Cole D. Swanson, PhD

Teaching Philosophy

During my time as an instructor, teaching assistant, mentor, and graduate fellow in the Duke University Department of Music, I have endeavored to develop effective pedagogy that engages students in active learning, challenges their assumptions, and contributes to the growth-mindset of our intellectual community. I consider effective teaching to be a collaborative process that encourages reflexivity and creativity in the study, critique, and interpretation of music. Three key principles guide my approach to music pedagogy: accessing and producing knowledge through historical and cultural awareness; strident analysis informed by active listening and dynamic research; and classroom dynamics that achieve excellence through collaboration and empathy.

Several key principles structure my approach to course design. First and foremost, I work to develop students’ understanding of the social and historical contexts that inform music-making and the traditions it draws upon, including both classical and popular styles. In my course “Scoring Digital Hollywood” students work to understand how film scoring has shifted away from emulating European art music to incorporating a wide variety of musical styles and approaches, including African American vernacular music, rock and pop, electronic composition, and much more. The course begins with key theoretical readings about how music “works” in cinematic contexts before shifting to larger discussions around how this transition has affected perceptions around film music’s perceived purpose or value in the last two decades. By tracing Hollywood’s musical history within a framework that includes insights from academics, critics, and practitioners, students can experience film with new eyes and ears, gleaning a new understanding of audiovisual media’s relationship to the political and social contexts it is created in. 

Similarly, my approach to teaching the history of Western art music is oriented around sustained consideration of canonical works, figures, and musical conventions, though not at the expense of the bigger picture, nor of traditions and practitioners that have been marginalized by apparatus of Eurocentric musicology. I familiarize my students with significant scholarly insights into the canon while working with them to construct networks of insight into additional contextual elements that supplement, rather than displace, the “core” of the music history curriculum. Thus, my students are active participants in a reflexive process surrounding the canon, challenging the reified status of the discipline alongside their own assumptions around hierarchized musical culture.

In addition, I teach the value of critical listening as a way of accessing and producing knowledge. The skill of listening through layers of mediation on a film or sound recording requires understanding the practice of sound recording from technological and aesthetic perspectives. I help students sharpen their ability to interrogate the form and content of sound recordings as products of historical and cultural processes. For instance, in my jazz course “What is Jazz?: History, Culture, and the Canon,” students explore an album of their choice in various formats, beginning with a digital version on a streaming platform before finding the same album as a CD, LP, or cassette in our music library catalog. Students reflect not only on how the listening experience differs between the two but on how their interactions with the materiality of musical objects inform their understanding of the music and its relationship to cultural practices. 

My teaching also incorporates my personal background as an instrumental and vocal performer, improviser, collaborative artist, and musical director. Working in the genres of jazz and blues, classical performance, musical theater, and opera has not only equipped me with a deep reservoir of knowledge in a variety of musical styles and eras but informs my passion for teaching all music as a social activity that involves composers, performers, and listeners alike. Conceptualizing musical pedagogy in this way necessitates including the lived experiences of my students as well, thereby encouraging them to think creatively and courageously in imagining how they can contribute to the course as a thinker and writer. As part of nurturing these contributions, in lieu of a traditional term paper I offer students multiple options to produce a culminating project that develops their writing and critical thinking practice, including musical compositions, video essays, podcasts, and opportunities for interpretive performances. I guide students through a process that mirrors the development and revision of a research paper, including self-reflective critique, the integration of independent research, and refining of a central thesis or aim. Finally, students share the development of their projects with their colleagues and benefit from communal feedback at every step of the process, keeping the practices of research and writing in-step with a habit of empathetic and compassionate collaboration.

In my approach to teaching, I ascribe and aspire to the model set out by Don McCormick and Michael Kahn in their article “Barn Raising: Collaborative Group Processes in Seminars,” (1982) which proposes a shift away from classroom paradigms of argumentation and intellectual combat, towards a belief in the transformative power of inclusionary conversation. Older models of education have been premised on the notion that intellectual strength is achieved through interrogative rigor; I propose that nuance, clarity of thought, and the courage to speak-up in an increasingly noisy world are vastly more valuable and humanistic qualities, and that the pursuit of those goals is much more satisfying for student and instructor alike. Intellectual rigor and excellence are, in my view, only possible and desirable when the wellbeing of an intellectual community and its members are prioritized.