Teaching history of Black music is integral to education, professor says

Cat Foster believes that teaching students to appreciate the history of Black music is integral to education. That’s exactly what she is doing at Virginia Tech, through her role as assistant professor of practice of music education in the School of Education.

Black History Month "is a time where we can identify what makes the Black culture special,” Foster said. “However, I feel like it's something that should be celebrated year round, and I think when we get into the habit of only celebrating something during a specific month, we're in danger of not giving that culture the respect and the honor that it needs.”

Foster's first higher education job was at Fayetteville State University, the oldest public historically Black college or university in North Carolina. This experience informed her areas of research interest and her approach to teaching overall.

“I was able to build deep, meaningful relationships with my students even though there were many barriers that separated us,” Foster said. “This was very different from my previous experiences in teaching, but I am appreciative that they trusted me and wanted to share their personal stories with me.”

These connections and disclosures often came from Foster checking in on students when they had missing work, which has made that practice even more important to her.

“My research really centered more around this faculty experience and giving more grace as a faculty member, because you don't know what's going on and students are not always going to share all of this information,” Foster said. “There were things that my students shared with me that I, as a white person with white privilege, I cannot relate to.”

Her research and personal experiences led her to think about what she could do to help make the field of music education more diverse and to better represent different cultures in the classroom.

“If you look at the stats, we're overwhelmingly white and female, and so what can we do as teacher educators and white pre-service teachers? What can we do to expand our recruiting efforts and really train more teachers who look like the students who will be sitting in front of them?” 

The importance of teaching the history of Black music

Foster said making sure people of color are part of how we discuss music both historically and in the modern day are essential to capturing the whole story.

“You can't tell me that things weren't happening on other continents besides Western Europe during, say the 1600s or 1700s,” she said. “For example, there was a Afro-Brazilian composer at the same time as Beethoven — Jose Mauricio Nunes Garcia — but he was living in Rio de Janeiro, and he had no knowledge of Beethoven but their music was crazy similar.”

Foster also is making an effort to discuss how Black people are influential in contemporary music. She launched the class Culturally Responsive Teaching last fall, which focused on teaching in a way that includes and respects the cultures of everyone in the classroom. She invited Devin Walker, an expert in percussion, racism in children’s music, and the go-go music genre, to give a day-long presentation to both graduate students and local teachers. Walker’s stage name is Uncle Devin and he is a Washington, D.C.-based teaching artist who calls himself a "drumcussionist."

Foster also thinks a lot of teachers limit themselves unnecessarily in terms of the genres of Black music they teach, leaving out many groups of people.

“We don't have to just talk about jazz. We can talk about jazz and we can talk about jazz musicians who are Black, but we can also talk about rappers and it's OK,” Foster said, “It's OK to talk about hip-hop, and it's OK to talk about the roots of rock 'n' roll and the Black artists who really paved the way in some of these genres that we love so much.”

When asked what she says to teachers interested in creating a more diverse music curriculum for their students, Foster said, “I encourage people to find resources and not just hope that it lands in your lap or that someone hands it to you.  If this is something that you're really curious about or you want to make sure that there's representation in your classroom, you're going to have to do the legwork and you're going to have to go find the resources and find the information.”

Written by Alexandra Krens