W. W. Norton's "Future of the Humanities" speaker series hosts a talk from Sara Haefeli on teaching music history with cases, Wednesday, February 15.
As the field of musicology is coming to terms with its exclusionary, colonialist history, many instructors are thinking critically about course content. Haefeli suggests that we need to consider not only what we teach, but how we teach it. Professor Haefeli proposes that a case study pedagogy can decenter the West and whiteness in the curriculum, and all sources of authority that reify the privilege of the canon—including the professor as the primary source of knowledge and authority in the classroom. A case study approach can accommodate diverse musical examples without risk of tokenization.
A case study pedagogy shifts the focus of a class from acquiring content to acquiring musicological skills. It opens up pathways of inquiry that are inclusive and non-hierarchical; it flattens dichotomies (such as high/low, European/indigenous, professional/amateur); and it suggests that communities of performers, audiences, patrons, inventors, and technologies shape musical practices more than do individual composers. A case study approach can help students question Eurocentric habits of mind about what music is, who makes it, what it means, and how it functions in groups of people. Using the creation of Lincoln Center in the 1960s as a sample case study, she will demonstrate how to create a music-historical case, how to guide discussion, and how to assess student work. She will also describe how students can learn to create research questions of their own inspired by a case and how they can work collaboratively on projects that begin to explore these questions.