Beyond Decorating Your Classroom

 

When preparing our room for our students this upcoming fall, we are always looking for meaningful ways to make our walls as appealing and fun as they are instructional. Our classrooms tend to be a music theory, music history, and inspirational book all at the same time. I know that some of us are going to be teaching on a cart, this idea that I am sharing with you today can translate to that format too. 

During my first year of teaching full time, I was at a brand new school, which put me in charge of buying everything for the classroom. It was an extremely stressful and exciting time.

As you all know, anchor charts and posters of famous musicians are always part of the list of materials to get, so I did. When this arrived I felt that the packet for composers was incomplete. Honestly, I have always felt this way and if you want to add female composers, you need to buy a different packet. For this reason, I created my own. I’m blessed with a room with generous space and I display my famous artists in a timeline, starting from the Renaissance to today. Here are the ones I use, I just put them in a very simple slide presentation. Please make a copy for yourself if you are interested in using this resource. When sharing about notable musicians on a cart you can do that through a Slide or PowerPoint presentation.

In a culturally responsive classroom, our students need to find themselves represented on our walls, as well as in the books we read, and the music we sing and play. I enjoy creating opportunities for our students to discover and explore all the possibilities available to them. Therefore, when choosing which musicians to showcase in our rooms, our list should all look different. Our walls of composers should be different and should go beyond the composers traditionally featured.

This is the criteria I used when looking for artists to feature.

• I looked for artists that represent the demographic of my students and beyond, and when available I use pictures of them at their young age. I work at a bilingual school with a heterogeneous population of Latinx and Anglos. They are well represented in my wall.
• I looked for diversity in gender. I try my best to showcase men and women artists equally represented.
• I looked for artists that represent a variety of music styles, roles and genres. I don’t limit my wall to classical and orchestral music, as all music have the same value within their own context. Classical music is equally important than  Cumbia from Central and South America or Plena from Puerto Rico. These musics simply follow different standards and compositional norms than eurocentric music and they play a different cultural role.
• I feature more than composers of orchestral music, I also showcase choral composers, instrumentalists, singers, producers, and more. Music artists in a general sense. Music offers so many opportunities!
• I looked for artists they can recognize. I want my students to feel that their taste and their music knowledge is valued and acknowledged.
• I also feature artists that are meaningful to me personally. All of my students know my love for Selena. Her music is part of the soundtrack of my childhood as it is Smetana’s Moldau and Chopin’s piano works.
• I looked for my friends. We all have friends that are active performers. I am always interested in showing them the different levels of success and having the opportunity to have conversations with those artists they see on the wall. For example, my husband, a jazz composer himself, went to graduate school with Angela Parrish, she is making it in LA and you can hear her sing in the movie La La Land. I am sure, if I ask her, she will video chat with my students. My husband is also on my wall, and I play a game with my student where they try to guess who he is and they need to tell me in secret and not tell others. It goes on and on and keeps them looking at all the amazing artists on the wall. My wall is alive and active. It is a conversation starter.
• I looked for famous young musicians from the past and present. I want them to get inspired and to know that if they have a desire, a talent, and work hard they too can achieve success at an early age. For example, you will find Joey Alexander on my wall, the young jazz piano prodigy from Indonesia. He is barely 17 and has been at the Grammy’s several times.
• Because my wall is in a timeline, and the traditional composers are part of the music timeline you can find, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Smetana, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and all of the ones that you would normally see. But they are in the context of a timeline and representing a region and tradition in the world.

If you get stuck, like I did when looking from artists from Asia, ask your friends. I keep in touch with many friends from the universities I’ve been to and they help me with suggestions.

Make your wall of artists more powerful by creating a playlist with the music of the people on your wall. The opportunities are endless!