The Founding of Rock and Roll Academy
Why Being an Expert Isn’t Necessarily the Most Important Thing
During the 1980’s I taught guitar at the Augusta Arts Festival in West Virginia. Each year, the most revered traditional music artists in America would gather to share their expertise with students in the ages-old folk format of aural transmission. The masters showed up, played and explained, while the students listened, took notes, and did their best to absorb the information.
One year, however, a student showed up and began setting up a tripod with a huge VHS camera on top of it. When asked what he was doing, he casually replied that he was going to videotape the lessons. The traditional artists, who disseminated knowledge for a living, were taken aback. It felt like an intrusion, as much personal as it was technological.
What might it mean that someone was going to videotape them, capture their teaching in a permanent format, instead of honoring the traditional folk process of master and student? Audio recording the process was permitted. Videotaping, though, somehow felt different.
A quick meeting was held. It was determined that no videotaping would be allowed. The student begrudgingly took down his tripod.
As guardians of the tradition, the artists understandably felt threatened. For one thing, it was how they made their living. Videotaping threatened their ability to control access to their expertise. They weren’t arrogant about it, it’s just who they were and what they did. They were authentic artists and expert teachers; masters of a tradition caught in the crosshairs of cultural change.
At the time, in the misty mountains of West Virginia, it made sense to protect the masters.
Flash forward to the fall of 2004, when I was launching the first after school semester of Rock and Roll Academy. During that first semester, I pretty much followed the traditional model of being the expert and showing my students how to play their parts. Students downloaded their chosen songs from Apple Music and, once I heard the song, I used my musical and teaching skills to break down and convey the content to the students. I was a teacher. It worked.
But midway through the second semester, somewhere in early March 2005, a group of excited students ran up to me in class. They were all talking at once and trying to show me their laptop. More accurately, they were all freaking out and yelling at me, shoving their laptop in my face.
What? What was it, I asked them?
They breathlessly explained to me that they just had found the songs they wanted to play, online, on a website. But it wasn’t just that they had found their songs online. They had found them in an instructional video format that showed them how to play all the instruments. And it wasn’t just their songs, they said. There were, like, thousands of songs on this website.
“What website is that?” I innocently asked.
As one voice, my students yelled, “YouTube!”
Hmm, let me see that, I said, having no idea that the teaching of music had just been forever changed.
YouTube was founded February 14, 2005, a month into the second semester of RRA. Although I didn’t know it at the time, YouTube would not only change my role with my students, it would change and expand my concept of what was possible within a student-driven educational model.
But it wouldn’t be a seamless transition.
At first, you see, I was very uneasy about this new resource. And not because I didn’t trust the educational content. Quite the contrary. The content was detailed and deep. No, the reason I was uneasy is because I had a huge ego identification with being the expert, the beloved music teacher that my students needed in order to play their favorite music. I was resistant to being displaced. I was literally stuck in the 80’s, attached to my role as revered teacher and expert.
And, in fairness, who doesn’t want to be needed and loved?
My students, however, had zero resistance to this new way of learning. They were so enthralled, in fact, that it was as if a force of nature had been unleashed. I kept my feelings to myself.
The handwriting was on the wall.
My students would no longer need me to learn how to play their favorite music.
When you search out the Latin root for the word educate, you come upon two words with contradictory meanings. On the one hand, you find ‘educare’, which means ‘to train or mold’. On the other, you find ‘educere’, which means ‘to draw out’. Embedded directly in the root of the word itself lies the fundamental dichotomy and tension as to the proper role of an educator.
Do I train and mold? Ensure a standardized outcome?
Or do I draw out of the learner a less standardized, but perhaps more individualized, outcome?
When I founded Rock and Roll Academy, I knew there’d be less direct teaching and more of the collaborative model I’d experienced as an artist. But I soon discovered I had an unexamined attachment to being the expert. The expertise of the YouTube group mind quickly revealed and challenged that attachment. An attachment that didn’t serve my students, or their process.
As an artist, I saw it right away. As an educator, I struggled.
Deciding to trust my artist instincts –and my students—I relinquished control of being the sole expert in the room. To say it was freeing would be an understatement. It was a complete joy.
Once the students had access to video learning they were able to self-direct their learning at a higher level. They felt empowered as learners, individually, and as a group. From my perspective, I was able to move more deeply into my vision of a shared learning model. Freed from the burden of being responsible for knowing every single piece of content, I was now able to focus on facilitating the collaborative process and encouraging individual learning styles.
“Freed from the burden of being responsible for knowing every single piece of content, I was now able to focus on facilitating the collaborative process and encouraging individual learning styles.”
The point here is not about YouTube. The point is that the model of on-demand video learning places the decisions about learning into the hands of the students. Students can learn what they want, when they want, for as long as they want. Whether the information resides on video, with another student, with the teacher, or with the explorative process itself, what matters is that students have access to information based on choice, self-direction, and self-assessment.
This equation changes the learning model completely, with or without the video component.
Not all RRA implementations are YouTube enabled. Working in socioeconomically-challenged districts, access to technology is frequently limited. In RRA’s work with incarcerated youth, going online inside a secure facility is not an option. But it doesn’t impede the efficacy of a facilitated, choice-based, self- directed learning model. A model that draws out the learner.
The learner in your classroom isn’t looking for an expert. Your learner is looking for someone who will accept them, draw out their own knowing, and see them –witness them—standing in their power as an autonomous human being. This is our highest calling as educators.
Thirty years later, all the traditional music masters who gathered in West Virginia, are gone. Much of the content they conveyed has been forgotten, whether it was eventually videotaped, or not. What will not be forgotten, however, is the capacity they held for unconditional love and acceptance of those who came before them. Those who came before them in the tradition, and those who came before them as learners.
The masters understood they were temporary keepers of a knowledge with a long lineage of learners. In their presence, you were seen as someone who was a part of their tradition, by virtue of your presence alone. This sacred gift of belonging, community and inclusion, was imparted to each and every learner.
The DNA of that gift lives on today in the Rock and Roll Academy.
Mark Galbo
Founder and CEO
Rock and Roll Academy