Elizabeth Moore: Reflections on Phase II of the Fellowship

As they neared the completion of Phase II of the Kenan Fellowship, each Fellow was posed three questions by their teaching artist mentor. Here, Elizabeth responds to the questions from her mentor, Lisa.


1. Describe your LCI in-school classroom presentations. Explain the challenges you faced and how you overcame some of your personal obstacles. How did your experience affect your perspective on teaching artist work, and its relation to your own future career plans?

2. In what ways has your AE experience as a Kenan Fellow changed or affected your final project and your artistic perspective? In what ways has it affected your practice as a teacher and your practice as a violist?

3. Revisit the following resources: Maxine Greene’s Variations on a Blue Guitar, John Dewey’s Art as Experience and Eric Booth’s The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible. Choose some excerpts that are meaningful as you near the completion of your LCI Fellowship and explain why they resonate with you.

I have always liked lists and always felt best with a clear plan. Life does not generally comply with my desire for order, and I find myself faced more often with options than answers. Possibilities rather than a plan. Yes, these things do have a positive ring to them, but it has taken time for them to incite hope rather than a fear of the unknown in me. What I am beginning to realize is that in every aspect of my life, planning and improvisation go hand in hand. The one supports the other. Careful planning and preparation lead to opportunities, and in the wake of opportunity come options and the necessity to think on your feet. This may seem like an observation of the obvious, but as we rush through our daily lives we often times overlook such things. It is only when taking time to reflect that we connect the dots and become conscious of certain truths. The Kenan Fellowship at LCI has not only taught me the importance of reflection but has given me the tools and opportunity to do just that.

There is a tremendous amount of planning and preparation that goes into teaching. There is also a great deal of improvisation that will inevitably occur when plans are put into action. As I began the Kenan Fellowship at LCI I was aware of both of these aspects. I was comfortable with only one. As I began working with my Teaching Artist mentor Lisa in preparation for our school visits, I learned new strategies and methods of preparing and organizing before teaching. Lisa took a hands-on approach to initiating me in the ways of lesson plan writing, and before I knew quite what I was doing I found myself creating one. There was much revision necessary. Lisa provided constant feedback and collaboration, but much faster than I anticipated, I had a good idea of what goes into planning for an in-school lesson. One way to look at it is that if you are over-planning, you are on the right track. By this I mean that you probably will not end up using the entirety of your lesson plan as inevitably things take longer than planned. As each group of students is different, this leaves room for adjustments while still remaining true to the overarching goals of the lesson plan. This has already impacted the way I think about and plan for my private students’ lessons. A great deal of learning took place for me in this first area, but it was when putting these plans into action in the classroom that I truly stepped out of my comfort zone.

Having the opportunity to observe TAs in action has been a tremendously valuable learning experience for me. My experiences with Lisa in the classroom and leading activities myself are already affecting the way I teach my private music students and will surely continue to do so. Even though I came to LCI with previous experience in teaching, most of that was one on one with private students. Teaching to a room full of children was a new and daunting challenge for me. What I began to realize is that as I led the same activity with each different group of students, the particulars of the activity seemed naturally to invite change. What I needed to do was tune into what was particular about the group at hand and guide the activity in a direction that would be personally meaningful to them. Sometimes it was as straightforward as picking up on a connection a student made themselves and building on the link, and other times more delicate, as when students seemed disengaged. A connection to them had to be found to regain their attention. I cannot say that I mastered the art of this in out few in-school visits, but I am becoming more aware of these moments of personal connection, excitement or disengagement, and am becoming better equipped to respond to them.

Developing a rapport with the classroom teachers was something I had given little thought to before our first school visit, but the importance of this became immediately evident. With often much time between visits, it is extremely helpful if the teacher can keep the momentum going. It also eases the burden of keeping a class in line and engaged when the teacher shows enthusiasm and commitment to what is being explored. Having seen extremes in this area while working with Lisa this fall, I can say with out doubt that the level of commitment shown by the classroom teacher has a serious impact on the students’ experience as a whole. In my private teaching I can easily translate this to developing a rapport with my student’s parent(s). Just as with a TA’s school visits, there is generally a week’s time between lessons when the the student is expected to practice what we have been working on in our lessons. Especially for children of a young age, it is important to have the commitment of the parent as well as the student and to communicate with them about how to aid in their child’s practicing. This is an example of one of the many parts of teaching that are becoming clearer and more intentional due in large part to my experiences at LCI over the course of the Fellowship.

