Education Revolution: Author Dr Alice Hammel On Innovative Approaches That Are Transforming Education
An interview with Eden Gold
Be a part of the team at school. Music teachers are sometimes far away from other classrooms, or move between buildings and have difficulty becoming part of the team. I recommend we take the extra steps to reach out and collaborate with general and special education teachers and staff as well as teachers in other art or other interest areas.
The landscape of education is undergoing a profound transformation, propelled by technological advancements, pedagogical innovations, and a deepened understanding of learning diversities. Traditional classrooms are evolving, and new modes of teaching and learning are emerging to better prepare students for the complexities of the modern world. This series will take a look at the groundbreaking work being done across the globe to redefine education. As a part of this interview series, we had the pleasure to interview Dr. Alice Hammel.
Dr. Alice Hammel, 2023 National Association for Music Education (NAfME) Lowell Mason Fellow, Virginia Music Educator Association Outstanding Educator (2018), and Former-President of the Virginia Music Educators Association, is a widely known music educator, author, and clinician with diverse experience in music. As a current faculty member at the University of Arkansas, she has vast experience teaching instrumental and choral music in public and private schools.
She has co-authored five texts: Universal Design for Learning in Music Education, Teaching Music to Students with Differences and Disabilities: A Label-free Approach (third edition), Teaching Music to Students with Autism (second edition), Winding It Back: Teaching to Individual Differences in Music Classroom and Ensemble Settings, and Teaching Music to Students with Differences and Disabilities: A Practical Resource (second edition) available through Oxford University Press.
Dr. Hammel is Past-President of the Council for Exceptional Children — Division for Visual and Performing Arts Education and was recently awarded their Past President Award for Excellence.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory” behind what brought you to this particular career path?
I am a music educator, author, speaker and clinician. The backstory can be tied back to my parents! They were both pediatricians, who worked in our small town, and were the only doctors in quite a large area who would take Medicaid patients. Therefore, all of the children with disabilities would come to my parent’s office and I would see these kids that I didn’t go to school with, because at that time the law had not reached Sebring, so we still had children in separate schools or not attending school. My parents were not big on child care, so I would go to the hospital with them, or to the office with them. I even made rounds with residents starting when I was 4 years old.
They would take me to medical conferences, and this was in the 1960s and early 70s, when parenting was very different, so they would hand me a badge to the conference and say, “Bye.” Then I would go to whatever I wanted or go hangout in the exhibit hall. I was entirely by myself the whole time. My parents only spoke doctor talk, and I had no baby toys. My mom says that my high chair was the DSM-1, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is a book that tells us what is wrong with us, and I sat on that, so in order to communicate with my parents I learned how to speak doctor.
I eventually started working in their office, and began with emptying the trash can and worked my way up to working to helping with some of the Medicaid stuff when I was in high school. I broke many HIPAA laws I shouldn’t have, but I was just so curious about anything that was different. I still to this day am fascinated by things that are different. I eventually found a way to combine my love for all things different and for people with disabilities who need extra for school, with my love for all things music at the same time. I put it all together and this is what I do.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One very interesting story was the first IEP meeting I attended as a parent. I had attended many as an advocate, teacher, and mentor. The experience of being in the room talking about my own child really changed my perspective on the process. As a result, I started preparing differently and offering different advice to teachers and parents. I began to advocate strongly that each person at the table say something related to the strengths the student brings to school. IEP meetings can become unintentionally negative. Everyone is very busy and we sometimes forget that the student is also a child who needs all the support they can get.
Can you briefly share with our readers why you are an authority in the education field?
I have been in this field (music/special education) for almost my entire life. I also am someone who lives with disabilities and strongly believes in the Disability Rights saying “Nothing About Us Without Us.” Because of my early experiences with medical professionals, my almost 40 years of being a music teacher, the amazing opportunities I have had to speak to people and write articles and books has helped me hone my skills in communicating messages and strategies encompassing differences and disabilities. Because I also live with disabilities, I can bring an authenticity to the process and connect easily with others who also have disabilities.
Can you identify some areas of the US education system that are going really great?
I have seen a distinct shift over the past 20 years in the way we think about students who are different. As our country has begun to accept the value that persons with disabilities have, the stigma has lessened. I did not begin unmasking (revealing) my own disabilities until about 10 years ago after the culture was changing. It is now less stigmatizing to have disabilities and our schools are recognizing and moving with these new views that value all students and believe every child deserves an education. A Supreme Court Case in 2017 (Endrew v Douglas) moved the needle as well. One of the most practical sentences was that every child every day deserved meaningful and achievable goals. This has helped us remind everyone that every child can learn. We just need to wind things back to find their current skill levels and work from there. These are very exciting new advances that I highly value and appreciate in our current US education system.
Can you identify the key areas of the US education system that should be prioritized for improvement? Can you explain why those are so critical?
One of the most critical needs in the US education system is funding. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has never funded more than 14% of what is needed to educate students with disabilities and meet their needs. Most of the school funding comes from property taxes. This leans right into the inequities that are evident in our country. Some school systems have money to meet all their needs while others do not. Fully funding IDEA and providing more equity in the way our taxes pay for public schools could make a profound difference in the lives of so many children who do not have what they need to learn.
