bring up certain things. Maybe they see a racial component to something, but they’re worried about bringing it up because, you know, not a lot of people here are super qualified to speak about race. But we did in that discussion…I think people are more comfortable bringing more challenging topics to music classes. (Interview, 3/16/22) Students expressed a fear of offending, a desire to be informed, and a worry about saying something ignorant. Nicki, however, held a contrasting view, stating “it wasn’t super hard to talk about because racism is just such a known thing” (Interview, 3/22/22). In Chapter 7, I place the students’ hesitancy alongside Mr. Metta’s experience leading race-related conversations in 202 classrooms and the possibility of colorblindness impacting students’ hesitancy. Additionally, I will explore the possibility that students may be desensitized to certain topics, which could impact class discussions. Takeaways from Conversations A significant takeaway that students expressed from both the Super Bowl and the mask debate was the opportunity to practice looking at issues from multiple perspectives. Students built empathy skills by stepping into another’s shoes. “Instead of you having to share your opinion, which probably could have gotten ugly pretty quickly, he had you look at it from someone else’s perspective” (Interview, Jordyn, 3/16/22). Spring agreed this was a useful exercise because it “made you think more about other people instead of yourself, which was good because I’m a teenager. I get wrapped up in myself quite a bit [laughs]” (Interview, 3/22/22). Mr. Metta incorporated student voice in both conversations by asking them to brainstorm the stakeholders in the mask conversation and the inherent assumptions in the Super Bowl conversation. Students felt included and valued by this teacher practice. Gibby, a senior, felt strongly that having both discussions was important for his classmates because it gave them an opportunity to work on the life skill of learning to disagree. He identified the inability to be respectful in such disagreements as causing "a lot of issues in politics...I think there are people doing it successfully, but it's definitely outweighed by the people who are unable to listen to the other side” (Interview, 3/24/22). As a way to navigate such contentious conversations, Jacquelyn articulated “I think inviting a person in on a conversation rather than shutting them out is always a good rule” (Interview, 3/24/22). In many ways, what Mr. Metta hoped the students got out of the conversations aligned with what the students told me they got from the conversations. 203 How Conversations Impact Ensemble Music Making Students spoke about the reciprocal relationship between singing and conversing. Both activities aid students getting to know each other, and each domain benefits the other. “The act of singing with another person serves as a form of interpersonal communication and helps to break down barriers to friendship… When individuals sing together, at some level, they know each other better” (Parker, 2014, p. 28). Spring explained, when we talk “we’re able to bond, and then we’re able to make music together because we feel comfortable with each other” (Interview, 3/22/22). “They both kinda feed on each other. The trust we have in conversations comes from trusting each other in rehearsal, and vice versa” (Interview, Gibby, 3/24/22). Even when they do not know each other outside of class, students felt that the singing together made it easier to have a conversation. Others agreed that even when differing opinions existed, conversations brought the ensemble closer, which was important for music making. Another benefit to the interplay between conversation and singing within the context of a supportive community is singers’ relationship with mistakes. Spring explained it this way: We can feel comfortable making mistakes. That’s the biggest…takeaway from chorus… That is priceless to have in school especially. So I think that affects our music the most. And yeah, we goof off because we’re too close sometimes. But we also support each other because we are close. (Interview, 3/22/22) In Chapter 7, I discuss the student and teacher perspectives on mistakes and what that could mean for choral music. I integrate my observations on solo auditions and dress rehearsals as well to support this discussion. Students in Chamber Choir valued the conversations that took place in the classroom. They felt it was important to discuss relevant current events and were pleased with how Mr. 204 Metta allowed for student voice and perspective taking in the structured conversations. While overall, students felt comfortable discussing opinions in Chamber Choir, some students expressed topic-specific hesitancy and discomfort in conversations around race. Students felt that the conversations allowed them to bond with their peers which in turn made them closer as an ensemble. Summary In this chapter, I used excerpts from the data to highlight the difference in the present-day adolescent experience compared to my adolescent experience. In doing so, I illuminate my researcher lens and identify how my perspective can impact how I write about the student participants. The topics I discussed included the pandemic, social media, adults, school, and binary thinking. Then, I synthesized the student participants’ experiences in Chamber Choir. The singers described the environment as supportive and like a family. I compare how the environment in Chamber Choir is the same as or different than other classes, most notably Advanced Placement courses and the advisory program at Broadport High School. Through conversations with the students, I learned the importance of belonging versus fitting in. I explored this theme through a Walkthrough with Jimin and Spring. Lastly, I presented students’ reflections on the two specific conversations that I observed during the inquiry. 205 CHAPTER 7: DISCUSSION In this chapter, I discuss what emerged from interviews and observations as well as from placing everyone’s experiences alongside one another. I divide the discussion of the findings into two parts. First, I discuss emergent themes. I weave together the teacher’s and students’ experiences to notice how they align or create tension. Then, in light of the findings, I present a critique of the appropriateness of the literature I introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. I separate the emergent themes from the literature critique to reflect this inquiry's journey. Throughout data collection and analysis, themes bubbled to the surface as participants and I inquired into their stories. In many cases, these themes were unexpected. As I designed the study, I anticipated the possibility that the literature I introduced may not resonate with the findings, which in some ways came to be true. Therefore, after introducing the emergent themes, I return to how I entered the inquiry by revisiting the literature that initially shaped the project. Emergent Themes In this section, I discuss themes that emerged from interviews and observations. Although I designed a study to investigate how a teacher and students experienced difficult conversations in the chorus classroom, much more appeared in the data. First, I explain how the focus of the inquiry shifted, leading to the salient theme of community. From there, I define community and present a discussion on its importance to Nick and the students. Next, I discuss the constructs of empathy, vulnerability, and discomfort as they occurred in the teacher’s and students’ experiences. Lastly, in light of interviews and observations, I discuss how the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy suits Nick’s teaching at Broadport High School. 206 Articulating a Shift in Focus This dissertation captures my journey through the project. Chapters 1 and 2 were timebound to when I conceived the project. As I moved through the inquiry, I reflected on and critiqued my process, planning, and writing. Here I share three ways the inquiry shifted: (1) moving from focusing solely on discussion to including music making, (2) an awareness that “difficult” is subjective, and (3) building community is essential to having fruitful conversation. I continue the reflection in Chapter 8. Throughout the inquiry, I broadened the scope of observation from exclusively conversation to all aspects of the rehearsal. Initially, I honed in on the discussion aspect of rehearsals and my assumption that conversations would be difficult because of the selected topic. I attempted to ignore the musical elements of rehearsal because I thought that by doing so, I was focusing my research. Although I planned to sing alongside the ensemble to build relationships with participants, I erroneously thought if my fieldnotes and interviews excluded the music making, that would help funnel my data to what would be necessary to answer my research question. I came to realize that attempting to study only one aspect of a rehearsal without acknowledging the rest was futile. Students told me that they felt comfortable having conversations because they experienced connectedness and belonging. For conversations to occur, community had to be in place. The shared experience of music making was an essential component of community building. Therefore, I missed part of the experience when I eliminated the singing from the data collection. I went into the inquiry focused on the conversation. When I “soften[ed] my concentration, to more deeply understand the stories,” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 113) the theme of community—belonging, relationships, and shared experiences—came to the forefront. 207 Difficulty is subjective. In Chapter 2, I offered definitions of difficult conversations. Although I anticipated the likelihood that I may need to adapt the definition I offered, what came to pass was a rejection of difficulty being tied to topic. If students expressed discomfort during a conversation, it was usually tied to their awareness of their peers’ presence in the classroom. “Who is in the room” mattered to students. Additionally, a topic that may be difficult for one student will not necessarily be difficult for the next student, as difficulty is subjective. The community needs to be built before fruitful conversations can occur in a classroom. With that support in place, students may feel more comfortable being vulnerable, taking risks, and sharing opinions. I began this study by inquiring into difficult conversations, but I wrote this research text grappling with community. I resisted the urge to stay the path in an attempt to present a “smooth and narratively coherent” research text (Clandinin, 2013, p. 48). Such a move would be antithetical to the methodology of narrative inquiry. Living in the messiness of experience opens up possibilities for new understanding. As narrative inquirers, we need to hold open and to make visible the ways that participants, and we, struggle for that coherence, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. We must…make visible the multiplicity, as well as the narrative coherence and lack of narrative coherence, of our lives, the lives of participants, and the lives we co-compose in the midst of our narrative inquires. (Clandinin, 2013, p. 49) My research question started me on the path to explore difficult conversations and I discovered the salience of community. Nick first explained the importance of relationships and community as fundamental to his classroom environment. However, the ways community resonated through the student experiences was profound. By walking alongside the student participants and presenting the experiences we co-composed, I bring adolescent voice to the research. 208 The importance of community emerged as the salient theme. Nick aimed to develop an environment in Chamber Choir where students could talk about issues on their minds. By and large, I heard from students that they felt comfortable discussing issues in Chamber Choir, even with some hesitancy around race-related or political topics. Some students felt that Chamber Choir was the space where they were most likely to talk about current events and where they would feel most comfortable voicing an opinion. While this may be due to the students’ tendency to agree on the surface of issues, the finding remains that most students who spoke with me expressed a sense of community and the ability to have discussions in Chamber Choir. Articulated through the building blocks of belonging, relationships, and shared experiences, the importance of community was the salient emergent theme of this inquiry. Defining Community Participants in this study valued the sense of community they felt within Chamber Choir. Teachers and students had to establish community before approaching conversations, difficult or not. Because of the importance of community within the findings, I searched for a definition of the term that seemed to align with how the participants experienced it. Parker (2016) drew on a multi-pronged theoretical framework as she explored how four secondary choral teachers created and sustained community in their ensembles. Here, I place this framework alongside the findings of the inquiry. Parker (2016) leaned into the relational aspect of community which allowed her “to focus on the importance of interdependent connections between individuals” (p. 223). Nick and the students brought up relationships as foundational to their experience in Chamber Choir; in this way, Parker’s use of the term community aligned with how it appeared in this study. Two facets of Parker’s (2016) definition of community are particularly relevant to this inquiry. First, Parker introduced the Latin noun communitas, which means fellowship and 209 partnership. She clarified that “[c]ommunitas does not involve a merging of identities; rather, the gifts of each person are alive to the fullest” (p. 222). In this inquiry, Nick tended to both the ensemble as a whole and to his relationship with individual singers. In this way, he welcomed the “gifts of each person” into the choir community. Parker integrated belonging, relationships, and shared experiences as aspects of communitas.16 Students in this study experienced both belonging and fitting in, the latter of which could be construed as “a merging of identities.” Nodding’s (2013) conception of one-caring and the cared-for is the second part of Parker’s (2016) framework that applies to this inquiry. Ultimately, Parker (2016) found that the teachers in her study treated the students in the ensemble as a plural body, which led her to “encourage teachers to choose the individual as the cared-for because through that process, they may create a space for co-construction, cooperation, and agency, leading to communitas” (p. 234). Situated in Parker’s exploration of choral teachers who built community, I operationalized classroom community to consist of belonging, relationships, and shared experiences that are developed through co-construction, cooperation, and agency. The Importance of Community Nick and the singers valued the community within Chamber Choir. In this section, I invoke the three-dimensional narrative inquiry spaces of temporality, sociality and place and identify the building blocks of belonging, relationships, and shared experiences to examine the importance of community for Nick and students. I start with exploring the impact of who is in the room: the social dimension of the classroom and concert hall. I challenge the terms “safe” 16 Parker integrates the work of several scholars to come to this conclusion: E. Turner (2012), V. W. Turner (1969), Veblen (2013), and Veblen and Waldron (2012). 210 and “family” within the context of classroom community, weaving together the sociality and place commonplaces. Both teacher and students told me that the physical space impacts their experiences, and I integrate the commonplace of place for discussion. While I highlight one or two of the commonplaces in various sections, all three are intertwined and exist simultaneously in experiences (Clandinin, 2013). I lived alongside both teacher and students, and I noticed the ways their experiences aligned or diverged. The importance of community was the salient emergent theme in this dissertation. Sociality: The Impact of Who Is In The Room Interpersonal social relationships deeply impacted students’ comfort in the classroom. Through this inquiry, I learned that who is in the room matters much more than the topic under discussion when students determine how comfortable they are in a classroom. In some circumstances, they feared being judged by their peers. They were aware of the possibility of social ostracization due to sharing their opinions in class. Jimin withheld any proclamations of music preferences because she feared judgment, but Jordyn did not worry about “people attack[ing] you” (Interview, 3/16/22) for sharing an opinion in Chamber Choir. Spring felt comfortable voicing an opinion in Chamber Choir because “of the closeness of our group” (Interview, 3/22/22), and Regina felt similarly because she had friends in class. However, Jordyn shared many examples of frustrating conversations in other classes because she did not have a sense of community with her peers. These examples speak to the importance of belonging as an aspect of community. Although peers influenced students’ comfort levels in class, Nick reported that the students left the drama at the door and were able to focus on rehearsal. He believed students to be “pretty good about not carrying that [drama] into the rehearsal, even if they’re sitting and 211 thinking about it…I would say they’re pretty good about separating and not making it visible in a detrimental way” (Interview, 3/18/22). These two views could conflict with each other. While Nick praised the students for ignoring the social aspect of their lives within the classroom, the students reported that it was at the forefront of their awareness during class. It appears that there are at least two realms of happenings in the classroom: the academic and the social. If teachers attend to only the academic agenda of the class, then perhaps the students are left to navigate the social aspect silently. Teachers can support community building by inquiring into how students develop a sense of belonging. The sociality commonplace acknowledges the “larger cultural, social, institutional, and familial narratives” of one’s life, as well as how those larger forces impact the individual’s emotional and moral responses (Clandinin, 2013, p. 40). If teachers acknowledge the sociality commonplace, they might recognize the inextricable force of the institutional and social environment on the students’ experiences in classrooms. While the teacher may focus on the content of a course, a student’s academic experience is only one part of the sum total of high school. In this light, it seems natural that the presence of their peers impacted the students. Nick spoke extensively about the importance of relationship building to his practice. However, it appears that he was speaking solely about student-teacher relationships, not student- student relationships. Nick valued the relationships that he had both with individual singers and with the ensemble as a whole. This differs slightly from Parker’s (2016) study in which chorus teachers viewed singers in the ensemble as one unit, not as individuals. Students valued building peer relationships through informal bonding and sectional time. The student-led sectionals I observed perhaps embodied all three building blocks of community: belonging, relationships, and shared experiences. Nick, however, did not attend to peer-peer relationships explicitly. He 212 viewed sectionals as an opportunity for students to exercise leadership skills and accomplish specific musical goals, not as bonding activities. Given what the students in this inquiry expressed, purposefully tending to the interpersonal student relationships within an ensemble could be a worthwhile endeavor. Nick felt the impact of “who is in the room” during public performances. The February and May concerts at Broadport High School served as bookends for the observations in this inquiry. After the school district forbade concerts the previous school year because of the pandemic, Nick felt both joy and stress with the return of public performances. As he considered “who is in the room” of a concert, he felt the impact of both the singers on stage as well as the administration in the audience (Fieldnotes, 6/27/22). He felt relational responsibility to both students and administrators because he valued the community with both groups. First, I consider how Nick was impacted by students “in the room” as he experienced concerts. The commitment to setting the students up for a performance they would feel proud of often overrode other wishes Nick had for the class. As discussed in Chapter 5, Nick was worried about students learning the repertoire in the truncated preparation time. This anxiety caused him to adjust his goals for the performance. The end product was a performance of three polished full chorus pieces interspersed with several solo numbers. However, he admitted that his stomach was in knots leading up to the concert. Nick’s commitment to the students on stage—“in the room”—during the concert caused him stress because he feared he would not have the time to prepare them adequately. Nick’s relationship with the students