Every semester the music education department at Ithaca College hosts a symposium and invites speakers to come present.

This year they invited Randall Allsup, a professor from Teacher’s College Columbia University focused on social justice in music education.

He presented many thought provoking ideas about how equity is different than equality, how our spaces can affirm difference, and how challenging it can be to overcome financial stratification in our field.

The one thing I want to share with you today though is something he just mentioned in passing. He had us read into a project “generously” and then immediately afterward read into it “critically.”

We are often in classrooms, but in the real world too, are encouraged to either not think (be passive) or when we do think to think skeptically. We are taught to look critically at what we’ve been presented, to figure out how we are being tricked, mislead, persuaded maliciously. We are taught to look for the faults. We are taught to see how the project will fail in the future, why we shouldn’t invest in it.

Rarely do we THINK with enthusiasm, with generosity.

In his particular example we watched a promotional video on the Divan Orchestra, an ensemble which brings together musicians from Israel and Palestine to perform masterpieces from the Western Classical Cannon.

He first invited us to be generous with our thoughts.

What is going well? How is this a step forward? How are their intentions noble? What problem are they solving?

And then, only then, did we pivot to look at the effort with a critical lens.

Who doesn’t have access to this group? What is happening which is not intended? How could this be harmful, now or down the road?

Answers from both lines of thinking were insightful, especially when named one right after the other.

I encourage you to THINK both generously and critically in situations below, and ones like them…

• A student comes in unprepared, view this generously and critically.
• A colleague starts a new initiative in the community, consider the project with generosity and criticism.
• The public education system of which your students are a part can be analyzed through a generous and a critical lens.

Don’t be lazy — do both. It’s amazing what both perspectives will reveal.