CONCLUSION: CONDUCTORS, SYMPHONIES, AND ALL THAT JAZZ

Teachers whose practice is based upon “wisdom that unites knowledge, imagination, and the good” (Scheffler 1985, p. 12) are most likely to be at the post-formal stage of reasoning described. They are also likely to be sensitively attuned to the polyphony of voices so that with their students they will move toward possibilities not yet realized.

Conductors.  Conductors of symphonies must be properly attuned to the music and musicians before them. Teachers as conductors orchestrate the music of their class. Like conductors, teachers can make sure that all persons participate in the music making and together create sounds of harmony and passion. Wise teachers will realize that raising an eyebrow, curving the mouth, shifting one’s body toward or away from students’ faces are as likely to bring forth sound or silence as is the pointing of a finger or sweep of one’s arm. Rhythm, pitch, intensity, and timbre convey meaning and tone. The literal meaning of the notes is tempered by the teacher’s interpretation of the composition and knowledge of the persons comprising her or his orchestra.

Teachers as conductors will lead from the front, a position of unique authority, carefully taking responsibility for the music and the musicians. The tonal elements in the music will be well organized in a way that presupposes conscious, rehearsed, and deliberate participation. There is a preplanned order manifest in the composition and it’s execution. The composer needn’t be present, however, when the symphony is being performed.

Jazz.  Jazz is a form of music involving continual reinventing, reimagining, and reinterpretation. Each person is both a player, conductor, and composer simultaneously. Jazz is alive with the tension of the unexpected, the unplanned, the serendipitous. Jazz favors exuberance over order and the challenge of improvisation over playing only by the script. Indeed, improvisation is essential.

Improvisation reveals moments of change and previews transformation. Together these are times “filled with interlocking messages of our commitments and decisions. Each one is a message of possibility” (Bateson 1989, p. 241). Within the potential of improvisation persons experience heightened awareness of self and others. It is in this moment that the person sounds through paradoxically as unique yet in communion with others. Herein lies the meaning of difference.

“Difference,” notes Liberman (1989, p. 130), “is not a concept, it is an activity. It does not settle into a statis or permit itself to be reified but is a shifting system of adjusting relationships.” Difference, then, like self, is located in those places where persons come together, where persons are actively connected. Persons know themselves best in relation (Gilligan 1982). In this conceptualization, self is decentered yet present at that “intersection that inscribes both difference and unity” (Mehuron 1989, p. 91). This is the intersection celebrated in jazz.

Difference resides in the improvisational moment. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty (1973, pp. 12-13), improvisation is the expressive moment where the music takes possession of the musician; it is that moment where the person asserts her or his self while sustaining a sense of the other. It is here against the backdrop of all the others that a person composes her or his knowledge, her or his self. In jazz, sounds reflect off one another in a fluid world of “intonational possibilities, a rhythmix metamorphosis of the sonorous world” (Mehuron 1989, p. 92). It is here where the phenomenological meaning of authenticity is realized.

Authenticity is self in motion, it is self released in play. Caputo notes that authenticity “consists in keeping alive that indefiniteness, that possible-who-knows-when, maybe soon, maybe now, . . .” (1987, p. 199). This is consistent with Palmer’s claim that “authentic teaching and learning, requires a live encounter with the unexpected, an element of surprise, an evocation of that which we did not know until it happened” (1990, p. 74). Authenticity known this way is revealed in the jazz spirit. With jazz, teachers and students look toward one another and listen carefully. Expert teachers in jazz “pick up the interplay between mask and voice, face and speech, look and language, eidos and logos” (Caputo 1987, p. 289).

Expert teachers meet their students face-to-face, sometimes standing in front, from a position of authority, sometimes standing side-by-side as coequals, and sometimes standing behind, nudging students forward. Regardless of position or composition, however, the teacher-student relationship must be a genuine encounter. In such genuine encounters, relationship educates (Buber 1967). Together teacher and students dwell in tension that is “alive, is vibrant and resounds” (Aoki in Berman et al. 1991, p. 132), where each person looks to faces as openings to the soul and hearkens to the sounds that reverberate as intonational possibilities unfold.