supported his commitment to preparing them for the shared experience of the concert. Relationships and shared experiences are building blocks to community, but in the context of a concert, these aspects caused Nick stress. To what extent do music teachers perpetuate the pressures of performance thereby being 213 both the cause of the concert-season stress and the ones affected by it? The amount of teacher agency to adjust or remove public performances is likely tied closely to the specific district and community expectations that exist. Nick’s commitment to adequately preparing students for concerts resulted in stress. The second set of relationships Nick tended to during a concert existed between him and his building administrators. Nick viewed concerts as a public assessment of his teaching, and the presence of administration “in the room” at concerts impacted his experience of performances. Nick was aware of his relative newness in the district—this inquiry took place in his third year in RSU 91—and he saw the first step in advocating for long-term goals for the program as “showing success in a language they understand” (Fieldnotes, 6/27/22). If the administration saw a successful concert, Nick argued they would be more likely to support the program going forward. In this way, Nick was aware of the community of colleagues in the room during concerts. First, he could gain the administration’s trust by demonstrating competency on stage. He explained that trust was the first step in broadening their understanding of music education in hopes of expanding course offerings beyond performance-centered ensembles. Nick admitted that this approach pushed other curricular goals he had for the current group to the back burner, but he felt justified in thinking about the long-term goals of the music department. The pressure of performance was not for the music’s sake, but rather for who was in the room: the dual communities he had with the students and with the stakeholders who could support the program. The importance of community was tied to how Nick and students were impacted by the presence of others in various spaces. The students were aware of their relationships with peers during classroom discussions. Nick was aware of the students and administration during 214 concerts, and both stakeholders impacted how he experienced performances. I did not inquire into students’ experiences of concerts. Sociality and Place: Troubling Safety and Family In describing community, students and Nick used the terms “safe” and “family.” I lay their usage of the terms alongside how the concepts appear in the literature to inquire into this emergent aspect of community. The sociality commonplace examines the personal conditions and the social conditions of an experience. Looking through this lens can prompt such questions as: how do students feel in the room or what are the social contexts within which students experience Chamber Choir? The answers to these questions could provide context for established notions of safety and family that students and teachers bring with them into a classroom. Additionally, attending to the place commonplace allows inquirers to investigate how a physical space impacts experiences. Overlapping sociality and place as I interrogate safety and family allows me to look at what aspects of students’ home lives may impact their experiences at school, and how the status quo may be perpetuated under the guise of safety. Nick and the students used the term “safe” to describe the environment in Chamber Choir. Education scholars both embrace (Blair, 2009; Goodrich, 2020; Parker, 2010; Royston, 2017; Shouldice, 2019) and reject (Boler & Zembylas, 2003; Harry & Salvador, 2021; Ojala, 2021) the notion of safety in classrooms. Nick described a safe classroom as one in which students can be who they are, feel supported, and experience a sense of belonging. Some students described Chamber Choir as a safe environment, meaning they felt comfortable sharing their opinions in class discussions. Both Nick and the students who used “safe” employed the term for its positive connotations. I highlight a few instances when researchers promote safety as an important aspect of a classroom environment. Scholars invoke safety as a necessary attribute in a 215 music classroom that allows for healthy risk-taking (Blair, 2009), making musical mistakes17 (Shouldice, 2019), and promoting belonging (Parker, 2010). Royston (2017) advocated for improving students’ experiences in the music classroom by creating a safe space through tending to interpersonal relationships. Goodrich (2020) found that music peer mentor programs created safe spaces for LGBTQIA+ students. These studies invoke safety in a similar manner to how participants used the term. However, educators and researchers can benefit from interrogating the concept of safety. Boler and Zembylas (2003) rejected the notion of a safe classroom based on inherent power differences between student and teacher. Harry and Salvador (2021) urged music educators to resist uniformly establishing a safe space because safety can be a euphemism for “a sterile rejection of controversy” (p. 14). When a classroom is devoid of conflict, which could feel safe to some students, the environment may be promoting exclusively white safety as whiteness operates as normative. What feels safe for one student may be upholding the status quo by avoiding divisive topics. However, the status quo can perpetuate white supremacy in the classroom (Okun, 2021b). Is “safety” too nebulous to use when describing classroom environments? Nick and the singers describe safety as an important and positive aspect of community within the ensemble. They use the term similarly, though I could not determine if they used the term uniformly. There is tension between how Nick and the students use safety and how scholars trouble the idea. Returning to how the participants used “safety,” I further explore the concept specifically in choral music education spaces. Sweet (2020) discussed safety in a choral classroom as an act 17 I examine making musical mistakes later in this chapter within the discussion on vulnerability. 216 of embracing vulnerability. Situating vulnerability in the work of Brown (2012), Sweet expressed that being vulnerable to emotions allows adolescents to experience music making in deep and meaningful ways. She goes on to articulate a safe space in this way: One of the ideas that I promote with my Illinois music education students is the importance of establishing the classroom as a safe space for adolescents to be themselves to explore new facets of their identity as people and as musicians. Safe spaces are not sterile spaces, however, and feeling safe is not the same as feeling comfortable all the time. As adolescents explore who they are and navigate vocal changes, there will be moments of tension or joy or sadness or anger or frustration or exhilaration, and so forth. What is felt in a certain moment is not right or wrong; it is how a person feels at that moment. For adolescents, feelings and emotions ebb and flow a lot, and it is important to acknowledge that these feelings are not wrong. We can provide spaces where adolescents are free to feel vulnerable and further unpack and decipher how they are feeling and thinking. (p. 69, emphasis in original) Parker (2020) identified the repeated cycles of risk and safety as necessary aspects of adolescents’ musical identity construction. A musical space to be oneself, to progress at one’s own pace, and work alongside others resulted in “a feeling of safety and belonging” (p. 119). The way Parker (2020), Sweet (2020), and the participants in this inquiry operationalize safety aligns and invokes all three building blocks of community: belonging, relationships, and shared experiences. However, it could be possible that what feels safe to some singers feels oppressive to others. Perhaps the negative aspects of safety align with the finding of fitting in, and safety operates as maintaining the status quo. 217 In addition to critiquing safety, I trouble the metaphor of family in the classroom. Students described the positive community environment in Chamber Choir as feeling like a family, and Nick called the students in his class “my kids.” Metaphors are context-specific, and not everyone brings the same background to the concept of family. However, this is likely a common metaphor in music education. Adderley et al. (2003) asked high school ensemble members if the music classroom felt like, among other examples, a “home away from home” (p. 203). What some understand to be a universally positive concept, the family metaphor can unintentionally isolate some students. A trauma-informed lens cautions against using family as a way to describe the relationship between teacher and student, or the community environment in a classroom, because family for some may be the source of traumatic experiences. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are traumatic events experienced before age 18. The landmark CDC-Kaiser ACE study brought to light the pervasiveness of individual childhood trauma, such as abuse, parental separation or divorce, and household substance abuse (Felitti et al., 1998). ACEs are sometimes conceptualized as trauma that occurs in the household realm (Vien, 2020). Approximately 61% of U.S. adults surveyed across 23 states reported that they have experienced at least one ACE, and almost one quarter (24.64%) reported three or more ACEs (Merrick et al., 2018). The 2019 Maine Integrated Youth Health survey revealed that 68% of Maine high school students reported that they have experienced at least one ACE, and 21% reported that they have experienced four or more ACEs (Maine Department of Health and Human Services, 2019). These statistics demonstrate the trauma is ubiquitous. Family can be a source of trauma. When invoking terms like safe and family, teachers must be cautious about assuming that the terms have a universal meaning and that that meaning is unilaterally positive. Even the metaphor of a classroom operating like a family is situated in an idealized version of such a unit, which almost 218 no family is. Although relationships are an important component of developing community in an ensemble, those school-based relationships do not necessarily resemble the relationships students experience at home, with their families. Safety and family were two important aspects of the BHS community to many members. The potential for these terms to be harmful illustrates the need to explicitly define how such terms are operationalized, and perhaps replace the terms if necessary. Place: Two Buildings and the Importance of Space The participants shared the experience of attending Broadport High School. Although shared experiences can be a building block of community, I explore the ways the building both supported and prevented community building in this inquiry. “People, place, and stories are inextricably linked” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 41) therefore I inquire into the place dimension to understand the geography of the high school as a character in the participants’ stories. In this section, I explore how Nick’s schedule was strained because he taught in two buildings. This was a source of stress for him, though the resulting downtime for Chamber Choir students provided a welcomed unstructured time to bond with peers. The students primarily described a feeling of community being located in the classroom rather than attributed to specific teacher actions. Lastly, I notice how students and teacher experienced place within the high school, leaning into the similarities and differences. Nick worked in two buildings within the school district, which prevented him from building a professional community with either group of staff members. He was the chorus teacher at both the high school and the middle school. He felt like he was working at least a job and a half. He clarified that the stress caused by working in two buildings was not related to time, as I initially assumed. Rather, two buildings meant two sets of relationships. He felt certainly responsible for students in both buildings, but those relationships fed him. The 219 professional communities in both buildings were drastically different, and he expended a great deal of energy “trying to maneuver administrations with very different personalities” (Fieldnotes, 6/27/22). The way music was valued, or not, in each building differed, and therefore advocating for the program required two unique approaches. Nick adjusted his approach to accommodate his relationships with the two administrations. His propensity for burnout was likely reduced because of the philosophical alignment between his own beliefs and that of his high school’s administration. However, the lack of support at the middle school taxed his mental resources. Nick experienced stress from working in two buildings not because of time constraints, but rather because of the necessary changes to his professionalism that was required to match the administration in each building. It was difficult for Nick to build professional communities with fellow teachers and staff because he was not full-time in either building. While working in two buildings prevented community building for Nick, it resulted in a positive opportunity for students to build peer relationships. The singers categorized what I saw as wasted time or students being off task as prime opportunities for bonding. In my fieldnotes, I regularly brainstormed ways that Nick could utilize the minutes at the beginning of rehearsal that I labeled as “lost” or “wasted” because his two-building schedule did not permit him to start Chamber Choir right at the bell. When I heard from several students that those minutes were important to building community and bonding with fellow singers, I engaged in a humble pause (Patel, 2015). How hubristic of me to brainstorm ways to “improve time use in rehearsal.” That is not the role of the researcher. Additionally, students did use those minutes. The opportunities to be social could be part of the reason students join chorus; if I were to ignore that, I would be prioritizing my teacher goal and perspective over the students’ desires. 220 The students’ experiences of creating community troubled my former-teacher lens with which I observed rehearsals. In response to my asking what Nick did to promote classroom community, students largely answered that it was just a feeling when one entered the room. The geographical boundaries of the chorus room enveloped a sense of community that developed over time and to which Nick tended every class. In my observations, I noticed the deliberate way he greeted students when he entered, the gentle way he began class, and the integration of casual check-ins with vocal warmups. These were everyday practices that I believed added to the creation of community in the classroom. However, the students also told me that unstructured time was beneficial for getting to know the other singers in the room. Nick seemed relatively unphased by the “lost minutes” of rehearsal time, an attitude that pushed against my former- teacher lens. I had to attend temporally to the ways my teacher lens clouded my role as a researcher. There are many ways to run a choral classroom. The Walkthroughs with Nick, Jimin, and Spring demonstrated that a shared experience on its own does not guarantee community, especially if a sense of belonging is absent. Viewed through the commonplace of place, the Walkthroughs exposed how the building influenced participants’ experiences. Nick spent the most time describing his office, chorus room, and the theater during his Walkthrough. In the chorus room especially, he experienced community because of the relationships he had with students and the regular shared experience of rehearsal. He dedicated little time to describing the hallways or cafeterias. This contrasts with Jimin and Spring’s experiences of school. During their Walkthroughs, they had comparatively few words to say about classrooms but spoke voluminously about the spaces outside the classrooms. For Nick, the hallways were merely functional. For the students, hallways represented the worst social aspects of high school, suggesting they felt no sense of belonging in these areas of the building. 221 Spring was acutely aware of which social group had dominion over which hallway; Nick was oblivious. Nick’s focus was on bell-to-bell happenings, meaning, what took place from the beginning of class to the end of class. The students, however, explained to me a layer of high school life defined by the academics, another defined by the peers in the classes with them, and yet another that existed outside the classroom: on the bus, in the halls, and in the cafeteria. The social aspect of high school intertwines with the physical space creating a student experience that is dissimilar to how Nick experienced work. The relationship between place and belonging results in students experiencing community in some areas of the high school but not in others. Empathy, Vulnerability, Discomfort I anticipated encountering the constructs of vulnerability, empathy, and discomfort, and therefore integrated them into the preparation of this dissertation. All were indeed part of the inquiry but to varying levels of importance and not always consistent with the literature. Both students and teacher identified empathy as a takeaway from conversations in Chamber Choir, therefore, I will discuss empathy in relation to the scholarship I introduced in Chapter 2. Next, vulnerability existed in the form of being willing to make mistakes. Finally, I explore the musical discomfort that emerged during the inquiry. I save the discussion of discomfort during conversations for the second part of this chapter. Empathy Both teacher and students viewed empathy as an outgrowth of conversations. Several students reflected that the mask mandate debate especially allowed them the opportunity to place themselves in someone else’s shoes. By taking on the persona of an assigned stakeholder, students explored the contentious issue of mask mandates from another person’s vantage point. Nick expressed that this was an explicit goal of engaging in such discussions. Additionally, Nick 222 viewed empathy as an important construct when exploring music in class. He thought music could be an avenue through which students could gain perspective by inquiring into another’s life. Looking at the various conceptualizations of empathy introduced in Chapter 2, I believe that both students and teacher were invoking Goleman’s (1995) cognitive empathy, or perspective taking. I did not observe or hear about any action that took place due to the perspective-taking. Other types of empathy scholars identify involve responding with care (Batson, 2009) or being moved to help others (Goleman, 1995). Without action, Boler (1999) argued that empathy is merely the passive act of making the unfamiliar other more like oneself. While it is true that there was no activism or action portion of Chamber Choir, I characterize the students’ efforts in cognitive empathy as a necessary first step to understanding a worldview beyond one’s own. Noddings (2013) called for further exploration of the relationship between caring and empathy. She urged educators to provide students the opportunity for “supervised practice in the exercise of attention to other human beings and the evaluation of its results” (p. 205). Nick deliberately designed circumstances for students to practice empathy through conversations. These discussions took place within the caring community of Chamber Choir. Nick encouraged the students to think deeply about the motivations of their assigned stakeholders in the mask mandate debate and about the potential thought processes behind the Twitter statement at the center of the Super Bowl halftime show conversation. The students did not merely recognize the ways the new perspectives were like their own, but they also identified instances of dissimilarity. Empathy as a form of perspective taking was a recognized part of classroom discussions by both students and teacher. 