WVU Smithsonian Folkways World Music Pedagogy Course

06/24/2025

06/20/2025

We had a great week! Thank you to all participants, guest artists, and faculty for making this an impactful week, as always! This year's cohort was talented, thoughtful, and kind! What a great group of teachers! Now it's time to relax before returning to school and reflect on all the things we learned and taught one another. Next up: WMP in practice!

06/19/2025

Our participants taught lessons today using WMP and Smithsonian resources. Here are a few photos, and we will continue to share more photos from the week!

06/19/2025

One of our fantastic presenters this week was Heidi Dunkle, a superstar teacher in Morgantown. Heidi had us up and dancing this week!

Heidi Dunkle is a teacher in Monongalia County Schools in Morgantown WV. She currently teaches K-5 general music at Skyview Elementary and serves as the County’s General Music Facilitator. She is a member of the Mountain Laurel Chapter of AOSA, #118. She has certification in Orff-Schulwerk and a certificate from Smithsonian Folkways for World Music Pedagogy. She is on the WVMEA Advocacy Leadership Force and the West Virginia Public Theatre Board of Trustees. Heidi collaborates with WVU School of Music as host for the General Music Lab School Experience for undergraduate music education majors. She received awards as Music Educator of the Year for the County, Region, and State (2004-2006) and enjoys presenting music education workshops at the state and national levels.

06/16/2025

Later this week we will be visited by Jennifer Mellizo via Zoom to talk about the resources available to teachers in the Smithsonian Folkways archives. Whether or not you're attending our summer course this week, check out these free resources for teachers! https://folkways.si.edu/lesson-plans

Jennifer Mellizo is the Education Specialist at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (SFR) in Washington, DC, where she writes interdisciplinary educational materials that utilize audio tracks from the SFR collection and primary resources from across the Smithsonian Institution. Prior to this position, she was a successful K–8 general music, band, and choir teacher at the University of Wyoming Laboratory School in Laramie for 22 years. Jennifer was a Wyoming Arch Coal Teacher of the Year in 2014, the Albany County School District #1 Teacher of the Year in 2016, and a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Spain in 2021. She is a member of the Journal of General Music Education editorial board, publishes research and practical articles in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, and frequently presents her work at regional, national, and international conferences. Jennifer recently published a book entitled Re-Imagining Curricula in Global Times: A Music Education Perspective.

06/15/2025

Tomorrow marks the beginning of our 2025 summer course! In the afternoon, we will meet digitally with Patricia Shehan Campbell. An innovator in the field, she developed World Music Pedagogy.

Patricia Shehan Campbell is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, working at the interface of education and ethnomusicology. Her expertise is in children’s musical cultures and World Music Pedagogy, with multiple publications that include Songs in Their Heads; Music in Childhood; the Oxford Handbook on Children’s Musical Cultures; Music, Education and Diversity, Teaching Music Globally; Oxford’s 28-volume Global Music Series; and the Routledge World Music Pedagogy Series. Campbell is recipient of the 2012 Taiji Award, the 2017 Koizumi Prize for work on the preservation of traditional music through educational practice, and an Honorary Membership in the Society for Ethnomusicology since 2021. She is educational consultant to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the Alan Lomax recordings, and the Global Jukebox.

06/10/2025

Our course coordinator and host at WVU is Dr. Janet Robbins! She has served as coordinator for WVU’s Smithsonian Folkways Certificate Course in World Music Pedagogy since 2015. There's still time to register at go.wvu.edu/world-music.

Janet Robbins is professor emerita of music education at West Virginia University. Her teaching and scholarship reflect a career-long interest in ethnographic research, practitioner inquiry, and Orff Schulwerk’s music and movement approach. Her book chapter “Practitioner Inquiry,” appears in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education, Vol. 1 (Oxford online, 2023). Her interest in cross-cultural creativity was sparked by her work with Music Alive!, a federally funded faculty-student exchange project between WVU and Brazil partner universities in Recife and Rio de Janeiro (2006-2012). University students’ study-abroad experiences are chronicled in her chapter “Crossing Borders: Building Bridges for an International Exchange in Music Teacher Education,” published in Alternative Approaches in Music Education: Case Studies from the Field (2010). Janet traveled to Brazil to study music and dance traditions of Northeast Brazil for two sabbaticals (2006 and 2011), and in 2018 she returned to the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife as a Fulbright Specialist for a project, “Music, Culture, and Creative Practices,” aimed at promoting the nexus of music education and ethnomusicology.

