Gender-Neutral Voice Pedagogy: Inclusivity and Cultural Responsiveness in the Voice Classroom
February 27, 2023|
Dr. Shayna Isaacs
When the world came to a complete halt in 2020, the profound silence of in-person life as we knew it caused many of us to focus our attention inward, toward the self. Without life’s typical distractions, this self-reflection started me on a journey that transformed the way I thought of myself, including my gender identity. 2020 was the final year of my doctoral education, and I often found myself thinking about my career in the years to come. I began to question the efficacy of pedagogical practices that had been used during the years of my formal education. It is common practice in education to teach as we were once taught. But in my experience, there didn’t seem to be a place for those who identify as gender-nonconforming. I began to wonder about the repercussions on my professional life that this self-discovery would cost me: what sort of parts would I be considered for? If it came down to me and a cisgender singer, would companies hire the cisgender singer to avoid the hassle of my “otherness?” How will I fare in academia, where we all know discrimination is performatively decried but definitely still practiced? Above all else, the fact remains: it is important for current and future singers of any expression to be able to visualize themselves in this discipline.
The following is meant to present voice educators with practical ways to create a gender-identity-inclusive classroom or voice studio. This serves to not only equip fellow educators with tools that would allow them to more fully welcome a gender nonconforming individual into this discipline but also to establish a neutral vocabulary that makes clear our community’s stance on inclusion.
According to a study conducted by the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles in 2021, 1.2 million Americans identify as non-binary. Of those non-binary Americans, 76% are between the ages of 18 and 29. The same study found that 59% of LGBTQ+ students felt unsafe at school due to their gender expression. While formal studies concerning the number of non-binary individuals seeking employment in the arts have yet to be conducted on a large scale, I think we can all agree that the fine arts have long been a sanctuary for the queer community. As that community continues to broaden and change, so do the members within it. Unilateral pedagogical practices once considered standard are now being recognized as isolating and non-inclusive of our vocal community and voice educators must spearhead a movement to widen the scope of our teaching methods so that all prospective singers are welcome in our classrooms. This will require the creation of a new standard of pedagogical processes by which all teachers can welcome any singer.
Cultural Responsiveness in Teaching
In the 1990s, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings introduced the concept of “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Dr. Ladson-Billings examined the teaching practices of an elite group of teachers who had, within the framework of an educational study, been recently identified as “excellent” by both their principals and Black parents. Dr. Ladson-Billings stated that all teaching is culturally responsive, but the question was: to which culture is it currently oriented?
We as educators must ask these questions of our own teaching: who are we serving, and are we serving them successfully? Is our teaching culturally responsive? The following are the four categories under the umbrella of cultural responsiveness in teaching, all of which are interdependent and cannot function without the others.
1. Cultural humility
Cultural humility is defined as “having an awareness of personal limitations in understanding the cultural background and viewpoints of others, and having an openness to the other with regard to aspects of an individual’s or group’s cultural background and identity.” True cultural humility requires voice educators to communicate with their students in a way that involves more listening than speaking. Questions you can ask yourself include: How does this specific student feel about their voice? What would they like to improve upon? What challenges have they encountered as a gender-diverse person within the vocal community?
2. Cultural self-awareness
Cultural self-awareness is defined as “the ability to engage in critical self-reflection, to deconstruct your own cultural assumptions, and to identify your own cultural values.” Though this conversation is often difficult to have, especially within our innermost circles, we must acknowledge that our position as professors and educators is inherently one of privilege. With the power of academic titles and honorifics comes a level of responsibility—we must acknowledge this power dynamic as it affects our students and all of the various connotations it comes with before we can truly listen to a student’s perspective. Without this cultural self-awareness, a teacher listening to a student is simply waiting for their own turn to speak.
3. Cultural knowledge
Educators are faced with what often feels like an insurmountable task: understanding the perspectives and backgrounds of a wide range of people. The gender-nonconforming community is diverse and no two people within it share the exact same perspective—this is important when understanding the way a gender-diverse person might approach their education. Cultural knowledge in this case might depend heavily on knowing a student’s background: Where did they grow up? Was their family unit supportive of their gender journey? Did they have allies at school or at work? How are they finding their social circle in college? Who are their friends, and what do they do for fun? Any teacher would likely point out that they could answer the majority of these questions as they pertained to any of their students, both gender diverse and cisgender. But I propose that this knowledge is doubly as important when confronting the way that our current society interacts with gender-diverse people. Singers are faced with gendered terminology daily: “male and female voice,” “men’s or women’s choir,” and “falsetto.” These words might not carry a specific connotation for a cisgender student, but can feel othering and isolating to a gender non-conforming student. It can be hard to imagine yourself fitting into the grander scheme of the singing world when you never see or hear people like you referenced in your own education.
