MSU Scholar Profiles
Cynthia Taggart
Her community work has taken Cynthia Taggart far beyond the traditional definition of “service” as routine faculty committee assignments. For Taggart, Professor of Music at MSU and Director of the Early Childhood Program at the MSU Community Music School, the dynamic challenges of engagement, which cut across and integrate her teaching, scholarship, and professional relationships with communities and constituencies, allow her to move beyond the boundaries of the campus.
“Engagement,” Taggart argues passionately, is “mutual learning between faculty and the community.” Her engagement work at MSU started out 14 years ago with the co-founding of MSU’s nationally respected Community Music School. Since then, her reputation as an engaged music educator has branched out to include work with professional orchestras and with music faculty organizations across the United States.
Taggart teaches music not only to students at MSU, but also to infants and children at the Community Music School. She also partners with local teachers and parents in an innovative curriculum with the "Early On" program that brings music to at-risk young children. Nationally, Taggart works with orchestras throughout the U.S. to help them bring the many benefits of music education and performance to children in their own communities.
Taggart’s engagements with members of the Pittsburgh Symphony, the New World Symphony in Miami, and the National Repertory Orchestra in Colorado, for example, consisted of holding seminars for orchestra members, coordinating team-teaching practices, and providing individual feedback on teaching methods to professional musicians, many of whom had never had the opportunity of mentoring young, inexperienced, and community musicians.
Taggart’s efforts do not stop at orchestras and schools. She also was the first chairperson of the national College Music Society’s Community Engagement Committee. The position enabled her to plan annual engagement workshops held at the organization’s national conferences. These workshops always include best practice models as well as going out to the community to conduct the proposed engagement projects. Taggart believes that having numerous outreach projects at the annual conference “raises visibility of the engagement work and gives back to the community hosting the conference.” She is looking forward to continuing her national engagement work as the incoming President of the College Music Society.
In the meantime, Taggart strives to improve the views and attitudes about the scholarship of engagement locally and nationally. The scholarship of engagement, Taggart believes, “is just beginning to be valued as a kind of scholarship, rather than just service.” She lobbied to change the wording of the College Music Society engagement work from “Outreach” to “Engagement,” and she was happy to see the faculty inquiries and new teaching practices and attitudes the change has begun to bring about.
Faculty engagement practices, Taggart argues, need to reach across the otherwise separate venues of teaching and scholarship. Universities that emphasize outreach and engagement as somehow apart from or even detrimental to academic research foster, in Taggart’s view, a false and unnecessary dichotomy.
Taggart exudes her typical optimism. She has lately noticed land grant universities reframing their expectations and allowing engagement work to be an integral part of a faculty member’s professional work. Taggart is aware that such a far-reaching transformation will take time. “Until it permeates the culture all the way down to the faculty and students, there will always be roadblocks.” Until then, she has a philosophy that helps her manage her engagement projects beside her academic work: “If it isn’t on fire, I don’t put it out!”
Cynthia Taggart co-authored the engagement scholarship book Jump Right In - The Music Curriculum. To find out more about her local engagement work, please visit the MSU Community School web site. For more information about the National Music Conference, view the College Music Society web site.