06/08/2025

The musicology faculty at WVU are world class researchers and teachers. We are lucky to have Dr. Katelyn Best presenting a session again this year. There's still time to register at go.wvu.edu/world-music.

Katelyn Best is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Musicology at West Virginia University. She served as a lecturer for the Department of Musicology at Florida State University as well as the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University. She was also Co-Director of the Florida State University’s Andean Ensemble and Director of the World Music Ensemble Summer Music Program. As a scholar, her research explores music in Deaf culture, hip hop, sound studies, musical movements, and cultural activism. She received a Carol Krebs Research Fellow Award to conduct fieldwork throughout the U.S. and was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Crossroads Music and Social Justice Paper Prize and the SEM Applied Ethnomusicology Paper/Project Prize for work based on this research. Recent publications include “Expanding Musical Inclusivity: Representing and Re-presenting Music and Deaf Culture through Deaf Hip Hop Performance” in Participatory Approaches to Music and Democracy and “Ethnocentrism 2.0: The Impact of Hearing-Centrism on Musical Expression in Deaf Culture” in At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice.

06/05/2025

This year, we are including a session specifically about vocal music! There is still time to register for the World Music Pedagogy Course at WVU! Join us! go.wvu.edu/world-music.

Katie Schramm is a choral music educator and PhD student at the University of Michigan. Katie taught choir and general music in West Virginia, for ten years. While at WVU for her master's, Katie was the instructor of record for undergraduate choral and voice classes. Katie has presented her research on culturally sustaining pedagogies in the choral classroom and teacher agency at state and national conferences. In 2012, Katie traveled to Ghana for thirty days to study songs, drumming, and dance throughout the country. Shortly after our course, she departs to Mysuru, India for a similar research trip.

06/04/2025

The WMP course at WVU is unique because of the abundance of Appalachian music experts featured each year. Chris Haddox will lead our Old Time Jam on Wednesday afternoon as well. Keep an eye out for the event page! And here's some good news- registration has been extended! Register at go.wvu.edu/world-music.

Chris Haddox is a Logan, West Virginia born and raised songwriter/singer/multi-instrumentalist who is now based in Morgantown, West Virginia. Chris writes and sings songs about (to quote him) “religion, fi****ms, courthouse squares, goats on trampolines, shoes, fiddles, and hurricanes”—whatever catches his eye. Chris is also a community leader who has directed Habitat for Humanity and worked to preserve old neighborhoods, a WVU professor of sustainable design, and an amateur musicologist who researches musicians from the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The music community knows Chris as a well-loved, easy-going consummate picker who never met a stringed instrument he couldn’t master—not to mention a gifted songwriter in the traditional country/Americana vein.

Mary Linscheid is from Harmony Grove, WV, and holds a B.A. in English Creative Writing with minors in Appalachian Music and Appalachian Studies from West Virginia University. In her poetry, prose, and music, she explores the connection Appalachians have to their homeland, traditions, and community. She performs with alt-folk band The Wild Shoats, which won 1st place in the Appalachian String Band’s Neo-Traditional Band Contest in 2023. Currently, Mary is the Appalachian Programs Coordinator at Arthurdale Heritage in Preston County, WV.

05/29/2025

We are so lucky to have experts in their fields at WVU, like Chanler Bailey! Our steel pan sessions are always a favorite at the World Music Pedagogy course! Register by June 1st! go.wvu.edu/world-music.

For over 20 years, Chanler has been a craftsman for Mannette Instruments, guided by the late Dr. Mannette, and travels as a tuner and clinician. While a Percussion Performance major at West Virginia University, Chanler began playing steel drums as part of WVU's World Music Program, under the direction of Dr. Phil Faini. In 1992, as part of the World Music Center initiative, steel drum pioneer Dr. Ellie Mannette came to WVU and formed the University Tuning Project to pass on the steel drum art form. Chanler began his apprenticeship as a steel drum craftsman, tuner, and clinician at that time. He began teaching steel band at West Virginia University in 2021. Additionally, Chanler builds, tunes, and makes accessories for the steel drum.

05/25/2025

Only three more weeks until we gather for our 10th anniversary edition Smithsonian Folkways World Music Pedagogy Course. Join us in the West Virginia hills June 16-19 as we celebrate local and global music cutlure. Register by June 01! go.wvu.edu/world-music.