Our Mission
We encourage our students to push the boundaries of their creativity and courage; we remind them that they are empowered to make their voices heard. Through musical games, composition activities, and participatory performances that celebrate individuality and build community, we prioritize and uphold every person’s unique identity.
We encourage each other, as well as fellow music teachers everywhere, to criticize the colonialist tendencies of music education and respond through subversive just action. We design lesson plans with consideration to what our students need and what they already know. These lessons are created within the context of each community’s history of colonization and oppression.
Who We Are
Trade Winds Ensemble (TWE) is a group of professional musicians who teach workshops incorporating music composition, songwriting, interactive games, and creative writing to children around the world.
We believe that learning music comes with powerful benefits such as improved confidence, communication, teamwork, and joy. However, our teaching is guided by the fact that music education can only guarantee these benefits when students can access an anti-oppressive classroom. Each teaching artist involved with Trade Winds Ensemble is motivated to respond directly to the harmful tendencies of Western music’s pedagogical tradition, which tend to undermine the voices of students, neglect their interests in the artform, and start with an assumption of limited knowledge. Furthermore, these attitudes and their corresponding methods also perpetuate colonialist ideals of white hegemony through forcing the use of conventional notation, teaching exclusively Western instruments, or exposing students to music written only by white (largely European) male composers and, more dangerously, positing that this is the only music worthy of study. This overarching narrative has revealed evidence that children whose identities exist outside of Western classical music’s entry points are enforced to believe that they are not welcome to access music’s beauty and benefits by creating music of their own.
Our innovative workshops are at the heart of our work and synthesize the various facets of Trade Winds’ mission. Each member of our team contributes to the development of curricula that integrate music education and social work values. When seeking partner organizations, we look closely at institutions who are making a social impact already and are enthusiastic about offering music programming. Our fundraising methods are guided first by community building. We are always excited to expand our TWE family through crowdfunding and personal connections. We fully acknowledge that our efforts risk inadvertent retraumatization, and we regularly consult social workers and other experts when considering the ethics of our work. TWE is continually thinking of effective ways of promoting our work for the purposes of dissemination and fundraising without exploiting images of students or publishing sensitive information. Research and resource-sharing through all-team curriculum sessions, social work training, and incorporating feedback from each partner organization and every student who participates in a Trade Winds Ensemble workshop.
A typical TWE project consists of one-, two-, or three-week experiences which involve experimental composition exercises, creative writing activities, self-reflection activities, songwriting in teams, or creative drama. We are hosted by thoroughly vetted organizations focusing on social impact for children and/or youth and we always teach free of charge. Throughout the entire camp, representatives (such as caretakers, other teachers, or support staff) from the partner organization are present to serve the specific needs of our students. So that we can achieve sustainable growth, we love to establish new partnerships and nurture existing ones by extending our work beyond each camp in a way that makes sense to TWE and the partner. Our partner organizations include CEMUCHCA (Cap-Haitiën, Haiti), Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (Boonville, CA), Rise and Shine Academy (Nairobi, Kenya), RefugeeOne (Chicago, IL), Ruth Ellis Center (Detroit, MI), and the Umoja Centre (Arusha, Tanzania). As a team, we acknowledge that working in sensitive geographic locations requires an ever-evolving mindset that is open to feedback and criticism. Our artist-teachers independently and collectively maintain a commitment to research in an effort to make an impact through our teaching methods in a way that is both respectful and responsible to the populations we serve.
We look forward to many more years of TWE as we continue to work toward our goal: to dismantle oppression in Western music’s pedagogical tradition by celebrating students and fostering community.