Please tell us all about the innovative educational approaches that you are using. What is the specific problem that you aim to solve, and how have you addressed it?
I was steeped in the medical model of disability from birth. I know the labels and the etiology and incidence rates as well as the disabilities no one talks about. We really only speak about 12 medical model disabilities while there are many more that are not widely known or understood. Many teachers often open an IEP for a student and do not find a medical model disability named in the paperwork. My idea was to borrow the idea of domains and think about the way we all access the world through our daily lives. By using a domain system, in conjunction with an awareness of the medical model), we can pay more attention to our students and who they are as individuals rather than relying on what we learned in a class in college or read on the internet. The domains I feel work best are: Behavior, Cognition, Communication, Emotional, Physical/Medical, and Sensory. Every one of us, whether we have disabilities or not, has an uneven profile, to some extent, among these domains. We can also use the medical model information and include it within our knowledge of the student and the domains we know they will need extra support in to be successful.
In what ways do you think your approach might shape the future of education? What evidence supports this?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has been ‘the book’ for a long time. Medical professionals use it to diagnose patients with various medical model differences and disabilities. This book is published by the American Psychiatric Association. Their editions, starting around 1994, have begun to combine disabilities into larger categories to decrease the number of medical model disabilities overall. In Europe, they have been utilizing a more social model similar to domains. They create spaces and experiences that honor the personhood and dignity of everyone, rather than retrofitting a building, festival, concert, or other public event after it has been planned. If we can create spaces, events, and experiences that are planned as accessible to all, we will be moving much closer to the equity being sought by the disability community.
How do you measure the impact of your innovative educational practices on students’ learning and well-being?
My favorite measure is through the messages and emails I receive from teachers I have taught. I appreciate their stories of how the strategies they learned have improved their ability to meet the needs of all students. As I travel, I notice more teachers are now considering emotional and mental health as well as social and emotional learning. We are using far less deficit-based language and ask people with disabilities how they would like to be identified, rather than speaking for them as if they weren’t there. My greatest measure would be for my emails to stop coming and my phone to stop ringing because that would mean every student has what they need and every teacher knows how to assist them.
What challenges have you faced in implementing your educational innovations, and how have you overcome them?
In the beginning, it was slightly challenging to introduce a new model to US music educators. I felt considerable push-back from senior members of the profession. Honestly, I was surprised they even noticed me. 🙂 I did not change my path as a result of this because the kind of change we are enacting takes a lot of time. An equity and access issue will not be easily corrected. Time and persistent authentic interactions are helping ‘move the needle’ on disability. There are still some who think it is either the domain method or the medical model. That is incorrect. The domain method and medical model are both/and. We should know the medical model disabilities of our students and have some general idea about their needs. The domain model adds to our experience because it then asks us to consider what domains each of those needs are in and how we can create classrooms and learning experiences that fit all our students.
Keeping in mind the “Law of Unintended Consequences” can you see any potential drawbacks of this innovation that people should think more deeply about?
If there were a Law of Unintended Consequences within my work, I think it would be that some think they must choose between the medical model and domain model. I am working to correct this misperception and am delighted to say that Gen Z gets it.
What are your “5 Things I Wish I Knew When I First Started”?
1 . Raising your voice in the classroom doesn’t work
2 . Know your students — who they are, their families, their lives outside of school
3 . Be a part of the team at school. Music teachers are sometimes far away from other classrooms, or move between buildings and have difficulty becoming part of the team. I recommend we take the extra steps to reach out and collaborate with general and special education teachers and staff as well as teachers in other art or other interest areas.
4 . Do not assume that a level of expressive communication equals a level of receptive language. Many of our students know far more than they are able to convey and we should never assume.
5 . Take care of yourself (physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually). I learned this lesson from Millennials and Gen Z. If we do not take care of ourselves, we cannot continue to take care of others.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Positives come and go. Negatives accumulate.”
My dear friend Tim Lautzenheiser taught me that quote years ago. Some people we interact with have had so many negative experiences in their lives that they just give up. Yet, none of us will ever become satiated on specific, positive praise.
We are blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I would choose Dolly Parton. The way she pulled herself, her family, and so much of her home county out of poverty is a lesson in selflessness, gratitude, and kindness. I admire Dolly because she thinks of others more than herself. Between all the charitable groups she has founded, her casual generosity when she thinks no one is looking, and the way she treats everyone like a friend is inspiring to me.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I have a website: www.alicehammel.com
I have a Facebook business page: Dr. Alice Hammel
I love to answer emails: hammela@mac.com
Thank you so much for these insights! This was so inspiring!
About The Interviewer: Eden Gold, is a youth speaker, keynote speaker, founder of the online program Life After High School, and host of the Real Life Adulting Podcast. Being America’s rising force for positive change, Eden is a catalyst for change in shaping the future of education. With a lifelong mission of impacting the lives of 1 billion young adults, Eden serves as a practical guide, aiding young adults in honing their self-confidence, challenging societal conventions, and crafting a strategic roadmap towards the fulfilling lives they envision.
Do you need a dynamic speaker, or want to learn more about Eden’s programs? Click here: https://bit.ly/EdenGold.
Education Revolution: Author Dr Alice Hammel On Innovative Approaches That Are Transforming… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.