223 Vulnerability Vulnerability existed on the sidelines of this inquiry. Nick spoke about wanting to create an environment where students would feel free to make mistakes. He explicitly gave them permission to make mistakes both musically and in conversation. Spring’s sense of belonging in a class increased if she felt okay making mistakes. In my fieldnotes, I described students making mistakes and taking risks as discomfort, though perhaps looking at them through a lens of agentic emotional vulnerability would be beneficial. Broadport High School Chamber Choir students were mixed on how confident they felt singing out, though I attributed that to their self-described literacy skills. If students felt confident in their music reading skills, they were more likely to sing out as the choir was learning music. Contrastingly, some students told me they routinely listened the first time through a passage so they could hear their peers sing it before they made an attempt. Nick’s rehearsal process valued music literacy, and some students feared making a mistake. If I view making mistakes as an element of vulnerability, then in order to belong in a space, a student has to feel comfortable being vulnerable with the people in the room, which includes being willing to make musical mistakes. Nick’s warmups often required a wide range of physicality. Interestingly, students who reservedly participated were girls. Nick asked students to make large arm gestures and full body movements. He asked them to spread out and take up space. Some girls extended their arms with bent elbows and hesitantly followed Nick’s kinesthetic instructions. Spring and Jimin did not consider their classes when they picked out their outfits for the day. I saw girls tug at rising hemlines and adjust crop tops after each repetition of a warmup. Fashion was an integral part of expressing themselves for Spring and Jimin. Perhaps the same could be said for others in the ensemble. My adult perspective wondered if girls’ clothing made them feel situationally 224 vulnerable because of the physicality of the warmups. This is not to suggest that I think girls should feel body conscious because of an outfit. Rather, I am wondering if that was the case. This gender divide extended to solo auditions as well. Almost all tenors and basses tried out in front of their classmates, demonstrating the same abandon with which they attacked rehearsals. An alto turned to her peer and said, “I know that it’s a safe environment, but it’s so much pressure… I know that I want it. But can I do it in this moment?” (Fieldnotes, 4/5/22). The alto’s situational awareness of her singing voice could be influenced by “fear and risk of embarrassment due to the unpredictable nature of the voice” which has been found to influence how females sing, “especially when in front of others” (Sweet, 2015, p. 84). The willingness to take risks, to possibly make mistakes, to step out of one’s comfort zone, seems related to vulnerability. Could exposing oneself to vulnerability possibly lead to disrupting the sense of community, to making it so one no longer feels belonging? The two activities of singing and discussing seemed to have a reciprocal relationship that increased students’ sense of community. Because they spent so much time together rehearsing— multiple years in some cases—they felt more comfortable having conversations. Conversely, the conversations led to an increased sense of community which helped their musical rehearsal process. Class discussions allowed students to know one another and let go of their assumptions of others. As Parker (2010) noted, “perhaps the shared vulnerability of singing helps to create the climate of openness in the classroom” (p. 349). While Lucy was the only student to explicitly mention vulnerability—in the context of speaking in-person versus online—I believe that musical mistakes and taking risks can be viewed as a subset of vulnerability in the chorus classroom. Additionally, being willing to make mistakes appeared to be intertwined with community and belonging. Even in the most performance-focused ensembles, tending to the 225 social relationships between the members could be a beneficial use of time. Singers might be more willing to take musical risks if they feel like they belong. Discomfort In the development of this inquiry, I wondered about musical discomfort. Although I intended to focus on discomfort through conversation, I was also open to the possibility that students may experience discomfort while singing or by engaging in unfamiliar ways of making music. If I extend the finding that community determines students’ comfort levels more than the discussion topic, perhaps I would discover a similar musical conclusion. If students feel belonging in the room, they may be better equipped to navigate discomfort when singing or encountering new music. Indeed, in a study investigating how girls experience their voice change during puberty, Sweet (2015) found that “the essence of the experience of female voice change was that vulnerability and fear of embarrassment determined all use of the singing voice, resulting in risk assessment for each singing situation and setting” (p. 84). Students are supremely aware of the social aspect of the choral room. Sweet (2020) advocated for explicit instruction about puberty for all singers to help them navigate their changing voices through adolescence. Puberty can cause physical discomfort, and a changing voice can lead to complicated emotions for ensemble members. Even though female singers sometimes experienced physical discomfort singing an assigned part, they may have been hesitant to express those feelings to a teacher for fear of letting down the ensemble (Sweet, 2018). Perhaps this musical discomfort situated in a changing voice adds context to the solo audition process in Chamber Choir. In the three months I observed, I did not witness any discussion about the changing voice; however, I acknowledge that I did not ask Nick about previous such discussions 226 on the topic. How voice-changing adolescent singers’ physical discomfort intersects with social discomfort, vulnerability, and the desire to belong would benefit from empirical investigation. In this inquiry, I was attuned to conversation and musical experiences producing controversy or unsettled emotions. I did not see any discomfort resulting from unfamiliar musical content, though I did not inquire into the students’ experiences in this realm. I acknowledge that my perspective as an observer is only one viewpoint. The constructs of empathy, vulnerability, and discomfort were important in this inquiry. However, their importance was overshadowed by the emergent theme of community. In this section, I explored how the three constructs were evident throughout the inquiry. Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Although I framed the design of the study using anti-racist education, what I observed in the classroom necessitated a different framework. Culturally relevant pedagogy emerged as a better fit. Moreover, I designed this study and utilized the literature from Chapter 2 in a decidedly teacher-focused manner. The literature on controversial public issues and anti-racist education focused on what the teacher does in the classroom. At first, my adoption of these lenses clouded my ability to hear what the students were telling me. The way the students spoke about the discussions in Chamber Choir compared to other classes—along with Nick’s teaching philosophy—led me to include literature on culturally relevant pedagogy. I was so narrowly focused on Nick’s specific practices in the classroom that I nearly missed the impact of his overall philosophy. Indeed, students struggled to name particular ways Nick created the environment in the classroom; instead, they talked about building a supportive community as an ongoing endeavor. My focus and “fuss over ‘methods’ was misplaced. What teachers believe about their students, their families, and communities matters immensely” (Ladson-Billings, 227 2021, p. 153).18 Furthermore, “there is no script, no checklist, no set of techniques” to enact culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 4). Rather, Ladson-Billings put forth three equally weighted components of the pedagogy. The three pillars of culturally relevant pedagogy are student learning, cultural competence, and sociopolitical/critical consciousness (Ladson-Billings, 2021, pp. 4–9). Student learning refers to growth that occurs over a period of time for a specific student, not measured against any standardized model of success. This recognizes both that students’ individual growth may look different than their peers and that students learn more than it is possible to capture in any one test. Cultural competence calls for teachers to provide students the opportunity to gain an “understanding of their own history, culture, customs, and languages” and develop the “fluency and facility in at least one other culture” (p. 5). This need applies to “white, mainstream students” as well as BIPOC students so that they are all ready “to operate in a diverse, globally interconnected, democratic society” (p. 5). The final pillar is sociopolitical/critical consciousness “is the essence of education in a democratic society” (p. 6) in which students prepare to be “effective members of society” by “critiqu[ing] their environment and the problems they encounter” (p. 7). While Ladson-Billings put forth culturally relevant pedagogy to advocate for quality teaching for Black students, it was never intended solely for Black students, but rather “it has always been about raising our pedagogical game for all children” (p. 9). Thus, applying a 18 Ladson-Billings (2021) builds on earlier work, including: Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The dream keepers: Successful teachers of African American children (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Education Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: A.k.a. the remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84. 228 culturally relevant pedagogy lens to my observations in a majority white, low-poverty school district in Maine has merit. Nick embodied the culturally relevant pedagogy proposition of student learning. He firmly believed that all students were capable of success, and he was committed to providing the tools to achieve both in and out of the classroom. He held high standards for all students. Students reported commonly having conversations based on potentially controversial issues in their honors-level classes but not elsewhere within their school schedule. Perhaps teachers believed that only honors students were capable of engaging in such discussions, similar to how the socioeconomic status of students affected the academic expectations teachers held for them (Anyon, 1980). In his previous district, Nick was trained in critical thinking strategies to lead a non-musical honors class for 12th grade students. He applied these techniques to conversations within Chamber Choir, whose membership encompassed a mix of ages and a range of students enrolled in honors classes or not. Nick created a culture of high expectations, and students chose academic excellence (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 47). Furthermore, Nick operated from the standpoint of building a community of learners who worked collaboratively to learn. This disrupted the power hierarchy of the teacher being the holder of all knowledge and opened the possibility of sharing the one-caring and cared-for roles. Students had learned to watch for their teachers’ reactions to student contributions, to prioritize the teachers’ reason for discussing a topic rather than their own thoughts, and readily dismissed their ideas in lieu of teachers’ thoughts. Both in formal discussions and in rehearsal, Nick demonstrated that he valued student input and believed that they are capable of having individual thoughts. Students noticed this. From my observations and discussions with Nick and students, I learned that he embodied the student learning pillar of culturally relevant pedagogy. 229 I did not see significant evidence of teaching for cultural competence, as defined by Ladson-Billings (2021), during my observation period. Nick asked for student input on selecting repertoire for the May concert, which demonstrated how he co-constructed the classroom experience with the singers. However, the three pieces he selected were within the musical theatre/movie genre. This could be interpreted as narrowly attending to cultural competence. Students honed their skills within the culture of the Western choral music tradition, but that singularity lacks the “bicultural” aspect that Ladson-Billings calls for. Nick spoke about the natural alignment of music education with exploring other cultures. Indeed, he explained how he did that in previous years through literature and individual student research projects. I believe that the pressures of performance overrode Nick’s desire to engage in such cultural exploration. Students developed sociopolitical/critical consciousness through discussions in Chamber Choir. Ladson-Billings asserted that this pillar is the most ignored by educators who purport to engage in culturally relevant pedagogy. The most common reaction to this component is that it’s too dangerous. Teachers will talk about not wanting to get “too political.” As I explain culturally relevant pedagogy to them, I try to make them recognize that all teaching is political. Even the declaration that one is not going to engage in anything political in the classroom is a political decision. The failure to engage in sociopolitical or critical consciousness represents an acceptance of the status quo. (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 6) Some students expressed a similar concern within the mask mandate conversation; they wished to avoid the topic because it was too political. I found political party affiliation to be a dominant identity marker for many students. However, Ladson-Billings (2021) cautioned, “The political work of the classroom is not to be confused with partisanship” (p. 7). Teachers must provide 230 students the opportunity to critique the world around them using whatever issues are most important to them. So if it is the attire and weight loss of Kim Kardashian (Yuan, 2022) or the fall of Roe v. Wade (Mangan & Breuninger, 2022), culturally relevant pedagogy calls for teachers to know their students, to respond to their interests, and to provide students the opportunity to analyze, synthesize, and critique the world around them. Nick accomplished this pillar by discussing the Super Bowl halftime show and the ending of mask mandates. He repeatedly expressed a commitment to the skills he teaches in class being relevant to students’ lives outside of school. Schools should be preparing students for “democratic citizenship,” therefore, students must learn how to engage with and “discuss divisive public topics” (D. E. Hess, 2002, p. 11). In response to the prevalence of adults in government positions, local and national, not being able to civilly disagree, Nick desired for students to cultivate a sociopolitical consciousness. “If we’re not teaching them to do this stuff in school and our classrooms, how on earth do we expect them to be able to do it when they leave?” (Interview, 1/28/22). The administrative support for potentially divisive conversations within classes at Broadport High School illuminates the impact of place on an environment: the singular-ness of the inquiry location undoubtedly affects the findings. Students in Nick’s classroom had many opportunities to practice utilizing their developing sociopolitical consciousness. Jimin and Spring expressed themselves artistically as well as musically. For this inquiry, they both shared pieces of their visual art that spoke to their identity and work of which they were particularly proud. Additionally, Spring created a map to articulate belonging in a way that words could not capture. Although the May concert at Broadport High School also included a student art show, an exclusive set of BHS students created the artwork displayed. Ladson- Billings (2021) noticed that culturally relevant teachers “demonstrate[d] a connectedness with all 231 of the students” (p 32). I wonder about the possibilities of student expression through multiple mediums during Chamber Choir as a way to form peer and teacher connections. In the time that I observed, students engaged in discussions and music making; both activities heightened their sense of connectedness. What opportunities exist for artistic, or other, connections within the music classroom as a way to honor the whole student? Ladson-Billings acknowledged that the inquiry that led to the three propositions of culturally relevant pedagogy took place in elementary classrooms. As she reflected on her scholarship, she recognized the possibility for secondary teachers to use “the power of youth and popular culture” in their teaching in a way that is perhaps less probable in the earlier grades (155). Nick realized this possibility by utilizing the Super Bowl halftime show, which most of the students in the class had already seen, as a jumping-off point for a discussion on bias. Furthermore, the specific statement that was the basis for the conversation came from Twitter. By integrating social media and the Super Bowl into classroom conversation, Nick created a culturally relevant experience for students, and they practiced critical thinking tools that could be applied to novel situations outside the classroom walls. In this section, I introduced emergent themes from the data. I first discussed how I shifted the focus of this inquiry. The salient theme became the importance of community. Situated in Parker’s (2016) work, I defined community in the choral classroom as a combination of belonging, relationships, and shared experiences. I placed the teacher’s experiences alongside the students’ experiences and noticed where they aligned and where tension existed. I explored the impact of who is in the room, troubled the notions of safety and family, and explored the impact of teaching in two buildings. I anticipated the constructs of empathy, vulnerability, and discomfort, and indeed they were present, and I discussed here the specific ways they showed up 232 in the inquiry. Lastly, I presented culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2021) as a useful framework to interpret Nick’s teaching and the students’ experiences in Chamber Choir. Critique: Challenging Where I Began While planning this inquiry, I sought literature that could be the lens through which I view how students and a teacher might experience difficult conversations in a chorus classroom. In this section, I discuss the findings from Chapters 5 and 6 through the three sets of previously introduced literature: discussing controversial public issues in schools (D. E. Hess, 2002), anti- racist education (Dei, 2000), and a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999). First, I focus exclusively on the discussions held in Chamber Choir by examining Nick’s facilitation through the lens of controversial public issues in secondary classrooms. Next, I look for ways Nick enacted anti-racist music education in his classroom. This was the framework I used for this dissertation, and it proved useful for some aspects, while culturally relevant pedagogy ultimately served the findings better in other ways. Lastly, I present reasons why utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort would not be appropriate in the setting I observed. By reaching back to where I began, I critique the appropriateness of the application of literature presented to the findings of this dissertation. Discussing Controversial Public Issues D. E. Hess (2002) proposed six common attributes held by teachers who demonstrated mastery in leading classroom discussions on controversial public issues. According to Hess, controversial public issues “are unresolved questions of public policy that spark significant disagreement” (p. 11). During this inquiry, Nick held a debate on the ending of mask mandates at school, which undoubtedly qualifies as a controversial public issue. The Super Bowl halftime show conversation perhaps is not one of public policy; however, popular public opinion was split 233 on the performance. Hess sought to codify what constitutes effective discussions on controversial public issues in secondary social studies classes, and I found that Nick embodied several of the teaching practices in his music classroom. For example, the discussions during chorus were the desired outcomes of the class meetings; students learned how to better engage in public discourse. However, the Super Bowl discussion also served as a method to teach students how to identify implicit biases within social media statements. In this way, Nick taught “for, not just with, discussion” (D. E. Hess, 2002, p. 29). Hess (2002) found that expert teachers shared some of the power with students by creating conversation guidelines. Nick began the Super Bowl conversation by referencing the conversation norms he and the students had co-created at the beginning of the school year. Additionally, Nick selected topics to discuss in class that directly impacted the students and were present in their out-of-school lives. This demonstrates Nick’s commitment to making course content relevant to students beyond the classroom, which aligns with Hess’s (2002) third proposition: “teachers select a discussion model and a facilitator style that is congruent with their reasons for using discussion and their definition of what constitutes effective discussion” (p. 30). To my knowledge, Nick did not assess students’ participation in either formal discussion I observed. However, I cannot say if that was a deliberate decision that aligned with his values on participation, which is Hess’s fourth effective teacher strategy. The final two propositions Hess outlined were visible in Nick’s class. During both the discussions, Nick did not offer his personal views on either matter. However, his choice of topics represents his views that those matters were indeed worthy of discussion. In the mask mandate debate, Nick also asked students to set aside their own personal views and look at the issue from the perspective of their assigned stakeholders. Not only does this demonstrate Nick’s attention to the relationships in the room and the high potential for students to feel hesitant to express their 234 own opinions, but the decision also aligned with Nick’s desire for students to think of others and acknowledge the existence of multiple viewpoints on an issue. Lastly, engaging in potentially controversial issues “is aligned with, not in