Love Your Mother

During the finest moments in rural schools, teachers and students journey together. Instead of walking away from issues and concerns, they walk around them, exploring what it means to make music, care for one another, and understand anthropogenic and ecological histories of and diversity within this distinct place. In this chapter, the author explains how ecology has informed his own personal music teaching and learning, offering insights for how other teachers can approach teaching and learning in rural locales. The question guiding this writing is a normative one: How can ecology —as a material reality and as a rational and moral idea—influence Music Education in rural settings? Answers to this question come through the method of philosophy in the form of an autoethnography. The author theorizes—through a succession of pedagogical moments—a single eco-literate unit designed to introduce fifth-grade general music students to soundscapes. Recommendations for five-related pedagogies emerge: interweaving, relationship, pilgrimage, love, and expanded kinship. Through singing, listening, and moving, both teacher and students build knowledge, appreciation, and love for the more-than-human musical world, both locally and globally.