About My Teaching
I view teaching and mentorship as a great privilege and a great responsibility, and I am passionate about learning alongside my students as we engage together in research and performance. Whether working with children, graduate students, or senior citizens in schools, houses of worship, or prisons, my teaching is grounded in a belief in the importance of taking critical, interdisciplinary, and interactive approaches to instruction.
Learn more about my university- and secondary-level teaching experience below.
University Teaching Experience
In my university-level teaching, I use music and sound as a lens through which to view personal, social, historical, economic, and political processes in varied geographical contexts. Developing undergraduate and graduate Musicology/Ethnomusicology and Music Education courses at Boston University, in prison through BU’s Prison Education Program, and most recently as an Engaged Scholarship Course Fellow at Harvard University, I have aimed to made musical coursework engaging and interactive for both majors and non-majors. In every course I teach, I strive to include live music-making experiences when possible, providing opportunities for students to sing chorales, dance to Bulgarian folk music, and experiment with reading different kinds of music notation. Outside of class, I am committed to helping students to develop their writing and critical thinking skills through one-on-one meetings and tutoring sessions.
Course Reviews
In their reviews of my teaching, students write:
“Emily’s mastery of this content and the necessary communication skills required to both mediate and produce productive conversation is simply unmatched.”
“Emily’s clarity of thought and expression is inspiring as we consider readings and ideas. She can guide a conversation without imposing her opinion at any point. She is also an extraordinary listener.”
“Connective and calm, she has a beautiful way of teaching and learning from us at the same time.”
“I valued Emily’s clarity of thought and purpose, her scholarly understandings and guidance.”
“Emily is excellent at leading discussions and bringing the main points of our articles to mind. She is very open and accepting for all of our questions and discussions, and she is knowledgeable about all of our materials. She is also friendly and makes us feel comfortable.”
“This course is absolutely enlightening, life changing, inspiring, and quite honestly, empowering.”
Undergraduate-Level Teaching
I have taught and assisted with the following Musicology and Ethnomusicology undergraduate courses at Boston University and Harvard University:
American Music (Instructor)
Curry College Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Milton, MA (2019)
This course will survey American music from colonization to the present, including popular, classical, jazz, folk, and electronic forms. International influences on the development of American “style” will play a key role in assigned readings, discussions, and research projects. This course will require a great deal of listening out of class to assigned music in addition to analytic readings, research, and a field trip to historically important musical sites in Boston. All students must demonstrate facility in online research techniques.
Primary Text: Crawford and Hamberlin, An Introduction to America’s Music, W.W. Norton.
Music and Disability (Engaged Scholarship Course Fellow)
Harvard University Department of Music, Cambridge, MA (2017)
Through field work, readings, discussions, and presentations, this upper-level undergraduate/graduate course will explore topics related to disability in music history, music theory, and performance studies, and examine recent developments in neuroscience, music therapy, and music education. Defining disability as a cultural construction rather than as a medical pathology, the course will also consider the practice of music as a vehicle of empowerment, reflecting on music’s generative role in shaping communities and advancing social justice and human rights. Students will design and implement inclusive and democratic community music projects, partnering with local service organizations and educational institutions.
Primary Text: Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music, Oxford University Press.
Musical Cultures of the World (Teaching Assistant)
Boston University Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Boston, MA (2017)
This undergraduate Ethnomusicology course for Music Majors and Non-Majors offers an introductory look at selected regions/countries among the diverse musical cultures around the world. Through these musical practices, we investigate the ways in which many of these styles are the product of long running intra/intercultural dialogues, struggles, and negotiation processes that continue to produce new hybrid forms. Because of the vast array of people and cultures within each selected area, this course is necessarily selective and introductory. A variety of scholars and performing artists will give workshops on music/dance and discuss their lives as musicians. For their final assessment, students produce ethnographic research projects.
Textbooks selected from Oxford University Press’s Global Music Series, ed. Wade and Campbell.
History and Literature of Music Part I (Teaching Assistant)
Boston University Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Boston, MA (2015)
This undergraduate course for Music Majors traces in vivid detail the history, performance practices, cultural significance, and musical styles of Western music from the Middle Ages to approximately 1750. The course touches on many issues — sound, score, performance, and history — and it also gives students a chance to produce a significant research project. The course is organized flexibly, some weeks centered in a particular region or locale (Paris, Notre Dame), others to a certain composer or genre (Josquin, opera), and still others to a particular historical development (Renaissance) or school of performers (Troubadours).
