Teachers learn to use music

Teachers from all around the country are convening at Pitt this summer to learn how to use the… Teachers from all around the country are convening at Pitt this summer to learn how to use the campaign songs of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams to better educate their students.

It’s happening as part of Voices Across Time, a program created by the University’s Center for American Music to educate teachers on how to use music in their classrooms to give students a deeper understanding of facts.

The program, which is in its 17th year, began June 27 and runs through July 29.

Voices Across Time instructs teachers on how to use music as a tool to educate K-12 youth in a variety of different subjects. The program teaches the participants to use music in order to give students a better understanding of subjects taught in the classroom.

College professors from all over the country who are considered experts in their fields will train the 23 participating educators to teach history, economics, civics and other subjects through song.

Deane Root, a Pitt professor and director of the Center for American Music, and Fletcher Hodges Jr., the center’s curator, said the institute provides teachers with the meaning behind the facts they are teaching.

“The teachers tell us it’s important because it’s the only program that they have found that helps them learn how to use music from American history in their teaching,” Root said.

Musicologists, education specialists, songwriters and historians provide the educators with the materials and techniques to use American music in their curricula. The institute teaches participants about life, languages and history through discussions, live performances and field trips.

Scholars participating in the program have reported results that have more than exceeded the expectations of the program’s directors.

“Teachers share information about the results, so we have specific instances of what they have done with the material,” Root said. “A lot of the teachers that are sitting here this summer are telling us how they are going to be using this in the classrooms in the fall.”

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The institute is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Competition for the funding grant is high, so having Voices Across Time take place every year at Pitt is a nearly impossible task.

Root said that while the University wishes this could be an annual event, the NEH has a very competitive application process. Therefore, the University only applies every other year, on average.

The endowment from NEH is about $200,000 and is mainly used to offset the housing and traveling costs for the scholars attending the institute.

Most of the funding goes to stipends for the summer scholars to help them pay for transportation and housing costs. Root said the money also pays the fee to the presenters, which are mostly college professors who are experts in some topic within American history and literature.

Recent music graduate Nick Anway said that this is a great program not only for promoting youth education, but also for helping young learners experience the different cultures present within the United States.

“I think the point of music in academics is to be able to use it as a profile for a way to contextualize and relate to the area you are [teaching],” Anway said. “So if you are talking about African American culture in the ’50s with blues and soul and gospel, it is a way to understand and experience that culture as well as the academic perspective of it.”

One example such learning that the program uses is the song “Which Side Are You On?” written by Florence Reece, the wife of a coal miner, about a miner’s strike in Kentucky in the 1930s. The song was made popular in the 1950s after Pete Seeger covered it a decade earlier, and it was also popular during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It is used to teach about the conflicts occuring at the time and what a sentiment of the country was.

Other tunes taught in the program include the campaign songs of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. These are used to cover the contentious issues in the 1824 U.S. presidential election.

English literature and philosophy graduate Ethan Cohen thinks that the institute makes obvious sense and could provide educators with an invaluable tool for educating the nation’s future.

“I definitely think this is an awesome program, mainly because as someone who has studied literature, we use art as a lens to see history through,” Cohen said. “If you are looking at American music specifically, it is a great way to learn history through the music.”