Patricia Shehan Campbell, Music Education
I was teaching in a suburban Cleveland school district when I began my Ph.D. work at Kent State University. The KSU experience was riveting to me, revealing possibilities in music and pedagogy that never would have emerged without the facilitation of committed and caring professors — all of them thinking musicians and scholars of music and its teaching, transmission and learning. Opportunities abounded to probe how children and youth learn music, and at what ages and stages (and in what circumstances and settings) various pedagogical techniques could be put to best use. At KSU, I was encouraged to pay tribute to time-honored musical expressions and teaching traditions, and yet I was also opened up to the world beyond 'now' and 'the norm'. I came of age at KSU, and it was the professors there that brought me to thinking new thoughts on music and its teaching, which gradually evolved into the actions of the professional life ahead of me.