Daniel's Interview

The focus of my service-learning project, Drum It Up with Emergent Multilingual Students, is to foster community-building opportunities and develop Social-Emotional Learning experiences with emergent multilingual students at my school. Although these students may come from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, they will still benefit from the opportunity to build connections with students with similar experiences and challenges as them.

Challenges and Barriers for Emergent Multilingual Students:

Upon their first steps into their new school, many emergent multilingual students are flooded with anxieties and fears of the unknown. Many of these students have only recently immigrated to the US and have settled into their new communities with barely a window of opportunity to acclimate and familiarize themselves with their new home. For some of these students, not only are they entering into a new linguistic environment, but also many times a new cultural environment that may be vastly different from what they were once familiar with.

These linguistic and cultural differences that set them apart from their peers might only be exasperated by the trauma and challenges they experienced on their journey into the US. In particular, some of the students in my school have emigrated out of Venezuela, a country currently experiencing extreme economic hardship and political instability during an upcoming election year fraught with corruption. Other students, originally from Haiti, are still reeling from the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the country in 2021, claiming the lives of over 2,000 people and leaving nearly 10% of the 11 million people displaced from their homes and communities. Some of my students from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are escaping from extreme poverty, rampant corruption, and violence from the illicit drug trade that has their home communities in a chokehold. These stories only cover a fraction of what some of the emergent multilingual students have experienced before coming to my school.

These barriers hold noticeable effects on the academic and social development of these emergent multilingual students. Students and their caretakers alike would benefit from an opportunity to foster healthy community-building with their peers in a situation that removes as many of these barriers as possible. Furthermore, by participating in this experience, students will build upon social- and self-awareness concepts as they navigate how they may best contribute musically to the ensemble.

The students selected to participate in this activity have been identified by my school’s ESOL department as either; 1) Evaluated and placed at Level 1 on the six-level English Proficiency Assessment given by these teachers, 2) Are newly emigrated students with a primary home language that is not English, or 3) Had previously been placed into either category 1) or category 2) in the previous school year, but have been identified by their current teacher as a student who would greatly benefit from this opportunity (namely due to processing trauma and/or emotional regulation).

These students will meet with me for about 20 minutes once every two weeks, where we will participate in movement activities and instrument playing, namely focused on drum circles. Utilizing resources, games, and activities geared for musicians of all ages and musical ability, I will lead students through a collective ensemble experience. Due to the variety in linguistic background with my students (and to demonstrate that we can still create meaningful experiences together with a language barrier), I will do as much of the instruction utilizing nonverbal communication. I will be miming, demonstrating, mirroring, and utilizing visual cues as much as I can, only sparingly using language to communicate the directions or expectations of the activity.

Some engaging activities and games I plan to start with include ones featuring steady beat and pattern passing, timbre exploration, introductory improvisation development, and beginning grooves that we might be able to jam out to.

Due to the nature of the group, and our expectation to facilitate as much of the instruction with nonverbal communication, I intend to obtain feedback from my students in a similar, nonverbal method. I will give them a post-it that they are able to stick onto a wall chart with emoji figures that showcase happy, scared, angry, upset, etc. that they may stick before they come in for the drum circle, and one they can stick upon leaving to go back to class. Of course, the interpretation of their emotions carries with it a wide assortment of external factors, but I will be able to quickly gauge what kind of effect the drum circle is having on the students. I will also check-in with these students in between our meetings to see how they feel on a one-on-one basis, to see if there is anything I might be able to do to make this a meaningful experience for them.

Based on my interview with Emily Backus and previous communication with other music educators experienced in facilitating percussion-based SEL activities in their classrooms and/or teaching emergent multilingual students, I believe that the greatest amount of preparation I need to do is related to finding methods and approaches to demonstrating musical concepts to my students using as little spoken communication as possible. I am fortunate that I do not have to directly align these activities in the drum circle with county and state standards to achieve specific musical goals, so I am allowed a great amount of flexibility with how I wish to structure our meetings together. Additionally, since these are the students that I teach at my school, many already have an understanding of my expectations and procedures, which will certainly aid in the delivery of instruction during our drum circle times.