opposition to, what is expected in the school” (D. E. Hess, 2002, p. 33). The administration at Broadport High School expressed their support of students having civil conversations about topics about which they may disagree, and the school district’s mission statement embraced “challenging minds” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Nick demonstrated mastery in leading discussions on controversial public issues. I found the six attributes Hess (2002) proposed to be a useful list when explicating how Nick demonstrated mastery in facilitating class discussions. Anti-racist Education In Chapter 2, I outlined tenets of anti-racist education. Here, I discuss what I observed in Nick’s classroom through the lens of anti-racism in a general education setting. Then, I look more specifically at anti-racism in music education. Anti-racist education challenges the notion of normative whiteness (Dei, 2000). During the Super Bowl discussion, a student identified this bias: “rap doesn’t meet the white standard for music” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Nick urged the students to dive deeper into that statement. Though that was only a brief section of the overall conversation, explicitly talking about race was tied to issues of power and popularity within the music industry. After the discussion, students expressed to me an awareness of their privilege as white, educated teenagers, which in some led to a hesitancy to engage in the topic of race. This race-related hesitancy could be an example of racial colorblindness, “the belief that racial group membership should not be taken into account, or even noticed” (Apfelbaum et al., 2012, p. 205). Color blindness can lead people to proclaim, “I don’t see race,” yet perceiving race differentiation occurs rapidly and at a young age (Bar-Haim et al., 2006). The white students 235 seemed afraid to mention race perhaps because of an ingrained belief that they should not notice racial differences. Aware of this possibility, Nick relied on the co-created discussion norms to support an environment conducive to discussing uncomfortable topics. Two of the norms are particularly relevant here: “support each other as we work to articulate our thoughts” and “challenge ourselves to acknowledge our emotions and biases as we debate” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22). Additionally, Nick did not shy away from the topic of race. Rather, when the student brought up whiteness in music, he filled what could have been a “race-related silence” with explicit language and the resources to engage the class in the discussion (J. Hess, 2017, p. 16). While the student broke the silence about race, Nick supported the use of explicit language and prompted students to address the systemic inequities in popular music (J. Hess, 2017). Nick set up his classroom to be one in which students can become aware of their social position in the world and share a responsibility for learning with the teacher (Kishimoto, 2018). Through classroom discussions, Nick adopted many tenets of anti-racist education. Overwhelmingly, students expressed an abundant awareness of political identity and felt that their peers in Chamber Choir all held their same (liberal) ideologies. Not all students mentioned politics; it is certainly possible that the students who did not mention political viewpoints held contrasting beliefs. If, however, political identity is at the forefront of students’ identities and there is a belief that everyone feels the same, perhaps conversations in class act as a confirmation activity rather than a tool for disruption. Viewing this possibility through an anti- racist lens necessitates an acknowledgment of how whiteness operates normatively, especially in moments of silence. Now, in an overwhelmingly white school, perhaps there are ways that whiteness occupies the majority. However, a failure to identify normative assumptions can lead 236 to perpetuating white supremacy. Through discussion, music educators can play a role in helping students in a fairly homogenous setting recognize their normative views. Additionally, teachers must make space for students of color to affirm their identities in the music program. Students appreciated the opportunity to practice empathy in classroom discussions and perhaps learn to disagree with peers. Perhaps, then, there is room to engage these goals with acknowledging whiteness in conversation. While this inquiry focused on discussions, I also looked at how Nick engaged in anti- racist music education throughout the rehearsal process. Dungee (2020) asserted that merely the inclusion of diverse repertoire is not anti-racist teaching to its fullest; rather, he argued that teachers must also interrogate their own privilege, advocate for anti-racist policies, and integrate anti-racist teaching practices into their pedagogy. Nick worked on three pieces during the inquiry. The pieces aligned with Nick’s musical goals for the singers and his vision for the May performance. Was it “diverse” repertoire? Is it fair of me to interrogate the diversity of repertoire based on just three pieces? Placed in conjunction with the repertoire the students prepared for the February concert, Nick selected songs within and outside of the Western canon, popular music, folk music, sacred (Jewish and Christian) and secular, and music by female and BIPOC composers or arrangers. However, as Dungee suggested, repertoire selection is not the end of anti-racist teaching. It matters more what the teacher does in practice and preparation than what literature the students prepare. Teachers gain a great deal by integrating anti-racist practices into music education. Nick pushed against the concepts of merit and ability by allowing all students who wanted to sing a solo to perform at the May concert. Though this critique is not unique to anti-racism, it is one way music teachers can work toward a justice-oriented experience for students (J. Hess, 2015). 237 To disrupt whiteness as normal in music education is to recognize its centrality in “the ensemble paradigm, through repertoire, in curriculum, in the privileging of notation and still comportment” (J. Hess, 2021b, p. 17). Chamber Choir is a decidedly performance-oriented class that centers notational literacy. Students experience choral music through the Western classical tradition of the large ensemble; there is a singular epistemology through which students know music (J. Hess, 2015). In this way, Nick’s pedagogy is not anti-racist. Similarly, anti-racism was not embedded in the curriculum, as there was a notable absence of courageous conversations (Singleton, 2015) about the literature selected. Although I contextualize Nick’s teaching nestled between the idealism of his philosophy and the realism of the time, there could have been conversations that examined the origins of the music studied and the musical theatre productions from which they came (J. Hess, 2017). How simple it is for me to write about the possibilities for music education to be an agent of change from behind the comfort of my computer screen without students to teach and a community that expects a performance. Music teachers can attend to anti-racist practices in a multitude of spaces. Hess (2017) advocated for “being explicit with teacher discourse outside the classroom” (p. 30) which she went on to explain as in meetings with other teachers and administrators. Through this inquiry, I wonder about the spaces that students occupy that are not teacher-focused: the hallways, the bus rides, the cafeteria. Jimin’s experiences with racism in middle school happened on the bus and in the cafeteria, places where adults are not necessarily a part of every conversation. Through the Walkthroughs for this inquiry, I came to learn that the hallways played an integral role in the students’ high school experiences. As Spring mustered the courage to walk down “the popular kids’ hallway,” she berated herself for being so judgmental, yet she admitted that there are still “a lot of inside things that I don’t say out loud” (Walkthrough, 5/10/22). Perhaps the 238 opportunities for teachers to challenge students’ cultural assumptions happen less often at the secondary level because students have learned that there are things that you “don’t say out loud.” Hess (2015, 2017) wrote about elementary school teachers who engaged in anti-racist teaching partially by responding to the cultural assumptions that students expressed during class. Broadport High School Chamber Choir students appeared homogenous in their thinking, and Nick expressed a need to deliberately peel back layers to have deeper conversations. If this is a result of students learning what is socially acceptable to say in their specific high school environment, teachers would need to diligently engage students to acknowledge their deeply- held beliefs, which may or may not align with what they share in class discussions? Furthermore, the findings of this study demonstrate the influence of the hallways and cafeteria on the student experience. What control do teachers have over hallway and cafeteria conversations? Should they have any? Through deliberate conversations that addressed race and bias, Nick’s teaching was anti-racist. However, the pressures of performance and the stressful nature of the job limited his capacity to engage in other aspects of anti-racist music education. Pedagogy of Discomfort In Chapter 2, I presented Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort as a framework for potentially analyzing what I observed and as a method the teacher participant may incorporate in his classroom. Through interviews and observations, I determined that a pedagogy of discomfort is not appropriate for this inquiry setting. In this section, I first acknowledge ways in which a pedagogy of discomfort could have been an appropriate framework, but I illuminate why I ultimately determined it not to be. These reasons include: the time constraints within the choral rehearsal process that would limit the teacher’s ability to care for their students; the disruption of worldviews may not be appropriate for students, though the teacher could find use in the process; 239 and adolescents in this study expressed binary thinking. Additionally, I critique Boler’s assumption that the process would be discomforting, and I question whether a pedagogy of discomfort would be the most appropriate way to engage all students in classroom conversation. Boler’s framework was useful in my development of this inquiry and pushed my thinking about the role of emotions in classroom conversation, but ultimately, I determined that it would not be appropriate in the Broadport High School Chamber Choir classroom. One reason a pedagogy of discomfort could seem to be a suitable fit for this research is that Boler (1999) viewed emotions as the foundation for relational existence. Narrative inquiry is a “relational methodology” that recognizes that participants’ experiences are to be understood in relation to time, sociality, and place (Clandinin, 2013, p. 23). The narrative is co-created in the space between the inquirer and the participant. Additionally, Nick viewed relationships as the foundation of everything that happened in his classroom. He was committed to a relational existence in Chamber Choir and made space for students’ emotions. Boler viewed a pedagogy of discomfort as an endeavor that both teacher and student take together. Nick also attended to the teacher-student relationships and aimed to include student voice when he could. Boler advocated for teachers to attend to their classroom climate to create the space to have discomforting experiences. Nick attended to relationships to create community, allowing students to have a sense of belonging, enhance music making, and embrace the range of human emotions. A pedagogy of discomfort can be used to disrupt worldviews and question cherished beliefs. I imagined this being useful before beginning this project in chorus conversations around such topics as performing gender in music or singing religious music. During the observation, I saw the potential for its use in the Super Bowl conversation as students were dissecting possible implicit biases held by others. Could Nick have asked students to reflect on their own biases 240 against a genre of music they may not value? He could have led students through a creation of emotional genealogies—where do held beliefs originate—that investigate why they held negative views of a specific genre of music. However, in light of the high value for community by belonging, I worry that questioning cherished beliefs and challenging worldviews may result in a shattered sense of self. To feel a sense of belonging, one must be accepted for who they are. If a student’s sense of self is questioned because of the use of a pedagogy of discomfort, I worry it would make it harder for them to feel a sense of belonging in the classroom. I do add one important caveat. Teachers must address the instances of white supremacy and other oppressive systems. Oppression reinforces a false hierarchy among people and is “rooted in reason and rationality” (J. Hess, 2021a, p. 57). White supremacist rhetoric, an example of expressed hate, can be more easily identified than implicit manifestations. However, Hess (2021a) asserted “oppression based on reason is more important to critique and challenge than hate rooted in emotion” (p. 57). Although both hate and oppression can lead to violence, Hess argued that oppression is more dangerous because some view the rationality of oppression justifying violent acts perpetrated in its name. Okun (2021a) identified several characteristics of white supremacy culture, such as the belief that there is one right way to do things, uplifting individualism, and worshiping the written word. Although addressing manifestations of white supremacist culture may not change the minds or behavior immediately, doing so is the necessary work of an anti- racist teacher. The time constraints on conversation in the classroom during this inquiry lead me to believe that a pedagogy of discomfort is inappropriate in this setting. Boler cautioned against utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort without also offering critical hope to students. Critical hope is an action item; it is a way forward through the discomfort of shattered worldviews. It could be a 241 lengthy endeavor to tend to the emotional journey of every student in an ensemble after engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort. Imagine a classroom discussion that asked students to critically consider the gender norms in the text of a song. This could be a worthwhile endeavor. However, then the teacher asks the students to inquire into the construction of the gender norms they hold, how those gendered roles play out in their lives and families, and what message about gender they receive from school. Again, this could be a worthwhile endeavor. However, the teacher must have the time to journey with the students as they process the new considerations around gender that the conversation brought up. Dedicating an entire class period to conversations may be a stretch for some ensemble directors. During my three months in Nick’s class, he held full- class period discussions twice. But the next class, it was back to rehearsal as usual, which did not include discussions. The pressure of performance constrained the time Nick would have needed to ethically engage in a pedagogy of discomfort. Additionally, his teaching in two buildings would make him less available for outside-of-class time one-on-one meetings with students that may be required to provide individualized critical hope. For the setting of this inquiry, the time constraints make a pedagogy of discomfort an ill-fitting match. Boler proposed that through a pedagogy of discomfort, both teachers and students can attend to the co-implications of how their worldviews are shaped. Within this pedagogy, students and teachers investigate themselves and seek to understand how media and the world around them influence their cherished beliefs. As they stew in the ambiguity of adolescent identity development, who they are is at play, malleable, changeable. Boler acknowledged that this intense process of “witnessing” can induce feelings of shame and blame as students scrutinize their worldviews. Within the setting of this inquiry, I contend that the emotionally-heavy work of witnessing may be appropriate for teachers but not necessarily for students. Teachers could 242 inquire into the co-implications of the curriculum they enact with students and critique their own cherished beliefs that may come through in their teaching. Teachers can recognize how their beliefs shape the student experience by the repertoire selected, the framing of conversations, and the values held in the classroom. In Payne and Journell’s (2019) study of a teacher leading politically charged conversations with fifth graders, the teacher sought to create a space where students could see themselves in current events. The teacher asked students to use their identities to make sense of the world around them. This approach, while more like Boler’s “spectating,” could be more appropriate given the findings of this inquiry. The students I observed were capable of having rich conversations about current events. However, their tendency toward binary thinking is a roadblock from fully engaging in a pedagogy of discomfort. Boler (1999) argued that “living with ambiguity is discomforting” (p. 196) but also “a worthy educational ideal” (p. 197) because it allows people to attend to the spaces between binaries. Nick exhibited pluralistic thinking in his conceptions of success and in the language he used around philosophical values in education. Students, however, utilized language of dualisms that demonstrated a binary worldview. Okun (2021b) cautioned against simplifying the complexity of life into binaries that reinforce toxic power. The moralistic hierarchies that thrive in binary thinking can perpetuate white supremacy culture. If students do not yet possess the capacity for multiplicity, I contend that it may not be appropriate for them to first encounter this through a pedagogy of discomfort. I propose opportunities for students to experience ambiguity in situations with stakes lower than disrupting cherished beliefs. Scholars demonstrated that there are developmentally appropriate methods for students to engage in difficult conversations. Ladson-Billings (1990) conducted the research that led to the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy in elementary school classrooms. Hess (2015) 243 observed a music teacher engage grade three students in age-appropriate discussions on disrupting the white savior narrative by refocusing the conversation on inequity. Dunn (2022) found that teachers’ views on the “right” age to have critical conversations vary widely. She argued that much of what happens in classrooms around such conversations “depends on the comfort, criticality, and capability of the teacher rather than the students” (p. 83). Dunn argued that days after pedagogy19 is useful for all ages (pp. 82-88) and all content areas (89-93). Payne and Journell (2019) observed a teacher discuss presidential politics with elementary students by asking the students about how national events impact their world. These scholars demonstrated that students are aware of the world around them; therefore, having conversations about what they see is appropriate. It is up to the teacher to negotiate the topic skillfully. To engage students in politically charged current events topics, I believe the tenets of culturally responsive pedagogy, discussed earlier in this chapter, align more closely with the reality of the classroom I observed rather than a pedagogy of discomfort. Boler assumed discomfort would result from questioning cherished beliefs and strongly- held worldviews. I carried that assumption into this inquiry. Boler wrote from a place of experience; she engaged in a pedagogy of discomfort in her role as a college professor. She witnessed students experience discomfort in her classrooms. Boler (1999) presented the “central focus” of a pedagogy of discomfort “is to recognize how emotions define how and what one chooses to see, and conversely, not to see” (p. 176). I appreciate her attention to the role of emotions. Simultaneously, I am aware that I entered this inquiry searching for students’ discomfort, convinced it would be there due to difficult topics discussed. What I heard from 19 See Chapter 1 for a discussion on Days After Pedagogy (Dunn, 2022). 