Textbook: Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
History and Literature of Music Part II (Teaching Assistant)
Boston University Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Boston, MA (2016)
This undergraduate course for Music Majors is the second half of a two-semester survey of Western music history. It covers the major musical styles, composers, and repertory of the Classical and Romantic Eras and of the twentieth century and beyond (ca. 1750 to the present).
Textbook: Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca, A History of Western Music, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Graduate-Level Teaching
I have taught and assisted with the following graduate-level Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education courses at Boston University and through Boston University’s online graduate program:
Choral Music and Society: Reconceptualizing Repertoire and Practice from the Inside Out (Instructor)
Boston University Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Boston, MA (2016)
In this graduate-level (Ethno)Musicology course, we draw on a range of methodological approaches to engage with choral repertoire, the composers who create it, and the musicians who perform it. Throughout, questions that motivate our inquiry include: what is choral music? How has it become the world's most widespread form of participatory music-making (according to the International Federation for Choral Music)? What can we learn about individuals and communities from the choral works they perform and the ways in which they perform them? How is choral music being mobilized for social and political ends? Looking at repertoire, ensembles, festivals, and their reception in diverse settings and time periods, we strive to understand the historical and contemporary (ir)relevance of the choral arts. For their final projects, students utilize historical and/or ethnographic approaches to address some aspect of choral repertoire and/or practice.
Empowering Song: Music with Body, Mind and Heart (Instructor)
Boston University Department of Music Education, Boston, MA (2015-2018)
This graduate-level Music Education course, designed for music teachers, community musicians, choral conductors, and other arts professionals, focuses on progressive and imaginative modes, paradigms, and processes of music education. The focus of instruction is the Empowering Song approach, which André de Quadros and Emily Howe have developed through a long-term teaching engagement in two Massachusetts prisons. Through singing, movement, improvisation, and engagement with scholarly literature from a range of disciplines, students will work to develop creative approaches to democratic musical leadership rooted in contemporary social justice paradigms.
Community Music Perspectives (Online course Facilitator)
Boston University Department of Music Education, Boston, MA (2019)
Drawing upon the social, cultural, political, and economic milieu including movements in music education, music therapy and ethnomusicology, this course first examines reasons for the growth and development of community music. Students will be asked to trace an aspect of community music that may be considered as part of its heritage and also to evaluate and critique a contemporary community music project through fieldwork. Students will then be in a position to articulate their own vision for community music both as a practicum and as a scholarly pursuit.
Prison Education
I taught the following undergraduate-level course at MCI-Norfolk men’s prison and MCI-Framingham women’s prison through Boston University’s Prison Education Program:
Music and Culture (Instructor)
Boston University Prison Education Program, Boston, MA (2012-2017)
This course is meant to help students develop an understanding of the place and function of music in contemporary society as well as in human and personal history. In an interactive and interdisciplinary setting, students learn about music by singing, discussing, reading, and writing about it. The goals are multiple: to make art with heart; to find personal meaning through participatory music; to engage in music as a democratic practice; and to draw inspiration from making music with one another. We have developed our course approach, which we call Empowering Song, alongside our BU Prison Education students. Rooted in improvised song, poetry, body work, and imagery and featuring guest artists and master teachers from BU and beyond, Empowering Song aspires to facilitate personal and community transformation.
Elementary- and Secondary-Level Teaching Experience
As a conductor with the Boston Children’s Chorus and a teacher with Boston Public Schools, I have used Kodály-inspired pedagogy to create my own materials for teaching music literacy and musicianship skills to singers age 7-18. Additionally, I have developed age-appropriate social curricula meant to further the organization’s mission of catalyzing social change through music.
In 2019, I developed a choral curriculum for use in Cambodian public schools and to prepare a group of singers (ages 11-14) to perform in Him Sophy’s Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia. Delivered in Khmer, the program aimed to teach literacy through Cambodian and international folk songs and games, and then support the young musicians as they learned Sophy’s complex score.
In this video, you can watch me first introduce singers to an eighth-quarter-eighth syncopated pattern by ear; then transition into the oral teaching of African-American folk song; then notate and label the rhythmic pattern; and finally read a new section of Bangsokol inspired by Buddhist ritual chant.
I believe that one of art’s most important functions is to expose people to diverse viewpoints and experiences, and I am committed to exploring diverse forms of musical expression with students in classes and ensembles.