I have to admit that before I started at Lincoln Center Institute my understanding of Teaching Artistry as a field was rather fuzzy. I was aware that various arts programs around the country employed these Teaching Artists in varying numbers and were active in bringing arts awareness to students. That was about it. I had never considered it as a career option, mainly because it had never been presented as such. As becoming a Teaching Artist as a profession is still a recent development, this is not surprising. It is however unfortunate that more young musicians, and artists in general, are not aware of the field. Now that I have been exposed to what the TAs at LCI do and have an idea of the field’s potential, I definitely consider becoming a Teaching Artist an option I may explore in the future. I say this in such vague terms only because I consider it something that requires more experience than I yet have. It is, however, something I am very interested in and believe to be a powerful way of promoting the arts to future generations; something I feel is the concern of all artists.

There is no doubt in my mind that a single aspect of either my musical or personal life have escaped my experience at LCI unchanged. As I continue to mention, my teaching has been forever altered by LCI’s philosophy of aesthetic education and my experiences working with a TA. I am also beginning to notice changes in my playing. Although barely apparent in my day-to-day practicing, as I rehearse in preparation for an upcoming recital I am starting to notice a looseness and freedom in my playing that was previously missing. I believe it to be mainly a result of the changed way in which I listen to my own playing. I think the biggest change is that I am atempting to listen outside myself. I ask myself more, “What is it I want to share with my audience through this piece?” In asking and attempting to answer questions such as this, I have begun to bring a playfulness to my playing that was previously absent. This is an exciting development to me and one that I imagine will continue growing with the employment of the 10 Capacities for Imaginative Learning as well as other LCI practices in my professional and personal life.

"'Education,' as I view it, is a process of enabling persons to become different, to enter the multiple provinces of meaning that create perspectives on the works (of art)."  - Maxine Greene, Variations On A Blue Guitar

Within moments of beginning to revisit Maxine Greens’s Variations on a Blue Guitar, I came across this sentence, and as I continued to read it stuck with me. It made me think back to my school visits on Long Island with Lisa, and in particular to the moments of difficulty. It is in those instances of difficulty when attempting to connect with students, those times of struggle when the material you are presenting seems just too strange or foreign for your students to open up to, that I am assured that TAs, and artists in general, are needed in our schools and the extracurricular activities of young people more than ever. For as funding for arts programs in this country is cut, so is the breadth of the next generation’s education. To my mind there is a frightening amount of homogenization occurring in public schools. Teachers are expected to teach to the test and for the most part ask questions that require nothing more than regurgitated information. With this as the extent of education in our country, to what extent are students able to come forth with their own developed individual identities? There are many classroom teachers and community arts teachers that go above and beyond, making all the difference in expanding many young people’s world views. Having myself been gifted with an education rich with inspiring role models who have constantly expanded my range of experience, I feel almost as if I owe it to them to aid in the perpetuation of true curiosity and joy in learning. Perhaps the most important thing I will take away from working with LCI’s TAs is that being a good teacher is much more than passing on information. It is also about inspiring your students to ask questions about the world around them, and to greet new information and experiences with an open and inquisitive mind.

“The understanding of art and of its role in civilization is not furthered by setting out with eulogies of it nor by occupying ourselves exclusively at the outset with great works of art recognized as such. The comprehension which theory essays will be arrived at by detour; by going back to experience of common or mill run of things to discover the esthetic quality such experience possesses.”  - John Dewey, Art As Experience

What is the point at which it becomes a hindrance rather than help to artists and their fields to put their work on a pedestal? With the gentrification of an art form there are certain perils. As one audience is developed, another is lost as the price of performances rise out of their reach. Over time, as access becomes limited, experiences with certain music, dance, theatre, etc. are not had, and before long, if even presented with the opportunity to attend a performance, the experience no longer seems relevant. The concert hall is a foreign and uncomfortable world, with etiquette unknown. The solution to this problem is no simple one, but at its most fundamental level, it is again with education and broadened experience at a young age that the biggest difference can be made. No matter what turns my professional life takes, I intend to always keep teaching in some form as part of my life.

“Art happens outside of what you already know. Inherent in the artistic experience is the capacity to expand your sense of the way the world is or might be.”  - Eric Booth, The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible

Reading Eric Booth’s book, The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible at the end of the Fellowship is wonderful. It is both insightful and inspiring in its view of the Teaching Artist’s role in promoting and teaching the arts in 21st century America. It has helped me make connections as I reflect on my own experiences at LCI and in working with Teaching Artists. Even though practically everyone finds some form of art an enjoyable part of their life, there is still an overwhelming opinion that the arts do not meaningfully contribute to society. Arts programs and organizations find themselves time and again having to justify themselves when the evidence of their worth surrounds us. What else takes our existence and turns it into civilization to such an extent? Art in all its creative, imaginative glory has an irreplaceable power that I have never believed stronger than I do now as I reflect on my learning experience over the course of the Fellowship at LCI.