EMEA 2023
I had the great pleasure of presenting sessions on behalf of MusicFirst today at the 2023 EMEA Winter Conference in Vicenza, Italy. Sometimes travel for work is pretty awesome :)
This is the first time that I have been to this conference which is made up almost entirely of teachers who teach music for the DoDEA Schools - servicing the families of our US military. What an incredible group of people! They are all highly engaged and passionate music educators and they teach in what I would call a “non-traditional” school environment, even though the schools look pretty similar to schools stateside.
First of all, the student population is a very transient one. As their parents are all in the military, they often will only spend one “tour” or 2 years at a school before they transfer to another base - possibly in another country altogether. I met a dozen or so students and they were all very friendly and enthusiastic. This transience is quite a challenge for the teachers though - always gaining and losing students at random times during the school year.
Secondly, the teachers themselves move around a lot as well. Many of those I spoke with either grew up as “Army brats” (their words) or are married to people in the military. They often apply for and get jobs in the schools on the base where they are stationed, and then move when their spouse moves. Many of the teachers I spoke with during lunch have been in 4-6 different schools (and countries) in their careers. Japan, Germany, Turkey, Italy, the Netherlands, and England were some of the places that were mentioned at my lunch table alone.
Getting online to show the incredible tools available in the MusicFirst Classroom was a HUGE challenge. Because DoDEA schools are all on military bases, the first challenge was even getting “on base.” Thankfully my passport information had already been submitted so it wasn’t too big of a deal. Another challenge is that the internet is controlled and monitored by the US military - you can only imagine the security! I wasn’t allowed to use my own laptop for the presentations and couldn’t access my personal hotspot either. An amazing teacher named Amy helped me out by allowing me to present from her DoDEA authorized machine. Thankfully my slide decks were online (see below)!
Lastly, this is a very close knit community with lots of support for each other. It seems to me that the military is just as complicated a bureaucracy as any school district, and this group of music teachers were all at the conference to support, share and lend advice. I truly felt the warmth from the group, and I my presentations were very well received. I know that I will plan on presenting at this conference again in the future. For now, though, I am going to go and enjoy some incredible Italian wine and food. Ciao!
Here are my presentations for EMEA 2023:
