Next Workshop:
Meaningful Music Learning for Home, Hybrid and School: Maximizing Create, Respond and Connect (While Performing at Home)
August 5th, 2020|9am-noon, from the comfort of home via zoom
Workshop with Nyssa Brown
We are very excited to welcome Nyssa Brown of Music Ed Forward who will be doing a digital workshop in August on what our classrooms may look like this fall. If you haven’t gotten a chance to watch her webinar (http://musicedforward.com/webinars/fall2020 ), we highly recommend it. Nyssa has years of classroom experience and a great way of looking at how we teach to help us choose a path forward for our particular communities.
About the workshop from Nyssa:
“Should we be teaching the same thing this fall as we did in spring? What do our kids need now? How can we engage their hearts, minds, and musical skills? This workshop will highlight flexible, meaningful learning that can be done in multiple learning environments. Contextual, strengths-based learning as well as a focus on connection will be woven through the sample learning activities. Come think creatively and flexibly as we prepare to welcome our students back to music learning!”
Nyssa Brown is an international music education consultant working with schools interested in transforming students, teachers and communities through music education. With a speciality in curriculum design, conceptual learning and responsive facilitation, Nyssa empowers learners of all ages to build on their current knowledge and envision new possibilities. Nyssa has 16 years of experience in both the elementary and secondary music classrooms, as well as teaching and leadership experience at the team, school, district, state, national and international levels. In the recent development of the National Core Arts Standards, Nyssa served as a Grade 3-5 sub-committee member. Ms. Brown served as Music Education Coordinator for Minnesota’s Perpich Center for Arts Education and coached teachers in over 100 school districts across the state of Minnesota. She was one of ten finalists for 2004 Minnesota Teacher of the Year and received a prestigious Milken Educator Award in 2004 from the Milken Family Foundation. Passionate about teaching in a global context, Nyssa taught at American School of the Hague in the Netherlands, The American Embassy School in New Delhi, India and in both Namibia and South Africa, through a fellowship offered by the Eastman School of Music’s Umculo: The Kimberley Project. Nyssa is a faculty member of the Kodály Levels Courses at Indiana University and the University of St. Thomas. She has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas and Augsburg College. Nyssa also studied in Hungary at the Kodály Institute’s summer seminar. She released her first CD in October, 2000, “Packwood or Paradise.” Ms. Brown graduated from the Hartt School of Music and Hartford College for Women in 1998 with a BMus in Education and a BArts in Women’s Studies. She completed her Master of Arts in Music Education at the University of St. Thomas, 2008. Her Kodály certification was earned at Brigham Young University in 2001, and she has completed Levels 1 and 2 of her Orff training at University of St. Thomas.
First-year teachers – $10
OAKE Members – $20
General (Non-OAKE Members) – $25
An Apology To Our Members
July 9, 2020
Dear NWKE Community,
A few years ago, NWKE was asked by some of our members and colleagues to have a conversation about race. We handled it poorly, and as a result, we lost several valuable Black & Brown members, board members, members within the LGBTQ+ community, and those speaking up for them. We’re sorry. They deserved better from us as colleagues and friends. Their voices are needed and we weren’t listening. We are seeking to hear them now and make it right. Our membership, if not a diverse community, is not a whole one, and we are committing to rebuilding relationships.
NWKE hosted an event at which language was used that caused people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people in our community to feel marginalized. The response of the NWKE board to the people who were hurt by this workshop failed to address the concerns of our community and caused further damage to the educators who raised these concerns. We acknowledge that we made mistakes in how we tried to repair the harm. Our attempts were not enough, and we hope to do better in the future.
Beyond our actions as a board or a professional organization, we are also all music educators who work every day with incredibly diverse populations of students. We need to hear the voices of diverse educators in order for us to offer the kind of responsive music education that our students deserve. We feel the absence of these leaders and recognize their contribution to our organization. By speaking up and speaking out, they have helped us realize how much work we must do in order to make all identities and voices feel equally valued in NWKE.
Music education can be transformative in the hearts, minds, and lives of teachers and students alike: we seek to understand and implement culturally responsive teaching practices, anti-racist pedagogy, and practices aligned with decolonizing the music classroom within the framework of our Kodály teaching.
This is the call of Kodály in the 21st century.
We invite you to join us.
Recent News
New Teacher Discount for workshops –
Are you a first year teacher? We are excited to announce a new discount for first-year teachers. If you are in your first year of teaching, you can preregister for $15, or pay $20 the day of. This will show up as one of the checkout options on the main registration page.
Looking for a discount? – Want to help make these workshops happen and attend for a lower cost? Volunteering is a great way to become more involved in NWKE! Click here to sign up to volunteer at a workshop!
About NWKE
Northwest Kodály Educators is a chapter of the Organization of American Kodály Educators.