4. Cultural reciprocity
Lastly, cultural reciprocity is defined as “the capacity to use critical thinking to collaborate with students and their families to develop teaching options that are consistent with their cultural values.” We as educators are excited to teach and communicate—it is presumably one of the reasons why we chose this profession. This excitement can often lead to us making grand plans for a student’s training—we find ourselves setting benchmarks and making predictions about a student’s possible future on the first day of class. The thought of laying out our plans for a student’s individualized training far in advance is enticing; this planning feels like a sort of guarantee that our hopes will come to fruition. But the practice of cultural reciprocity tells us that students often arrive with their own goals in mind and that while our professional knowledge lends us an advantage in certain aspects of vocal training, it does not make us an expert throughout. A recent article in the 2022 Voice and Speech Review states that when gender-nonconforming students are asked to vocalize in a way that may be perceived by a participant as gendered, dysphoria or discomfort may arise, which can feel related to traumatic or minority stress and cause distress. It can be comforting to sink into the scientific process of singing; in fact, for many singers, a scientific approach is what grants them the emotional distance that allows them to evaluate, diagnose, and treat their own vocal faults. But many singers carry trauma from the ghosts of experiences past that can negatively affect their sound despite their best efforts: maybe someone once criticized their tone during a master class in front of their peers, or maybe the rate of their vibrato has been scrutinized by teachers and students alike to the point where the singer is starting to dislike their own sound. The same is true of gender non-conforming students, but with an added level of toxicity. Maybe someone said “you sound like a man” because the student produced full, resonant sounds in the lower end of their register, or “you have a girly voice” because a baritone or tenor chose to explore a higher mode of phonation. Cultural reciprocity means understanding a student’s cultural perspective to a point where saying something hurtful, even inadvertently, is mitigated.
Terminology in the Classroom
It is important first to note that gendered pedagogy is largely inaccurate and accounts for some of the most common and debilitating pedagogical myths. Even pitch has fallen prey to the gender trap, where high sounds are often categorized as feminine and low sounds as masculine. In reality, laryngeal size is the true determiner of how high or low a voice will be. Social gender constructs are very much a part of the way that music education has been formed and presented to the public—so what are some possible solutions?
The larynx does not have genitalia, and yet the “male” and “female” voice labels are still used in studios, voice pedagogy textbooks, and rehearsal rooms. A gender-neutral alternative to “male” and “female” voices is “non-treble” and “treble,” respectively. As voice educators, we should endeavor to speak about modes of phonation and vocal production in such a way that there is no stigma attached—this is where neutral language is most important. Anatomical terminology can be a fantastic solution in this case because it gives students concrete, factual information, and is gender-neutral by its very nature. We learn in the voice pedagogy classroom that the thyroarytenoid muscles, which form the body of the vocal folds, shorten and thicken them and are therefore responsible for pitch-lowering. On the flip side, the cricothyroid muscles rotate the laryngeal cartilages, passively stretching and thinning the vocal folds. These are responsible for pitch-raising. Knowing this, think about the way in which you talk about this to your students. Are you subconsciously assigning gender-coded terms to describe anatomical actions? Do you describe cricothyroid-dominant vocal production using terms with feminine implications such as pretty or sweet? Is thyroarytenoid-dominant production described by masculine-affiliated terms such as strong or muscular? This gender-coded terminology may seem innocuous on its own, but when used over and over to describe certain types of voices, gender-nonconforming students may feel othered, like their voice does not fit in anywhere. Alternative phrasing is something we encounter in the pedagogical field every few years, and not just when it pertains to equity and inclusion. Sometimes scientific discovery leads us to a new, more specific phraseology that can end up clarifying even the most mystical of pedagogical topics.
Neutrality and a complex understanding of the nuance of gender don’t become accessible to us overnight. We’ve collectively grown up in a broken system that has insinuated identities upon us, and those identities have become socially entrenched. We are all going to make mistakes as we work to dismantle this system and we should use those mistaken moments as a chance for cultural self-reflection. What sort of thinking and learning led me to this moment? What ill-formed instinct was I operating under when I made that choice? How can I change this instinct for next time? It can be difficult for educators to acknowledge our mistakes, especially to our students—we fear that it compromises our authority, and weakens us in front of our biggest critics. But students are not looking for literary monoliths who never misspeak. Yes, they are seeking our expertise, but they are also looking to be heard and understood by someone who knows about and loves the thing they also love—the singing voice.
At the end of the day, our job as voice educators is to provide our students with the tools they need in order to be autonomous. Being able to structure one’s own vocal practice and assess one’s own voice are invaluable skills for professional singers. This is not to say that they will never take another voice lesson or have another voice teacher after us, but if we can assist them in finding ways to affirm their identity and provide them with a working knowledge of vocal anatomy and physiology that does not rely on gender normative training, then I would say that is a job well done.
Sources
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Online Sources:
https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/nonbinary-lgbtq-adults-us/
https://www.nats.org/_Library/Virtual_Conference_2020/AATS_IN_SUPPORT_OF_TRANS_.pdf
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/d8-mnh1-st58
