Chapter 12: A New Song Every Year: Writing Songs with High School Students¹

Let us pretend for a minute that each high school English student in America spends at least some time writing and performing original music and lyrics each year. Consider the possibilities of students collaborating with local songwriters and lyricists and developing their voices and identities by performing in front of their peers. Classrooms or even entire school buildings, for two or three weeks, transform into collaboration laboratories as students construct knowledge and ability together, an effort that highlights the assets with which students arrive in classrooms. Students are artists, collaborators, thinkers, and creators.

Our students are immersed in music—but are they creating it? What if every American high school student—some twenty million strong—contributed a new song each year? As Eisner (2002) asks about school, “In what forms of representation are students expected to become ‘literate’?” (p. 9). We believe the world— and school—would be a better place if students were provided the opportunity to represent their ideas, passions, and visions in an art form of some kind, if not specifically songwriting.