244 students challenged my assumption that any specific emotion would result from a particular topic that I may view as difficult. Students told me that their peers’ presence and the sense of community factored more into their comfort in the classroom than the topic under discussion. While students may be well-served by their teachers acknowledging emotions in the classroom, they may be dis-served if the teacher assumes something will be necessarily discomforting. Some students made assumptions about their peers and the similarity of classmates’ viewpoints during the inquiry. The theme of “we all agree,” especially around political ideologies, existed. Perkins (2019) noticed that a student with conservative worldviews did not speak up in his choral rehearsal room. This may have also been the case in the Broadport High School Chamber Choir. However, I do not believe utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort would have been the appropriate line of action to engage all students in classroom discussion. I fear that the goal of identifying taken-for-granted beliefs and disrupting worldviews may be challenging within the sociality of the high school classroom, and it would perhaps not account for the vulnerability of some students, especially those with beliefs that clash with their peers. Perhaps, instead, a teacher could tend more carefully to the community in the room, create relationships with individual students as well as tend to the relationships between peers, to work toward a space in which all students felt comfortable expressing their opinions, even if those opinions exist in opposition to the dominant view of the class. A pedagogy of discomfort has much to offer in certain areas of education, which I will explore in Chapter 8. Although Boler’s (1999) framework shaped how I entered this inquiry, through listening and observations, I determined that it was not the most appropriate for the setting. Boler’s attention to emotions and community is a good match for what I observed in this setting. However, I contend that a pedagogy of discomfort is not the soundest educational 245 approach in this specific setting for these reasons: the lack of time to dedicate to cultivating critical hope, the adolescents’ prevalent binary thinking, and the goal of disrupting cherished beliefs. In this section, I revisited three sets of literature I introduced as I designed this study and explored how they were a useful lens for the participants' experiences. During discussions in Chamber Choir, Nick exhibited many of the skills Hess (2002) attributed to teachers who masterfully led conversations on controversial public issues. While Nick’s use of conversation to disrupt normative whiteness in music embraced an anti-racist lens, his approach to other aspects of music education did not. Lastly, I explored the multiple reasons why a pedagogy of discomfort is not an appropriate framework for the setting of this inquiry. Summary In this chapter, first, I explored emergent themes. The most salient emergent theme was the importance of community. Situated within the commonplaces of temporality, sociality, and place, I noticed the ways the students’ and teacher experiences aligned or created tension with each other in these areas: the impact of who is in the room; the analogies of safety and family; the impact of physical space; and the students’ experience with advisory. Because of the emergent theme of community, I recalibrated the inquiry, which I reflect on in this chapter. I revisited the constructs of empathy, vulnerability, and discomfort. Lastly, I offered culturally relevant pedagogy as a lens through which to view Nick’s teaching and the students’ experiences in Chamber Choir. In the second half of this chapter, I critiqued the appropriateness of the literature previously introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. Because I was designing a study on difficult conversations, I had searched for examples of teachers leading discussions on controversial 246 issues, which led me to the work of Hess (2002). Nick demonstrated several of the mastery teaching strategies that Hess proposed. Next, I viewed Nick’s discussion facilitation and music rehearsing through an anti-racist education framework. Lastly, I discussed why a pedagogy of discomfort is not appropriate in the setting of this inquiry. These three sets of literature framed the study’s design and had varying levels of relevant application at the end. 247 CHAPTER 8: IMPLICATIONS The importance of community is the salient finding of this inquiry. Students thrive when they feel a sense of belonging in a space. With the security of community, students may be more likely to engage in conversations, including ones on difficult topics. If they have a sense of belonging, students may be willing to take musical risks, make mistakes, and be vulnerably uncomfortable. My research question focused on the emotion of discomfort that I assumed would be present in difficult conversations. Students told me a different story. When I softened my research gaze and walked alongside the participants to where they were leading me, I learned about the importance of community. In this chapter, I present implications for PK–12 teachers, for music teacher educators, and for future research based on the findings of this study. The themes of listening to adolescents and cultivating classroom community can be integrated into all three arenas. Additionally, I explore the ways the pedagogy of discomfort can be used with undergraduate students as a way to disrupt whiteness in the field. I end this chapter and this dissertation with an epilogue. PK–12 Teaching The findings of this study provide many reflection opportunities for PK–12 teachers, specifically secondary choral teachers. In this section, I present several areas for consideration, though a teacher certainly may extract other threads for reflection. First, I advocate for consciously tending to community. Next, I discuss the importance of recognizing adult worldviews in teaching. I interrogate the value of discussion and performance in the ensemble. Then, I explore the opportunities to integrate critical conversations across the curriculum. Lastly, I suggest that teachers engage in critical conversations during professional development and recommend teachers study the pedagogy of leading such conversations in classrooms. 248 Making Time for Community Building Teachers may help support students by actively tending to classroom community. Students in this inquiry reported that their comfort level discussing any range of topics was more influenced by their sense of community rather that the specific subject for conversation. Although Nick tended to the environment of the entire class, and to his personal relationships with students, after discussing this inquiry’s findings, he saw an opportunity for growth in his praxis. He plans to explore ways he can support students building peer-to-peer relationships. Students in the inquiry noted that sectional times built camaraderie, and they identified unstructured rehearsal time as opportunities for bonding. This shifted my perspective on what I would have classified as wasted rehearsal time, a bias that perhaps resonates with other music teachers. Nick believed that students left their interpersonal drama at the door, which contrasted with the student experience of being highly aware of their peers in the classroom. Students reported feeling more comfortable making mistakes if they felt a sense of belonging, which could benefit the rehearsal process and lead to individual and ensemble growth. With this knowledge, teachers may consider setting aside dedicated bonding time, especially at the beginning of the school year. Deliberately planning for ways for students to get to know each other could have musical and social benefits that last the entire year. One way to build community could be through allowing time for conversation. Although Nick planned for both lengthy discussions in this inquiry, he expressed a willingness to let go of his lesson plan if an urgent topic came up. Dunn (2022) supports this notion of flexibility in teaching to acknowledge the impact of world events on students in a classroom. Students expressed appreciation for having a class in which they could talk about pressing matters. Routinely checking in with students at the beginning of class could allow for a teacher to gauge 249 if there are any pressing matters that could be discussed throughout the rehearsal. Singers in this inquiry expressed an omnipresent awareness of issues—both personal, interpersonal, and global—that stayed with them in the rehearsal space. Conversations could also be on planned topics related to the music curriculum. For example, choral teachers may consider explicitly addressing the adolescent voice change throughout the year to normalize talking about puberty (Sweet, 2020), which could go a long way in alleviating potential discomfort or embarrassment when students’ voices do not perform the way they would like them to. I advocate for conversations to be a regular part of choral education. Acknowledging Adultism Choral music education may benefit from teachers acknowledging their adult worldview. In this inquiry, I had the privilege of sitting down with a dozen high school students for one-on- one in depth conversations. I was struck by how much I valued those conversations from a researcher’s perspective juxtaposed with how rarely I made time for such opportunities when I was teaching high school students. I developed this inquiry and entered the field with a decidedly adult perspective. The students shared their experiences and demonstrated how their unique adolescent perspective can differ from the teacher’s. Through this inquiry, I began to recognize how adultism20 operates in my research and teaching. I am not urging teachers to remember their adolescence. Rather, this is a call to recognize that the adolescent worldview is distinct from the adult perspective. Of course, it is worth restating that there is no monolithic “adult” or “adolescent” experience. 20 Adultism is “behaviors and attitudes based on the assumption that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without their permission. This treatment is reinforced by social institution, laws, customs and attitudes” (National Conference for Community and Justice, 2022). 250 I see three threads of attending to adultism in the music classroom. First, music teachers may find it beneficial to interrogate instances when they feel they know best, moments of valuing adult knowledge over adolescents’ understanding. This hierarchical perspective may also limit what teachers assume about students’ capabilities. The combined interrogation of adultism and embracing of culturally relevant pedagogies could allow for high expectations for all students and the belief that all students are capable of learning. Nick consistently held high expectations for students and believed they had much to offer the music making and discussion process. However, he did acknowledge that when he feels the pressure of performance, he does rely on his teacher knowledge to set the agenda for the class, devoid of student input. Teachers do likely have pedagogical content knowledge that students do not. Second, teachers could tend to the social aspect of the ensemble by validating students’ experiences. This inquiry highlights the dual realms that exist for students in the classroom: the academic and the social. What an adult may perceive to be trivial could be of utmost importance to students, and teachers could be aware of a tendency to minimize how students perceive social interactions with their peers. Honoring students’ experiences could be coupled with providing them tools to navigate social situations and developing personal emotional awareness. Lastly, adultism caused me to assume certain topics would cause discomfort in students, the awareness of which led me to scrutinize how schools and society socialize young people into approaching some conversations with hesitancy. Some white students in this inquiry expressed a reluctance to discuss race. Perhaps music teachers can develop a community in their classroom that disrupts the notion that some topics are off limits at school. Furthermore, teachers may benefit from approaching a conversation without the assumption that students may react in a specific way or have specific 251 emotions based on the topic. Teachers and students could benefit from teachers’ interrogation of possible adultism appearing in their pedagogy. Interrogating the Value of Discussion Throughout the inquiry, I interrogated my fixation on classroom discussions. True enough, this is a dissertation that started as in inquiry specifically into difficult conversations. Nick expertly facilitated two impactful class discussions. In interviews, he talked about the possibilities of fruitful conversations rooted in literature, yet those did not materialize. As I reflected on my disappointment that more conversations did not take place during the observation period, I struggled with how much I was prioritizing conversation over music making. This especially came to a head when I sat in the audience of the concert. It was a successful concert: the students were proud of the musical work they had accomplished and were pleased to present it to their audience. Why am I writing about the importance of classroom discussions in chorus when successful concerts can occur without them? Music teachers could decide to be content with the status quo of performance-focused large-ensemble secondary music making. However, I see the music room as a place for possibility, a place for students to talk about their opinions and thoughts regarding current events, a place to invite the outside world into the classroom. Nick articulated his desire to provide students with the opportunity to gain skills in the classroom that will be relevant to their lives beyond school. Gibby, a senior in the bass section, reflected on the lack of adults in the public eye who displayed the ability to have a productive conversation about a topic they disagreed on. Nick echoed that frustration, and he expressed a deep desire for students to engage in such discussions so they could practice those skills that are necessary for a functioning democratic society (Dunn, 2022; Ladson-Billings, 2021). The music room can be a 252 place where bridges are built between the students’ home lives and school lives, the global world and the local school. Music teachers can provide students the opportunity to talk about a real- world issue, like hip-hop at the Super Bowl or the ending of mask mandates, in a way that transparently teaches critical thinking skills. These skills can then be applied in numerous ways both in the rehearsal process and beyond the walls of the classroom. In a tangent during the Super Bowl half time show discussion, students wrestled with the idea of separating art from artist. Consider applications in the performance-oriented, large ensemble Eurocentric classroom: for example, what are the complexities of performing Wagner’s music when he was a known anti-Semite? Nick facilitated rich though sporadic classroom discussions during the inquiry. Even without more discussions, specifically those situated in the literature, the Chamber Choir produced a wonderful concert. Therefore, I interrogated the value I placed on conversation in the secondary chorus classroom. Teachers at all grade levels can consider how discussions and performance fit into their curricular priorities for their classroom. Critical Conversations Across the Curriculum Critical conversations belong in all classrooms, regardless of grade, subject, or level. In this section, I suggest implications for the PK–12 teacher interwoven with future research possibilities. The tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy call for the development of a sociopolitical/critical consciousness, which can be achieved in part through dialogue (Ladson- Billings, 2021). Students in this inquiry expressed a desire to be informed before participating in conversations. This relates to Parker’s (2020) finding that adolescents urgently desire “to be accepted and taken seriously for what they wanted to know more about” (p. 207). Investigating the nuances between students’ desire to be informed and a fear of making mistakes could provide insight into the balance between erring on the side self-preservation and being open to personal 253 growth. Preparing students for participation in a democratic society should be incorporated into all subject areas (Sondel et al., 2018), and being informed is one critical aspect of responsible citizenship. Dunn (2022) argued that conversations about local and global events should happen throughout the school year and with all ages of students. Furthermore, they have the technological access to information, and Dunn argued that it is teachers’ responsibility to educate students how to use those tools responsibly. There are subject-specific curricula that addresses integrating high standards and culturally relevant practices into curriculum; for example, critical mathematics that integrates politics (Brantlinger, 2013), a math class that operates in an adolescent-centered community of care model (Ellerbrock & Vomvoridi-Ivanovic, 2022), and teaching math for social justice (Gutstein, 2003). I see the utility in those curricula existing. Schools and teachers could benefit from school-wide efforts to adopt a platform that serves both the whole-child and the curricula-specific goals of education. Teachers can work together as a faculty to cultivate a community of respectful civil conversation and rely on content-specific materials to address standards that must be met in their specific classroom. There are numerous practitioner-geared resources available on how to facilitate classroom conversations. Learning for Justice offers 18 teaching strategies to develop students’ speaking and listening skills during community inquiry that lead to “meaningful—and respectful—classroom discussions” (Community Inquiry, 2014). Additionally, the organization offers guidelines on navigating devastating news if students want to talk about it as it unfolds (Learning for Justice Staff, 2018). Although Dunn (2022) explicated “days after pedagogy,”21 the intent is to commit to teaching for justice throughout the school year for it is “a pedagogy that 21 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Days After Pedagogy. 254 cannot exist in isolation: Teaching on days after only works if you’ve been teaching for justice on days before and days during” (p. 13). Waterford.org (2020) offered nine tips to teachers who are engaging in difficult conversations, including the use of classroom norms, leaning into discomfort, and providing reflecting time at the end of the discussion. Beyond the classroom, Steen (2017) offered suggestions for teachers on preparing for difficult conversations with parents, colleagues, and administrators. Although this inquiry focused on experiences of conversations, it could be worthwhile to investigate how music teachers facilitate difficult conversations and the efficacy of various techniques. I highlighted here several resources available to teachers to guide discussion facilitation. These resources focus on the role of teachers in classroom conversation. Researchers could investigate how students learn to recognize and manage their emotions during difficult conversations. For example, teachers could develop classroom norms that support caring for oneself throughout the discussion and regularly provide reflection time at the end of the discussion to reflect on personal wellbeing. In this inquiry, Nick co-created discussion norms with students. Although the third norm stated “support each other as we work to articulate our thoughts,” (Fieldnotes, 2/16/22) this could also be an invitation to care for oneself. Tasking students with managing emotions would require a delicate balance of student agency, teacher- student power dynamics, and self-care for students. Especially in higher education, the use and value of offering trigger warnings is hotly debated, some arguing that trigger warnings are essential to caring for students while others arguing that there is no way to predict what materials may be triggering, rendering them useless (Milks, 2014). The debate over trigger warnings highlights the line between caring for students’ wellbeing and expecting student agency so they can care for themselves. 255 Classroom conversations could be a means of enhancing students’ feelings of connectedness in the classroom. