About Me

Alex At-A-Glance

I’m a music educator with 15 years of experience in multiple settings working with musicians from 5 years old to undergraduates. I hold B.A. in Music Education from University of Southern Maine, and was named the Maine Music Education Association’s Outstanding New Music Educator 2019-2020. I am currently attending Arizona State University in Tempe Arizona as a graduate student in Music Learning and Teaching.

My areas of interest include: Music Education Philosophy- Especially Epistemologies of Practice and Ethics of Music education, Songwriting and Documentary Songwriting, Critical Cultural Studies in Music Education, Music Technology and Narrative Inquiry.

In the Classroom

Before enrolling at Arizona State University in 2022 I was a music teacher in Maine at RSU 14 Windham/Raymond, a mixed suburban/rural district about 45 minutes drive from the state’s largest city. Over those 5 years I taught Beginning Band, Intermediate Band, Jazz Band, Rock Band, Guitar Class, Drumset Club, Music Technology, Songwriting, General Music and Chorus. For the 2019-2020 School year I was named the Maine Music Education Association’s Outstanding New Music Educator of the year.

In our classroom students use both traditional methods and modern technology to create, critique and understand the music around them and grow as musicians. We also entered other classrooms through curricular integration projects that help us to understand the physics of sound in our 7th and 8th grade science classrooms, the electronics involved in microphones in our 6th grade science lab, the aesthetic and cultural traditions of carnival musics in our art classes, we learned how to use music technology to create student podcasts in response to the Covid-19 pandemic with our ELA classes, and the construction and classification of musical instruments in our STEM classroom.

Outside the Classroom

Outside the classroom, after-school, we created a vibrant popular music program with a “drum set club” dedicated to learning the drum set and a student driven rock band that learned to rehearse and perform rock tunes as well as wrote their own original songs for performance.

I also served the school community as a teacher-leader of the Civil Rights Team in our school, a student led chapter of a statewide organization that aimed to make our schools safe and welcoming spaces for all by facilitating conversations and advocacy around civil rights in school.

At Arizona State University

In my time at ASU I have been the instructor for MUS 210: The Arts Around Us, an arts course designed to foster a deeper understanding and engagement with the arts through analysis and creation of artistic works in our own unique contexts, and MUE 319: The Digital and Hybrid Lab, an applied music technology education class focused on teaching future teachers how to engage in digital and hybrid musicianship as well as technical skills and ways of thinking about technology. I’ve also enjoyed playing in Layali Al-Sham the middle eastern music ensemble at ASU as well as working with the Consortium For Innovation and Technology in Music Education.

In my own life as a musician and artist I played upright bass for 4 years with a trad-jazz quartet which eventually became part of a lively summer outdoor swing dance scene. I was a private studio instructor on the guitar for around 10 years. I also was a puppeteer and I have directed a full length puppet opera. I have used that experience to work with undergraduate students to build a shadow puppet show that can be used to teach the essential elements of musical composition and tour it to elementary schools as. I am a teaching artist through Documentary Songwriters and have presented nationally about using DocSong to create meaningful compositions from students' lived experiences. I play the Guitar, Bass, Banjo, and Ukulele

Curriculum Vitae and Resume

University Teaching Experience

Philosophy of Teaching

Past Projects

Past Teaching Experiences

MMEA All State Conference Co-Presentation: Project Based Learning in the Secondary Music Classroom w/ Dr. Jocelyn Armes

Dr. Armes and I presented for teaching at the all state conference about the principles and realities of using project based learning and design in the secondary music classroom. This included process exemplars and student work from my classes. It was a great way to connect with other teachers interested in approaching music education through a constructionist/constructivist approach.

ROCK Band Recording and Music video project: 2020-2021

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As a cumulative year long project students in all grades worked in classroom groups to learn rock band instruments. Students then engaged these skills to cover songs like Enter Sandman, 7 Nation Army, Wonderwall , I’m Yours, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and others. Vocalists from the local music scene were then asked to collaborate and sing the songs we were learning.

We then converted our music classroom into a recording studio and learned about the process of recording and editing music. Students then took this finished recording and created music videos. Planning and directing the shoots as well as working on their performances.

These music videos were edited together into a final presentation of completed student work in the place of a final concert. This concert is available to the public here, Labeled 6th grade Concert and 7th and 8th grade Concert.

The Jordan Small-Cast: 2020-2021

During the early part of the school year my students worked to create original oral history and interview podcasts about their concerns and perspectives regarding living through the Covid -19 pandemic. Students learned audio editing and scoring and worked as interviewers, editors, and producers. The final work was published worldwide to Spotify, a free streaming platform.

Mardis Gras Second Line parade and food drive: 2018-2020

As part of a curricular integration with Visual Art students in the Jazz band worked to learn about the musical traditions of Carnival and Mardis Gras in particular by playing some traditional second line jazz tunes and performing in a traditional Mardis Gras style parade with Masks and figures created as part of the exploration of Carnival traditions all over the world. We combined this with an effort to solicit donations for our local food pantry and in the 2 year we were able to do the parade we were able to secure more than 1000 pounds of nonperishable food items for our local food pantry.

Spring Steel Bands 2017

This spring I had the great fortune to work with the Steel Band programs at North Yarmouth Academy. It was a blast! I was able to get some practice playing the pans and directing the ensemble as well as arranging some simple songs for beginner steel ensemble.

I worked with new musicians in the high school, some of whom had never played an instrument before, to learn a variety of traditional and pop tunes culminating in a performance at the New England Steel Band Festival at Thompson's Point in Portland.

I also worked with 5th and 8th grade ensembles to introduce the steel pans and work together to learn and rehearse music for performance.

Middle School Wind Ensemble

I was also fortunate to student teach with Jerry Barry at Falmouth Middle School where I worked with students from 5th grade through 8th grade in both sectional and full ensemble classes. Together we worked through three pieces including one containing an aleatoric section. The students were great and hard working and the concert sounded fantastic!

Presenting at NAFME eastern Division

This spring I was invited to co-present a session at the eastern division conference of the National Association for Music Education. The presentation focused on using shadow puppetry to teach the essential elements of composition to students of all ages. By drawing on comparisons between traditional 5 act dramatic structure and musical form students are able to create a small puppet show and score it to demonstrate the connection between narrative, emotion, storytelling and composition