hi! i'm kylie leon and while i'm currently an english + secondary ed major that's very very likely to change soon as my true passions are music and art! not only is it important to me to in general keep these subjects alive in schools and make sure funding is allotted to them and not just sports, it is also important to me that the students that are privileged enough to learn about art and music are doing it in a fully comprehensible lens and are absorbing media critically, specifically in a historical sense. learning about artists' and musicians' works is only beneficial on a surface level, students should also learn the way the world around them impacted the art, for better or worse, and who they are as people. 

a journal article detailing the author's experience in her own high school art class and the shallowness of it, versus the atmosphere she has created in her art class now as an educator. "i have recognized the power that comes with a critical awareness about my own social identities ... my goal in my classroom is for students to engage in a critical analysis of their world through their lens of self"

an easy to read and understand newspaper article that would be given as an introductory to the topic of racism in classical music. the articles and other resources inside the article feature more in depth research on the topic and are from Black voices. This article is written by his white man as he struggles to find something he enjoys to be seen as problematic and would be easier to digest for a white majority student body (not that racism needs to be easy for white people to digest but...), without leaving out their Black counterparts. "the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught. 

Featuring songs in my classroom that only uplift everyone in the class is a large part of having an inclusive history at a young age. Many of the nursery rhymes known and loved have deep-rooted racism, which doesn't seem too deep once you really begin looking, it all becomes quite obvious. For younger music classrooms, these songs will just be omitted from the curriculum, but for older students, they will be observed and analyzed in a historical lens. "I stopped the students, I told them we were moving on to a different activity, and I never taught the song again."

Dives into how researches and educators are are able to collaborate with and get younger generations involved in art in critical ways acting towards social justice, political engagement, and liberation. 

Links theoretical issues to practical examples, and uses a diverse lens to analyze art and it's historical forms. Relationships between art forms such as art making, art history, visual studies, theory, and criticism are explored and gives voices to historically oppressed groups. "How does race matter when pursuing a artistic education?"