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents’ mental health suffered as prolonged periods of isolation and virtual schooling impacted their education (Jones et al., 2022). Students who felt close to people—physically at school or virtually—had a lower prevalence of poor mental health throughout the pandemic. To improve mental health among youth, Jones et al. (2022) recommended the use of strategies to foster school connectedness, such as tending to relationships between students, their families, and school staff. The findings of this inquiry suggest that cultivating community in the classroom, through music and conversation, can lead to strong feelings of connectedness and belonging for some students. Opportunities for Professional Development In this inquiry, I began investigating conversations through a pedagogy of discomfort and came instead to hear about the importance of community. There is an opportunity here within the realm of professional development for teachers. Nolan and Molla (2018) used Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort, among other frameworks, to support teachers’ growth and reflection. The framework could be utilized to disrupt teachers’ potential views that critical conversations should only take place with honors students. Teachers could interrogate their views on the abilities of various groups of students, which could address the student observations in this inquiry that critical conversations only took place in some classes in their schedule and not all. In professional development settings, teachers could “create a space of honest and collective self- reflection and inquiry” and strive to “avoid letting ourselves ‘off the hook’ from responsibilities” (Boler, 1999, p. 187). If professional development for teachers could be exclusively skill-based instead of content specific, colleagues across a building could collectively conspire to integrate critical 256 conversations across the curriculum. This could potentially support teachers integrating conversations into all subject areas. Nick noticed varying levels of comfort in his colleagues regarding the willingness to engage in critical conversations with students. Dedicating professional development time to building these skills could develop a common pedagogical language among the staff. Not only would students reap the benefit of conversations being integrated in more subject areas, but the professional development across disciplines could help build community among colleagues, which Nick lacked at Broadport High School. The goal of a narrative inquiry is not generalizability, but rather to promote reflection on one’s praxis as the reader considers their stories of experience alongside those of the participants (Clandinin, 2013). In this section, I presented implications for PK–12 music teachers. There are two related avenues for effecting change in the field of music education—music teacher preparation and research—and both can be vehicles for incorporating the findings of this inquiry. Music Teacher Education Within higher education, music teacher educators need to attend to the needs of preservice teachers both as students and as future teachers. By recognizing the dual roles students hold, music teacher educators can teach undergraduate skills that they hope the students will then pass along to future generations (Harry & Salvador, 2021). Music teacher educators can commit to cultivating community and listening to student voice in their courses. Additionally, there could be a role for a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) in the tertiary classroom, especially in the work to disrupt whiteness in music teacher education. I consider what skills should be explicitly taught to preservice teachers and which they should experience as students, instead. As Nick and I reflected on the emergent findings of this inquiry, I asked him if he thought undergraduates should learn how to tend to community and 257 how to facilitate conversations as part of their coursework. I was surprised when he responded in the negative. He felt that he had the bandwidth to focus on community and conversations because his choral pedagogy was solid. He advocated for maintaining a focus on the practical during coursework so that once in the field, new teachers could develop the “other” skills of community and conversation. If I adopt this approach, I wonder how I, as a music teacher educator, can incorporate community building and deliberate conversations into the undergraduate experience. I could develop a classroom in which students experience these two facets of education. There is an opportunity to engage undergraduate music education majors in critical conversations. If preservice teachers experience the value of conversation in music spaces during their time as a student, then perhaps they will be so moved to include discussions in their future classrooms. Inviting Discomfort into the Undergraduate Classroom There are opportunities to engage preservice music teachers in the discomforting work of dismantling taken-for-granted practices and examining the social context of cherished beliefs. Although I believe that a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) was not appropriate for the inquiry setting with secondary students, I explore here the possibilities it could bring to an undergraduate classroom. Context is certainly important in determining the appropriateness of utilizing the framework, and I believe the older students and the differing goals of secondary versus tertiary education could make way for ethical discomfort. Richerme and Miksza (2020) and Harry and Salvador (2021) explored critical dialogue among preservice music educators. In the context of undergraduate choral methods coursework, I see many potential controversial public issues that could arise, such as sexuality (Taylor, 2018), gender (Palkki, 2020; Palkki & Sauerland, 2019), ensemble hierarchies (Estes, 2013; Parker, 2018), and sacred music 258 (Koperniak, 2020). Preservice teachers could have well-established, cherished beliefs about these issues. Using counternarratives to engage preservice teachers in questioning hegemonic choral history (Aronson et al., 2020) and then explicitly teaching them how to engage their future students in difficult conversations can happen in the undergraduate classroom. Dunn et al. (2019) called on teacher educators to prepare: preservice teachers to (a) consider the “ethics” of neutrality and of framing justice and equity issues as “polarizing” or “controversial”; (b) learn how to adapt curriculum to respond to, and create space for reflection about, current events and national crises or traumas (Simmons, Baggett, & Eggleton, 2014); and (c) work within and around policies that may limit their creativity, agency, and collaboration. (p. 468) Through collaborative dialogue, teacher and students could collectively witness how perceptions and histories shape emotions and actions. Boler (1999) highlighted the lineage of beliefs, emotions, and actions, urging preservice teachers to “evaluate how the actions that follow from their beliefs and strong feelings may affect others, and as a result, become able to evaluate their teaching philosophy and understand when and why other teachers choose different curricula” (p. 195). If preservice teachers engaged in a pedagogy of discomfort during their undergraduate coursework, unsettling cherished beliefs, consider the possibilities for reimagining music education the next generation of educators could bring to the field. Disrupting Whiteness in Music Teacher Education To disrupt whiteness in music teacher education, undergraduates need to be prepared to teach diverse learners and grapple with white supremacy in the field. Music teachers in the United States are overwhelmingly white; 86% of those who took the Praxis II exam in music between 2007–2012 were white (Elpus, 2015). Comparatively, 52% of the U.S. high school class 259 of 2013 identified as white (Elpus & Abril, 2019). Although this mismatch in demographics highlights disparities in many areas, the prevalence of white undergraduates in music teacher preparation programs necessitates coursework in which students grapple with their racial identity to better serve future students. The work of preparing teachers for diverse classrooms should be comprehensive and cannot be accomplished in a single class or field experience. Rather, Ladson- Billings (2021) articulated strategies for improving the education of teachers that would happen throughout their training: the use of autobiography to inquire into personal stories of identity; restructured field experiences to experience music in more than middle-income white schools, and learning from teachers who enact culturally relevant pedagogy (pp. 111–114). To “dim the light of racism,” McCall (2021) urged teachers and institutions to “establish a culture of care for all students, reconceptualize broader definitions of success, examine and reimagine campus power dynamics, mandate critical consciousness development, and build culturally relevant curricular designs” (pp. 33–34). Music education can and must unseat white supremacy, and these are tools through which teacher educators can do it. There is a need to disrupt whiteness in music teacher education and it may be discomforting for some. The discomforting experiences Ohito (2016) shared of “punctur[ing] the dominance of White supremacy in teacher education” (p. 455) is inspiring and necessary in the field of music education. Instructors could consider utilizing a pedagogy of discomfort for such work (Boler, 1999). White preservice teachers bring with them to the classroom a lifetime of experiences that shape their understandings of race and often respond to challenges to these understandings with methods to protect and maintain whiteness (Picower, 2009). This is not work that I believe should be assessed nor can it be accomplished within one semester. Rather, 260 coursework that engages in disrupting whiteness is one way to begin addressing the needs of students of all ages and races. Aronson et al. (2020) examined the use of critical race theory to disrupt whiteness in teacher education. The researchers asserted that teachers are underprepared to discuss race in their classrooms. It should be noted that Nick in this study comfortably integrated race into the discussion on the Super Bowl halftime show, though it is doubtful that this skill set was a result of his undergraduate training. Simultaneously, some students in Chamber Choir expressed hesitation talking about race because of their whiteness. Aronson et al. utilized these five tenets of critical race theory with preservice teachers to examine curriculum: racism as normal, historical implications, interest convergence, intersectionality, and counternarrative. Through a deliberate use of counternarratives to highlight traditionally minoritized voices, the researchers engaged the preservice teachers in a critical analysis of curriculum. They cited the abundant evidence that white preservice teachers are hesitant or even avoid talking about race as reasons to explicitly encourage their students to consider how to have similar conversations in future classrooms. Furthermore, they called on teacher educators to recognize their role in perpetuating racist curricula. Critical to this investigation, “regardless of whether you teach a ‘diversity’ course or a methods course, whiteness is everywhere” (Aronson et al., 2020, p. 318). Calling out white supremacy and working to dismantle systems of oppression must be done first by teacher educators to propel forward an agenda of change in PK–12 schools. The urgency to identify and disrupt whiteness in music teacher education resonates strongly for me as I prepare to begin my career as a music teacher educator in Maine, the whitest state in the country (Casey, 2021). I fear that I will indulge in racial ignorance when working with the predominantly white student body I will likely have in classes. While some music 261 teacher educators reject the imperative to engage in social justice work and proclaim their work is only to teach musical concepts (Salvador & Kelly-McHale, 2017), I am committed to scrutinizing my whiteness and examining the ways I perpetuate whiteness in music education. In this inquiry, Nick spoke about his impetus to do better for his students than he experienced as a high schooler. I feel similarly motivated. I am eager to do better for the undergraduate students I will teach so that they can do better with their future students than I did with those I taught in my PK–12 experience. VanDeusen (2021) critiqued her past research in an effort to “reveal the ways in which whiteness was largely unacknowledged but always lurking in the background” (p. 121). She offered ways forward for music teacher education: Embedding antiracism and antiracist pedagogies through the diversification of curriculum, the development of coursework dedicated to examining the sociocultural and political contexts of schooling, education and music education, and facilitating of field experiences in a variety of settings is crucial to creating systemic change in preservice music teacher preparation. (p. 136) Each of these calls to action must be unpacked and implemented to disrupt whiteness in music teacher preparation. Future Research This inquiry provided insight into the experiences of students and their teacher in a secondary choral classroom. It began as an investigation focused exclusively on difficult conversations and evolved into an exploration about the importance of community. When I first Zoomed with the students in Broadport High School’s Chamber Choir to introduce the project, one student asked, “where will this research go?” (Researcher journal, 2/10/22). Now, I can answer, “there are multiple possible directions it can go.” In this section, I first advocate for 262 including adolescent voice in research. Then, I explore possible directions for future research including the implications of changing location, inquiring further into the difference between belonging and fitting in, investigating the sociality of the high school experience, and a conversation on spirituals. Adolescents in Research In order for students’ voices to be centered in music education research, the researcher has to be willing to listen to students. When I asked Spring to elaborate on why she particularly liked her history teacher, she replied bluntly, “[he] talks to us like we’re people” (Interview, 3/22/22). Adolescents are people; adults need to listen. Parker (2020) shared some pointed observations about the state of student voice in music education research: Music educators, music teacher educators, and researchers need a book that foregrounds the voices of adolescents on music. I have observed that though educators and researchers talk and write about adolescents, we do not often include the perspectives of adolescents themselves. Without adolescent voices, our work remains incomplete. (p. xiii) Parker encouraged music educators to advocate for the adolescents in their lives by being present and listening. Building upon Stauffer’s concept of radical listening as a method for building trust (2017, as cited in Parker, 2020), Parker challenged educators to notice the tendency to “listen with the intention to reply” when conversing with adolescents. Instead, Parker suggested listening “with the intention to be present and to hear one another” (p. 216). Music education scholars can serve the students in the classroom by listening to them during research. The role and relative strength of student voice in music education and music education research has fluctuated over the decades. Researchers, utilizing a market-driven education lens, reported that student voice had been operationalized as “the voice of a consumer of music 263 education” (Spruce, 2015, p. 287). A separate set of literature investigates the integration of student voice in pursuit of social justice in the classroom (for discussion, see Spruce, 2015). Although this goal is certainly laudable, what I strive for is the incorporation of student voice in music education research. In what ways do scholars include student perspectives when investigating student experiences in the music classroom? For example, the titular quote—“home away from home”—from the oft-cited study (Adderley et al., 2003) about the world of the high school music classroom is not derived from a participant quote. That perspective was not from students. The researcher asked students if participation in ensembles was “like being part of a regular class? Or like a team situation? Is it like a club? Or like a ‘home away from home’?” (p. 194). Parker (2010, 2014, 2018, 2020) has explored the experiences of adolescents in the choral world by interviewing teenage participants extensively. Parker (2016) also has written from the teacher perspective and positioned student interviews as a method to “dimensionalize and triangulate” (p. 225) the data gathered from teacher interviews and researcher observations. This explicit delineation of the role of student participants makes plain how student voice is used in research. This inquiry demonstrated the importance of allowing students to express what is crucial in their lives. I advocate for research to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Researchers can provide pathways for students to describe the phenomenon under inquiry, rather than attempt to determine if the phenomenon fits within an existing construct. Parker (2020) took this approach “because describing what adolescents already see and do is critical to our understanding of how adolescents use music in their daily lives” (p. 1). Academics, for better or worse, act as gatekeepers in the production and dissemination of research. Within secondary education, adolescents are demonstrating a desire to have a voice in the decisions being made that impact 264 their schooling. For example, as school districts remove books from library shelves and course curricula, students are forming banned book clubs to read the books in question (Natanson, 2022). They are sharing their reactions to the book and to the ban on social media and with school officials. Some adolescents want a seat at the table where decisions are made about their education. There are many opportunities for that to happen within education research, and I explore several possible research puzzles later in this chapter that seek to center students in their experiences within music. Researchers may benefit from tending to adolescent development when designing studies. Pugh (2014) called for scholars across disciplines to incorporate childhood studies into their research. She argued that decades of sociological childhood studies have demonstrated three findings that she did not see regularly acknowledged in other fields: children are not passive, children are not innocent, and childhood is not universally the same (pp. 73-74). She hoped to galvanize a broad range of researchers to take up these central contributions of childhood studies: “that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same)” (p. 71). Pugh argued these three findings illuminate social processes within childhood that cannot be ignored when conducting research. This approach could shed light on educational research that seeks to understand the experiences of adolescents in music classrooms. Researchers could have much to gain by inviting students to the inquiry table. In this inquiry, I always intended for students to be participants. However, I learned a great deal when I recalibrated after listening to student voices because their answers changed the course of the 265 research. Shifting into inquiry possibilities that grow out of this current study, I seek to incorporate adolescent voices when possible. Inquiry Possibilities The findings from this study are specific to these participants and this place. It is not generalizable. The administration of Broadport High School explicitly supported teachers engaging students in what Nick referred to as honest civil conversations in which there might be differing opinions. RSU 91 engaged in an equity audit and created a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. The principal permitted this research study to occur. All of these facts point to the ways that place impacts an inquiry. It could be worthwhile to investigate community building or difficult conversations in numerous variations. With a Maine gubernatorial election on the horizon, the state could become a more hostile environment for teachers engaging in equity work. Two-term former-governor Paul LePage—who dubbed himself “Trump before Donald Trump became popular”—is mounting a political comeback against incumbent Janet Mills (Sharp, 2022, para. 7). So far, Maine has rejected anti-CRT laws, but the Maine Republican platform has begun embracing language that resembles the racist, homophobic, transphobic talking points in other states (Stout, 2021). A delegate at the Maine Republican Party convention in Spring, 2022, urged members “to join the ‘red wave’ of parents storming the school boards and voting booths across the nation to protect children from ‘pornographic sex training’ and gender confusion” (Overton, 2022, para. 4). Given this political climate, this inquiry would look different if a researcher changed place: same teacher but new group of students, new teacher within the same district, a neighboring school district, a new state, a new region of the country. The varieties of ways to continue this line of inquiry are endless if one focuses solely on the place commonplace. 