A Year in the Third Space

by Kinh (TK) Vu

 

I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself. . . .

—Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

In 2012, the Urban Institute's Austin Nichols reported that since the recession, 33,655 PhDs and a staggering 293,029 master's degree graduates resorted to food stamps (Nichols 2012). This news is cause for worry, because for those of us who have reimagined working within disciplines such as music education, our marketability may be chancy. Graduating without a full-time, tenure-track job, I have had the luxury to do what AT&T encourages: "rethink possible."

 

The Third Space

I am one of the many thousands of unemployed doctorate holders, and although I do not receive food stamps, I am homeless. In their study about homelessness and health issues in a mid-sized Canadian community, Tim Aubrey, Fran Klodawsky, and Daniel Coulombe define homelessness as a "situation in which an individual has no housing of his or her own and is staying in a temporary form of shelter" (2012, 144). This is my state as I wander from house to house, city to city, and country to country. My residence is tied to what I call the third space, associated with transience and outside the university, where my role is neither graduate student nor faculty member. My music teaching goals, which include serving people who reside in the margins (e.g., GLBT youth, elders in senior care) or teaching rap and Western classical music in the same rehearsal, make me a refugee or fugitive amidst the traditions of K–16 music education.

I first recognized myself as a third-space resident at the Syracuse Imagining America Conference in 2013. In the third space, one can perfect the act of seizing opportunities to act, and being an engaged scholar-artist-activist without borders. Because engaged scholarship and creative activity are part of my developing portfolio, the third space is emancipatory for naming issues that affect my career goals, critically reflecting on self and now, and practicing what I have theorized throughout my doctoral studies.

When I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, I could not know that my research in the Hmong community of St. Paul would change my heart and thus my trajectory as a music educator. The way I think about a music education career and the good that might come of it have certainly changed. My heart's work emerged through participation in Hmong musicians' work in communities, and encouragement of enlightened faculty in the School of Music and the Office for Public Engagement.

As a veteran K–12 teacher and newly minted music education PhD, I am interested in ways I can participate in the arts as a publicly engaged researcher and practitioner. My work experiences are grounded in traditional K–12 school music programs that include directing bands and teaching classroom music. When I became a doctoral student, I aspired to contribute to music education through teaching, research, and service.

My aspirations shifted from teaching high school band and general music for the primary purpose of developing aesthetic experiences to engaging with community-based solo artists whose arts focus on esteem, justice, and ethnic identity. The research I conducted for my dissertation was more closely related to the latter, where Hmong youth used music as an avenue toward their own development. Discovering a group of caring people who make life better, I uncovered a part of myself that I had not realized existed.

I sometimes wonder if I chose the research or the research chose me, because all research is "me-search." My own identity crisis may have been the springboard that launched me into a study of other Southeast Asians with similar identity issues around being Asian in America. The discoveries I made while conducting research in the Hmong community helped me learn that their music making occurs more readily outside schools than inside them. The messages they sing are very powerful self-expressions about personal and group issues, such as police brutality in their neighborhoods and equal rights for Hmong women. Music teachers like me have a lot to learn from the people in the towns where we work; I should have listened when I was a public school teacher. I am listening (and acting) now.

This year has been fruitful. I have forged relationships outside schools that resonate with my mission to be an agent of change for people who live in the margins. My present activities, all of which were unexpected, include studying aging inmates' use of music as a coping mechanism in an Illinois prison, developing a music program in a Vietnamese orphanage, and establishing a youth employment and mentoring program at Boston's Old North Church (a non-music project). None of these tracks were part of a plan, yet my skills as a PhD are called upon regardless of my specific degree. By practicing ideas I learned during graduate school, I am carving a path that keeps me intellectually active while helping me define a professional trajectory that is personally satisfying and will set me on a course for future research, action, artistry, and employment.

Discernment is crucial. Having this year to name, reflect, act, and dream about my contributions to society has been advantageous as I identify my goals. If I had not had the year off, I would never have established relationships with new colleagues (and mentors) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the University of Alaska Center for Community Engagement and Learning, Go Vap Orphanage, and the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. These are my lifelines.

I now bring to my profession a personal journey informed by my doctoratal studies and expanded by motivation to reimagine my work as a contemporary music educator. Although I could lament not landing a job right out of grad school, I choose to relish my story, to reach out to colleagues both familiar and new, and to discover opportunities heretofore unknown.

 

Building Alternatives and Hybrids

One alternative future leverages the power of music making outside schools while simultaneously teaching a form of music education that is tradition guided, critically minded, community based, justice infused, and yes, heart filled. Within K–12 music and teacher education, music teachers are being called upon to consider their roles as leaders in a democratic American education system. Music educators are leaders or guides when they model for students excellent musicianship, community awareness, and action, and like my best teachers, respect for self and others at all times. Paul G. Woodford notes that music teachers "need to reconceive themselves as opinion leaders and champions of the public good and not as just another special interest group" (2005, xi). Bennett Reimer calls for music teachers to address equity and justice around world issues while simultaneously possessing "an obligation to music and to the teaching and learning of music" (Reimer 2009, 164). These understandings of music education are the kinds in which I want to take a part.

Another alternative future, complementary to the above scenario, situates me outside formal education, taking advantage of my academic and public engagement preparation. With action-research interests situated in the Hmong immigrant and refugee communities of St. Paul, MN, I am expanding my work to include Hmong people from other parts of the United States. I center my attention on ways youth and young adults teach, learn, and use music (rap, spoken word poems, and songs) to move their sociopolitical agendas forward in communities that might not otherwise hear the voices of minority citizens.

Tou SaiKo Lee, a mentor in the St. Paul Hmong community, engages rappers and poets in an opening rap called "A Voice for the Voiceless." He asks participants to speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves, such as elders living in America who do not speak English or persecuted Hmong still living in Laos. By voicing these kinds of concerns aloud, youth become advocates for the "voiceless" and are encouraged to be change agents by continually speaking, singing, or rapping those stories so that the silent ones are not forgotten.

A doctorate in music education is worthwhile if the degree is a conduit through which I can travel to BE an agent of positive change. Although it is foreseeable that my research trajectories, teaching experiences, and creative activities will converge, I still wonder how best to act in a way that is critically responsive to my past, caring to my present, and important to my future as a faculty member, nonprofit leader, community organizer, and musician. While the alternative route that I have traversed in the third space is certainly unexpected, it has become a boon to my professional career. Thomas Merton wrote, "You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith, and hope" (Merton, 1965, 1966, 206).

 

Work Cited