266 The influx of New Mainers into the state presents challenges and opportunities for music teachers. Nick explained “phys ed, art, and performing arts get a lot of the students because you can’t dump them in AP Chemistry” (Interview, 5/13/22) with the existing language barriers. The school district was scrambling to hire staff, especially English Language Learner support, but Nick relayed that he had received no training beyond an initial alert from administration. Researchers could investigate the duality of pre-existing equity issues within a school and the sudden presence of a new group of students with significant cultural differences and language barriers. Additionally, researchers could inquire into the experiences of the New Mainer students. Listening to students in this moment could be valuable for educators and future students. This inquiry highlighted the performance-related stress that teachers experience. In an effort to highlight student voice, researchers could inquire into students’ experiences with concerts in secondary ensembles. One could investigate the levels of pre-performance stress and post-performance satisfaction for both students and teachers; alignment or misalignment both hold valuable implications. This may lead to challenging the notion of mandatory performances or the viewing of end-of-the-semester concerts as the summative experience. A related inquiry could investigate what aspects of the ensemble experience students most value; if one is public performance, perhaps more opportunities should be added. The role of performance in a secondary choral program is one of many issues that could benefit from an inquiry into students’ experiences. In this inquiry, students experienced both belonging and fitting in and the distinction between them. Parker (2010) investigated belonging in the choral classroom. She reported that “the unique combination of regular interaction plus the shared act of singing bridges emotional 267 worlds and brings participants together” (p. 350). Parker called for further research investigating the relationship of singing and belonging. I echo this and suggest adding the dimension of fitting in. How do students experience both belonging and fitting in within a choral classroom, and in what ways does repertoire, performance practices, peer relationships, and teacher actions impact the students’ experiences? Future research could also investigate how teachers experience belonging and fitting in at professional conferences, in their school buildings, or at different points in their careers. It was apparent in this inquiry that students and teacher experienced the minutes outside of class differently. Nick focused on the “bell-to-bell” moments. This is to say, when he reflected on his experiences at school, he was primarily concerned with what happened within the 75- minute block of structured class time. The students, on the other hand, spoke extensively about the impact of the minutes outside of class. The time spent in the hallways and in the cafeteria played a significant role in their experiences of their school day. This could be a unique opportunity to engage in youth participatory action research (YPAR) which works to study and transform education-related issues by researching with rather than on young people (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). This praxis “provides young people with opportunities to study social problems affecting their lives and then determine actions to rectify these problems” (p. 2). If the sociality commonplace of the hallways detrimentally affected students’ experiences at school, perhaps they can study the issue and come up with suitable solutions, including what teachers should know about the student experience outside of the classroom. Lastly, there could be an opportunity to conduct research with a teacher who is dedicated to specific, planned conversations during the timeline for observations. For example, Nick reflected on his experience teaching students the difference between spirituals and gospel music. 268 Researchers could deliberately collaborate with a teacher during a semester in which those conversations will be planned. This research would be an empirical investigation of the ideas Garrett (2022) presented regarding contextualizing the negro spiritual. The impetus for this research would be to capture the ways teachers plan for and implement such contextualizing lessons, as well as to understand the student experience of the process. As always, place is highly impactful and who is in the room matters; this study could be done in numerous locations all with unique findings. This inquiry began as an investigation into difficult conversations and ended up exploring the role of community for students and teacher. In this section, I explored several possible avenues for future research including replication studies in new settings, evaluating a potential dissonance between student and teacher values of performance, further inquiring into belonging versus fitting in, a potential youth participatory action research investigating the impact of hallways, and lastly, exploring the experiences of a chorus teacher and their students as they contextualize spirituals. The findings from this inquiry offer many opportunities for reflection as well as implications for the field. Teachers in PK–12 settings may consider deliberately integrating community building and critical conversations into their curriculum. Additionally, they may benefit from acknowledging instances of adultism in their practice and look for professional development opportunities tied to critical conversation. Music teacher educators can explicitly invite discomfort into their classrooms to unseat white supremacy through interrogating cherished beliefs. In addition to considerations for practice, this inquiry can lead to many further areas of research, especially that which highlights adolescent voices. 269 Epilogue “Because narrative inquiry is an ongoing reflexive and reflective methodology, narrative inquirers need to continually inquire into their experiences before, during, and after each inquiry” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 55). I attend now to my stories of experience as I exit this inquiry. In an exercise in vulnerability, I expose some areas of researcher growth, especially how I learned to listen to student voice. Additionally, I reflect on the current events of the last few months and how that impacts who I am in this research. Reflections on the Research The participants in this inquiry gifted me with their stories. I am indebted to their generosity with their time and their experiences. Any holes in the narrative are my responsibility. Clandinin’s (2013) musing about what remained unknown resonated with me: I wondered what else I did not know yet. I realized again that in narrative inquiry the stories we hear are always partial, always contextual, and always in the relational space between researcher and participant. I wondered what other stories we could share if we continued to talk. (p. 116) This inquiry began with teacher interviews. Nick and I sat for the first formal interview before I began observing in his classroom. He was beautifully articulate and offered a wonderful reflection on his practice. I was prepared to hear this. When I began talking with students, I was bowled over by their openness and honesty. I was not prepared to hear such a profound theme of belonging and community, but that is where this inquiry guided me when I softened my concentration. The adolescents pushed back against my assumption that discomfort in conversations would be primarily due to the topic. While some students expressed hesitancy while talking about race or “politicized” issues, there was a common theme: it matters who is in 270 the room. I engaged in a humble pause (Patel, 2015) at this point in the research process before moving forward. I had designed this inquiry centering my adult worldview. To navigate the tension between my adult worldview and the perspective of the adolescent participants, I embraced the temporality commonplace. Through narrative beginnings, I reached back to reflect on my adolescence and my time as a high school teacher working with students. The puddle of distance between teacher-me and students started at the beginning of my career and developed into a wide ocean. I was warned as a 23-year-old teacher to draw a hard line between myself and the students in front of me. The seniors are 18. Some of them have siblings older than you. You need to be an authority figure. So, I distanced myself. Over my career, I had to re-learn how to connect with the adolescent age group, especially as the years between my current age and the stable age of high schoolers grew. The research question is another example of how my adult worldview clouded the design of this research. The question guiding this inquiry was, “How do teacher and students experience difficult conversations?” I was unaware of how convinced I was that specific conversations would be difficult just by the nature of the topic. I return to two sentences from Chapter 2: Prior to discussing controversial topics, students may benefit if their teacher develops a “relational pedagogy by actively creating space for students to process and express their emotions” (Sondel et al., 2018, p. 180). As I designed this study, I considered what possible emotions might be most relevant in classroom discussions. (p. 41) I focused on the emotional aspect of the Sondel et al. quote, but what ended up being most relevant in the findings was the “relational pedagogy” that Nick utilized to “actively creat[e] space” for students to be in community with each other. My adult perspective assumed the focus 271 would be the difficulty of conversations. I learned to listen for and observe moments of community and belonging. Additionally, in Chapter 1, I wrote, “In a dissertation on difficult conversations, I want to explicitly define the phenomenon” (p. 32). This approach misses the multiplicity of narrative inquiry; it makes sense that there could be multiple definitions of what could be difficult and what those conversations would feel like to those involved. I cannot unilaterally identify what all participants would experience as difficult or discomfort. I reflected toward the end of data collection: How arrogant and amusing that I thought I could define difficult conversations. I have no idea what one may or may not find difficult. As a teacher, I can prepare for conversations in which people may disagree, but I can’t predict nor control whether they find them difficult. (Researcher journal, 5/7/22) Leaning into the multiplicity of experience was at times freeing and other times overwhelming. After I coded the data, I wrote this reflection: As I stew in the data and look at the disparate collection of books on my table, I’m overwhelmed by all the different ways I could interpret the data. So many frameworks. Do I want to view the data through Noddings’ happiness (2003) or care (2013) [framework]? Or do I situate it in Delpit’s (2019) [book] Teaching When the World Is On Fire? What about teacher stress? Or, a big switch, the lens of social development in adolescents? There’s no one way. There’s no wrong way. There’s no right way. It’s simple: what story do I want to tell? It’s a big responsibility for a researcher. (Researcher journal, 5/26/22). 272 I chose one set of stories to tell from this inquiry. When community arose as the salient theme, I listened and followed that thread. But if I go back into the data, it is possible that other stories could emerge. In this inquiry, interviewing Nick and interviewing students required two separate skill sets for me. While reflecting on her experience researching adolescent music identity, Parker (2020) noted that the students she spoke with answered questions “reflexively and then reflectively” (p. 221). The initial reflexive answer was the knee jerk response to what seemed like a simple question. Students’ reflective answers often “expanded into a number of philosophical ideas” (p. 221). Jimin answered reflexively, and usually stopped. She completed the task. Spring often answered succinctly, sometimes with playful irony or subtle poking fun at my question, and then if she so desired, she expanded reflectively. Spring did not need permission to go off script; she was comfortable sharing her thoughts. Jimin listened carefully to the question, often asking for clarification on language or requesting an example. What I saw as a carefully crafted open-ended question, the way the students answered demonstrated that my questions were at times simplistic and banal. I learned to ask if they wanted to say more, to ask for definitions of terms used, and invite them to offer examples. I take with me the commitment to listening to students’ voices in research. As a teacher, I felt comfortable connecting with the singers in an ensemble. But when I entered Nick’s classroom, I felt lost at first. I lacked the designation of teacher and found it difficult to connect with students. The mini-interviews provided me the opportunity to have one- on-one conversations, but it also defined my role. I was the question asker. It was the luxury of that role that afforded me the time to sit with a dozen students to have individual conversations. I carry that with me as I head into the next phase of my career. The students had so much to teach 273 me, but I had to be ready to listen. Through this inquiry, I learned the importance of student voice in research. If I engage in research that asks teachers’ perspectives on the student experience, then I am not learning what the students actually think. If I am using student voice to bolster the teachers’ perspectives, I am not centering their experience. If I collect data within a rigid methodology, I miss the opportunity to be led by emergent themes. Because of my experience with the student participants in this inquiry, I look forward to centering students’ perspectives in future projects. I am grateful for this opportunity to grow and learn as a researcher. Temporal Context: An Update I offer this update to the temporal context I provided in Chapter 1 to capture what has been happening in local and global news between the end of data collection and the completion of this document. What events I chose to include here is clearly impacted by what news I consume. Motivated by the racist belief that Black people were replacing white people, a white 18-year-old killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket, livestreaming the shooting (McKinley & Thrush, 2022). Just ten days later, a gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers and wounded 17 others (Chappell, 2022). The war in Ukraine continues as Russian forces brutally capture various regions throughout the country (Timsit et al., 2022). The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol began its series of public hearings on June 9, 2022 (Weisman, 2022). The Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade, leaving access to abortion care up to individual states (Mangan & Breuninger, 2022). Police in Akron, Ohio, fatally shot Jayland Walker, an unarmed Black man, more than 60 times during a traffic stop (McGraw & Ploeg, 2022). These events shape the sociopolitical landscape of the United States, 274 which ultimately impacts the teaching and learning experience for students and teachers in schools. By virtue of the temporality of the inquiry, this is a pandemic dissertation. Interestingly, the impact of the pandemic was not a salient theme. The lack of pandemic-related data could certainly be shaped by my lens as the researcher: which questions I asked during interviews and which stories I chose to include here. The pandemic caused Nick professional stress, but pandemic teaching was just one of many causes of stress in his life. Nick led the students in a debate over the mask mandate ending, but interestingly not on the same day the protest took place outside the school. Before the mandate was lifted, students complied with masking requirements during rehearsal. They seemed adept at singing with their faces partially covered. When I pointedly asked Jimin and Spring to reflect on their experiences academically and socially during the pandemic, they obliged. However, I came to understand that the length of the pandemic has created a “new normal” for the adolescents. This was the third school year disrupted by the pandemic; this is simply part of the landscape of high school. From a personal perspective, this inquiry is absolutely a pandemic dissertation. The changes in my life and the virtual nature of courses resulted in a majority of my doctoral experience taking place online. I wrote about the importance of community from the isolation of my office; the irony is not lost on me. Nick’s commitment to community inspired me. Broadport High School Chamber Choir students thrived socially and musically in his classroom. Because of what I learned from Nick and students, I am all the more dedicated to cultivating community in the next phase of my professional life. 275 A Final Note To You Dear Reader, Who are you in this inquiry? Do you share my adult (former) music teacher perspective? Of course, I realize there is no monolithic Adult Music Teacher perspective. However, I do think transitioning from high school student to high school teacher pushes us over a temporary bridge that crumbles once we cross. 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The University of Chicago Press. 302 APPENDIX A: TEACHER CONSENT FORM Research Participant Information and Consent Form: TEACHER Study Title: A Narrative Inquiry into Difficult Conversations in the High School Chorus Classroom Researcher and Title: Rebecca DeWan, Ph.D. Candidate in Music Education Department and Institution: Michigan State University, School of Music Address and Contact Information: 40 Lafayette St, Yarmouth, ME 207-329-6724 Sponsor: Dr. Juliet Hess, dissertation advisor You are being asked to participate in a research study that examines how teachers and students experience conversations in high school chorus classrooms. You are being asked to participate as the teacher in this study because you have been identified as a high caliber, experienced choral music educator who is committed to using classroom discussions as a regular part of your praxis. You will participate in three structured interviews with the researcher as well as informal weekly check ins. The researcher will observe one class period you teach for ten weeks (approximately 20 classes) between March–May 2022. You will conduct your chorus rehearsals as normal; this study is not intended to impact pedagogical decisions you make. The researcher will take notes during classroom observations. The researcher will not participate in classroom discussions but may sing alongside students during music making portions of class. A fundamental part of the methodology for a narrative inquiry is the collaborative relationship between researcher and participant. You will be invited to add comments and feedback on the research report. The extent to which you are involved in the report writing will be discussed throughout the research study and the decision is entirely up to you. Data for this project will kept confidential by assigning you a pseudonym. Identifying factors, such as age, gender, location, will be changed in any reporting of research. Only the researcher will have access to the key of participant identification. This document will be stored separately from all other research data. Information about you will be kept confidential to the maximum extent allowable by the law. Only the researcher will have access to the data, which will be stored on a password protected laptop. The results of this research may be published or presented at professional meetings, but the identities of all research participants will remain anonymous. Participation in this research project is completely voluntary. You have the right to say no. You may change your mind at any time and withdraw. You may choose not to answer specific questions or to stop participating at any time. If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, how to do any part of it, or to report an injury, please contact the researcher: Rebecca DeWan, 40 Lafayette St, Yarmouth, ME 207-329-6724 rebeccamdewan@gmail.com If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a research participant, would like to obtain information or offer input, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you may contact, anonymously if you wish, the Michigan State University’s Human Research 303 Protection Program at 517-355-2180, Fax 517-432-4503, or e-mail irb@msu.edu or regular mail at 4000 Collins Rd, Suite 136, Lansing, MI 48910. Your signature below means that you voluntarily agree to participate in this research study. __________________________________ _____________________________ Signature Date 304 APPENDIX B: ADMINISTRATION SUPPORT LETTER Administrator Approval Letter Dear [administrator’s name]: I am a Ph.D. candidate in music education at Michigan State University. I taught high school chorus in Maine for 13 years before beginning my doctoral studies, and I currently teach elementary general music part time. For my dissertation project, I am researching the experiences of students and teachers with difficult conversations that take place in the secondary choral classroom. I situate this research in the understanding that the current divisive sociopolitical climate might infiltrate classrooms. My study seeks to document how teachers and students experience classroom conversations that occur in that context. I am requesting permission to observe one class period of high school chorus for ten weeks (approximately 20 class meetings) between March–May 2022. I have identified [high school chorus teacher’s name] as the teacher participant in this study because of his/her track record as a choral educator of high caliber who is dedicated to integrating classroom discussion into his/her regular praxis. My role as the researcher is merely to observe; the study is not intended to alter curriculum or pedagogical decisions. I will be taking notes during observations. I will also be examining available documents such as chorus syllabi and handbooks, selected choral repertoire, school board meeting minutes, and local newspapers to gain a deeper understanding of the town. As required by the Institutional Review Board of Michigan State University, I will collect informed consent from [teacher participant]. I will collect consent of parents of the students in the chorus class and assent from the students to include them in my observational notes. Additionally, I will recruit four students to participate in interviews and focus groups. These interviews will take place outside of class time and will not interfere with the students’ performance or participation in class. I am happy to answer any questions you may have or discuss the project further. I appreciate your consideration. Sincerely, Rebecca DeWan 207-329-6724 rebeccamdewan@gmail.com Your signature below means that you grant Rebecca DeWan permission to observe in [chorus teacher]’s classroom between March–May 2022. _________________________________________ ________________________ Signature Date 305 APPENDIX C: STUDENT ASSENT FORM Research Information and STUDENT Assent Form Study Title: A Narrative Inquiry into Difficult Conversations in the High School Chorus Classroom Researcher and Title: Rebecca DeWan, Ph.D. Candidate in Music Education Department and Institution: Michigan State University, School of Music Address and Contact Information: 40 Lafayette St, Yarmouth, ME 207-329-6724 Sponsor: Dr. Juliet Hess, dissertation advisor A researcher is collaborating with your chorus teacher. You are being asked to participate in the research study. Researchers are required to provide an assent form to inform you about the research study, to convey that participation is voluntary, to explain risks and benefits of participation, and to empower you to make an informed decision. You should feel free to ask the researchers any questions you may have. Your parent will be given a separate “consent form” to sign. Both you and your parent need to agree for you to participate in the study. 1. PURPOSE OF RESEARCH You are being asked to participate in a research study of conversations that occur in the high school chorus classroom. You have been selected because you are a member of the [school’s name] auditioned chorus. In music education, much is known about the musical aspects of the rehearsal process. From this study, the researcher hopes to learn about the non-musical aspects of the high school choral rehearsal process, specifically the classroom discussions that occur. The study will take place between March–May 2022. 2. WHAT YOU WILL DO The researcher will observe regularly-occurring chorus rehearsals during the school day between the months of March–May 2022. Participation in this study falls into two categories: classroom observation and interviewees. a. CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: The researcher will be taking notes during the classroom discussions. Your participation in this category includes nothing outside of routine classwork for chorus class. Assenting to participation in this category allows for the researcher to include your contributions in class in the researcher’s notes. b. INTERVIEWEES: The researcher seeks 4 members of the high school chorus to participate in a series of three interviews and two focus groups. The purpose of these interviews is to learn about the role chorus plays in students’ lives and how they experience classroom discussions that take place within chorus class. These interviews will take place outside of class time. Each will be approximately 30-60 minutes. The interviews will be recorded and transcribed. The transcribed interviews will be seen by the researcher and you. The researcher will consult with you as she writes the research report. You will have the opportunity to provide the researcher feedback on how she writes about your experiences. 306 3. POTENTIAL BENEFITS You will not directly benefit from participation in this study. However, participation in this study may contribute to the understanding of how high school students experience classroom discussions that take place in the choral classroom. 4. POTENTIAL RISKS There are no foreseeable risks associated with participation in this study. 5. PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY Data for this project will kept confidential by assigning a pseudonym to each student participant. Identifying factors, such as age, gender, location, will be changed in any reporting of research. Only the researcher will have access to the key of participant identification. This document will be stored separately from all other research data. Information about you will be kept confidential to the maximum extent allowable by the law. Only the researcher will have access to the data, which will be stored on a password protected laptop. The results of this research may be published or presented at professional meetings, but the identities of all research participants will remain anonymous. If you participate in the interviews, the chorus teacher will not have access to the transcript. If your parent requests access to the interview transcript, the researcher will provide it. The researcher’s notes from classroom observations will not be shared with anyone except the researcher. 6. RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE, SAY NO, OR WITHDRAW Participation is voluntary and will have no effect on your grade in chorus class. Refusal to participate will involve no penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You may discontinue participation at any time without penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You have the right to say no. You may change your mind at any time and withdraw. If you participate in the interviews, you may choose not to answer specific questions or to stop participating at any time. 7. COSTS AND COMPENSATION FOR BEING IN THE STUDY There are no costs associated with participation in this study. You will not be compensated in any way for participation. Your participation in this study will have no bearing on the credit you receive for chorus class. 8. CONTACT INFORMATION If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, how to do any part of it, or to report an injury, please contact the researcher: Rebecca DeWan, 40 Lafayette Street, Yarmouth, ME 04096. Cell: 207-329-6724. Email: rebeccamdewan@gmail.com If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a research participant, would like to obtain information or offer input, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you may contact, anonymously if you wish, the Michigan State University’s Human Research Protection Program at 517-355-2180, Fax 517-432-4503, or e-mail irb@msu.edu or regular mail at 4000 Collins Rd, Suite 136, Lansing, MI 48910. 9. DOCUMENTATION OF INFORMED ASSENT 307 There are two ways to participate in this study: in the CLASSROOM OBSERVATION group and as an INTERVIEWEE. See page 1 for details. You may select both if you wish. CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: Your signatures below means that you voluntarily assent to participate in this research study. ________________________________________ _____________________________ Student Signature Date INTERVIEWEE: Your signatures below means that you voluntarily assent to participate in this research study. Interviews will be videotaped. These videos will be transcribed by the researcher. The videos will be stored on a password-protected computer accessible only to the researcher. They will be erased after the project has concluded. Please note, you may not be selected to be interviewed if too many students agree to participate; only four are needed. ________________________________________ _____________________________ Student Signature Date You will be given a copy of this form to keep. 308 APPENDIX D: PARENT/GUARDIAN CONSENT FORM Research Information and PARENT Consent Form Study Title: A Narrative Inquiry into Difficult Conversations in the High School Chorus Classroom Researcher and Title: Rebecca DeWan, Ph.D. Candidate in Music Education Department and Institution: Michigan State University, School of Music Address and Contact Information: 40 Lafayette St, Yarmouth, ME 207-329-6724 Sponsor: Dr. Juliet Hess, dissertation advisor A researcher is collaborating with your child’s chorus teacher. Your child is being asked to participate in the research study. Researchers are required to provide a parental permission form to inform you about the research study, to convey that participation is voluntary, to explain risks and benefits of participation, and to empower you to make an informed decision. You should feel free to ask the researchers any questions you may have. Your child will be given a separate “assent form” to sign. Both you and your child need to agree for the child’s participation in the study. 1. PURPOSE OF RESEARCH Your child is being asked to participate in a research study of conversations that occur in the high school chorus classroom. Your child has been selected because they are a member of the [school’s name] auditioned chorus. In music education, much is known about the musical aspects of the rehearsal process. From this study, the researcher hopes to learn about the non-musical aspects of the high school choral rehearsal process, specifically the classroom discussions that occur. The study will take place between March–May 2022. 2. WHAT YOUR CHILD WILL DO The researcher will observe regularly-occurring chorus rehearsals during the school day between the months of March–May 2022. Participation in this study falls into two categories: classroom observation and interviewees. a. CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: The researcher will be taking notes during the classroom discussions. Student participation in this category includes nothing outside of routine classwork for chorus class. Consenting to participation in this category allows for the researcher to include your child’s contributions in class in the researcher’s notes. b. INTERVIEWEES: The researcher seeks 4 members of the high school chorus to participate in a series of three interviews and two focus groups. The purpose of these interviews is to learn about the role chorus plays in students’ lives and how they experience classroom discussions that take place within chorus class. These interviews will take place outside of class time. Each will be approximately 30-60 minutes. The interviews will be recorded and transcribed. The transcribed interviews will be seen by the researcher and your child. The researcher will consult with your child as she writes the research report. Your child will have the opportunity to provide the researcher feedback on how she writes about their experiences. 309 3. POTENTIAL BENEFITS Your child will not directly benefit from participation in this study. However, participation in this study may contribute to the understanding of how high school students experience classroom discussions that take place in the choral classroom. 4. POTENTIAL RISKS There are no foreseeable risks associated with participation in this study. 5. PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY Data for this project will kept confidential by assigning a pseudonym to each student participant. Identifying factors, such as age, gender, location, will be changed in any reporting of research. Only the researcher will have access to the key of participant identification. This document will be stored separately from all other research data. Information about your child will be kept confidential to the maximum extent allowable by the law. Only the researcher will have access to the data, which will be stored on a password protected laptop. The results of this research may be published or presented at professional meetings, but the identities of all research participants will remain anonymous. If your child participates in the interviews, the chorus teacher will not have access to the transcript. If you request parental access to the interview transcript, the researcher will provide it. The researcher’s notes from classroom observations will not be shared with anyone except the researcher. 6. RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE, SAY NO, OR WITHDRAW Participation is voluntary and will have no effect on your child’s grade in chorus class. Refusal to participate will involve no penalty or loss of benefits to which your child is otherwise entitled. They may discontinue participation at any time without penalty or loss of benefits to which they are otherwise entitled. You have the right to say no. You may change your mind at any time and withdraw. If your child participates in the interviews, they may choose not to answer specific questions or to stop participating at any time. 7. COSTS AND COMPENSATION FOR BEING IN THE STUDY There are no costs associated with participation in this study. Your child will not be compensated in any way for participation. Your child’s participation in this study will have no bearing on the credit they receive for chorus class. 8. CONTACT INFORMATION If you have concerns or questions about this study, such as scientific issues, how to do any part of it, or to report an injury, please contact the researcher: Rebecca DeWan, 40 Lafayette Street, Yarmouth, ME 04096. Cell: 207-329-6724. Email: rebeccamdewan@gmail.com If you have questions or concerns about your role and rights as a parent of a research participant, would like to obtain information or offer input, or would like to register a complaint about this study, you may contact, anonymously if you wish, the Michigan State University’s Human Research Protection Program at 517-355-2180, Fax 517-432-4503, or e-mail irb@msu.edu or regular mail at 4000 Collins Rd, Suite 136, Lansing, MI 48910. 310 9. DOCUMENTATION OF INFORMED CONSENT There are two ways to participate in this study: in the CLASSROOM OBSERVATION group and as an INTERVIEWEE. See page 1 for details. You may select both if you wish. CLASSROOM OBSERVATION: Your signatures below means that you voluntarily give your permission for your child to participate in this research study. ________________________________________ _____________________________ Parent Signature Date INTERVIEWEE: Your signatures below means that you voluntarily give your permission for your child to participate in this research study. Interviews will be videotaped. These videos will be transcribed by the researcher. The videos will be stored on a password-protected computer accessible only to the researcher. They will be erased after the project has concluded. Please note, your child may not be selected to be interviewed if too many students agree to participate; only four are needed. ________________________________________ _____________________________ Parent Signature Date You will be given a copy of this form to keep. 311 APPENDIX E: OBSERVATION PROTOCOL Date: Attendance: Descriptive Notes Reflective Notes Observations about Community Building/Rapport Activities Observations about Classroom Discussion: Empathy, vulnerability, conflict, planned vs. unplanned, related to curriculum Observations about Student Voice & Participation Observations about Non- verbal communication 312 APPENDIX F: TEACHER INTERVIEW PROTOCOL Narrative inquiries are emergent. Clandinin (2013) described a successful interview as one that resembles a natural conversation rather than a list of questions. To that end, the questions below will guide the conversation of the three semi-structured interviews. “The closeness of the research interview to everyday conversation may imply a certain simplicity, but this simplicity is illusory” (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014, p. 18). Interview One: Life History (Seidman, 2019) and the narrative three-dimensional spaces of sociality, temporality, and place (Clandinin, 2013). 1. Temporality & sociality: past/present a. Describe your journey to becoming a music teacher. b. What was your school music experience like as a high school student? How has that experience impacted the way you are as a teacher? c. How have you experienced the COVID-19 pandemic as a music teacher? d. How has your philosophy as a choral music educator shifted over your career? Over the past year? During the pandemic? e. How would students in your class describe you as a teacher? 2. Place: a. Describe your school, district, town. What are its values? What are the community relationships like? How involved are parents? b. Describe your classroom. What’s on the walls? How are the seats organized? 3. Sociality: a. In what ways does your school or administration encourage or discourage teachers to discuss current events with students? 313 b. Can you think of a time when a school policy or stance on an issue has been in conflict with your personal views? c. How do you define a difficult conversation? How do you navigate them in your role as a teacher? 4. Demographics: I would like to ask you about the identities you hold. Consider what aspect of your identities you would like to share with the readers of this dissertation, perhaps in regard to age, race, sexuality, gender, education, religion. Interview Two: Details of Lived Experience 1. What musical goals do you have for this ensemble? 2. What non-music goals do you have for this ensemble? 3. What repertoire did you select for this ensemble? How do you select repertoire? 4. Describe for me your lesson planning process. How do you get from selecting repertoire to performance? 5. What role does conversation and class discussion play in your choral rehearsals? 6. How do you build rapport and classroom community? 7. How do you handle student conflict in class? How do you create space for multiple student viewpoints? 8. How have you publicly responded to major global/national/local events? Do these become planned topics of conversation in your classes? 314 APPENDIX G: STUDENT MINI-INTERVIEW PROTOCOL Brief Student Interviews (goal: 15-20 minutes) 1. I have observed two significant class discussions so far in chorus: one on the Super Bowl halftime show and one on the impending end of mask mandates. How did you experience those discussions? Describe your role during class those days. a. As other discussion topics are observed in class, I will ask about them in a similar manner: How did you experience the discussion on [insert topic]? 2. How are the discussions you have in chorus class similar or dissimilar to discussions in other classes in your schedule? 3. Can you describe things about the environment of chorus class that makes you feel comfortable or uncomfortable to voice your opinion in such discussions? 4. How do you feel about these discussions taking place specifically in a music class? In what ways do the discussions impact the music making? 5. Is there anything else you would like to add about how you’ve experienced classroom discussions this year in chorus class? 6. Demographics: I would like to ask you about the identities you hold. Consider what aspect of your identities you would like to share with the readers of this dissertation, perhaps in regard to age, race, sexuality, gender, education, religion. 315 APPENDIX H: FEATURED STUDENT INTERVIEW PROTOCOL Interview One: Focused Life History 1. How would you describe yourself in relation to your family? (How old are you? Do you have siblings?) 2. How would you describe yourself in relation to the town? (Have you lived here all your life? Do you feel connected to your town?) 3. How would you describe yourself in relation to the school? (What grade are you in? Do you feel connected to your school? Do you participate in extra-curriculars?) 4. Who are you in relation to the chorus? Describe your experiences with school music. 5. How have you experienced the pandemic? In what ways has it changed your home life? Your social life? Your school life? 6. In what ways or to what extent do you engage with local, state, or national news coverage? 7. To what extent or in what ways do you talk about current events in school? At home? With friends? 8. Demographics: I would like to ask you about the identities you hold. Consider what aspect of your identities you would like to share with the readers of this dissertation, perhaps in regard to age, race, sexuality, gender, education, religion. Interview Two: Details of Lived Experience 1. I want to ask you about the mundane details of being a student. a. What is your morning routine like before you arrive at school? b. How do you feel when you walk into the school building? c. What do you hear or experience in the hallways at school? 316 d. What classes do you take? What does it feel like to walk into each of those classrooms? e. What type of classroom activities engage you the most as a student? What activities do you find least engaging? 2. I’m interested to know more about your experiences with classroom discussions. a. How often do your teachers engage the class in discussion? b. How do teachers make room for differing opinions? c. Do you feel comfortable speaking in classroom discussions? What determines your willingness to participate? d. Can you think of any example of a recent class discussion or activity that challenged your view on an issue? 3. Lastly, I’m interested to know about your perceptions of the chorus class. a. How would you describe the classroom climate of the chorus? b. Do you feel able to sing out? To make a musical mistake? How come? c. Can you recall a recent class that involved classroom discussion? What was being discussed? How do you feel about the balance of singing versus talking (and other activities) in the class so far this year? d. How does your teacher promote community among classmates? e. Have you experienced any difficult conversations in chorus class 4. What is most important to you at school? What do you value most? 317 APPENDIX I: WALKTHROUGH PROTOCOL Questions for Walkthrough: 1) Describe what you see. (Goal: capture the physical space through your eyes, not mine) 2) Describe what you normally hear in these spaces as you walk about through your day. 3) Describe a sense of connectedness or belonging that you feel in each space. 4) What does your body feel like as you are in these spaces? 318