Introduction
For the Autobiography of the Mind project, I have chosen to create a Photo Essay to demonstrate the critical events in my life that have shaped my epistemological orientation. Understanding epistemologies as how one reconciles knowing in the context of their reality (ontology) towards the fundamental formation of their values (axiology), it must be acknowledged that any epistemology is multidimensional and rife with contextual, cultural, social, and historical baggage. Harding (1992) provides a compelling claim regarding the essential situated-ness of every individual’s epistemology:
…the standpoint claims that all knowledge attempts are socially situated, and that some of these objective social locations are better than others as starting points for knowledge projects, challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions of the scientific world view and the Western thought that takes science as its model of how to produce knowledge. (pg. 444)
The critical events responsible for one’s epistemological formation, thus, cannot be separated from their social and cultural contexts. Knowing — and therefore to embark upon the task of knowing another — requires a comprehensive undertaking towards understanding and empathizing with the self’s/other’s social context. Both Bourdieu (1986) and Yosso (2005) highlight the essentiality of leveraging one’s cultural capital in the task of knowledge production. This project, in its arts-based form, acknowledges this essential characteristic of epistemological formation and chooses to center both social and familial capital as defined by Yosso (2005).
In attempting to create an artifact that might be useful towards my own self-reflection as well as allowing others to better understand my epistemological orientation, the photo essay serves this purpose well. Introduced to me in my first course with Dr. Bianco (EDFN 7420: Foundations of Education in Urban and Diverse Communities), the format proved to be a strong tool for communicating a comprehensive storytelling of the constraints of Poudre School District’s strategic planning from the perspective of the systemically marginalized voices in the organization: the teachers and students, particularly of color and other marginalized identities (project linked here). Combined with the text-based related project — a policy brief directed towards the Superintendent and executive cabinet — the coupling produced a holistic and honest image regarding the state of the issue. Byttebier (2019) articulates this symbiosis by summarizing:
…while photos are often considered incapable of lying because they ‘quote’ from reality rather than altering it, pictures by themselves in isolation (both in time and space) are also often ambiguous and necessarily incomplete… by creating stories with pictures, we can remedy such ambiguity and alienation by re-creating a ‘living context’ that establishes a field of meaning that makes the photos come to life.
Applied in the context of this project, when put together, both the photos and text “…should contribute to a complex web of meaning that stimulates reflection on your topic and shows the things presented in a new and revealing light” (Byttebier, 2019). Such meaning will prove valuable in presenting the story of my epistemological development.
The following project presents a combination of personal, professional, and scholarly events from my past. At 25 years old, this decade of history — while comparatively short — is significant in that these memories and experiences are still temporally and emotionally relevant to who I am now. It is also worth disclosing that in crafting this project, the photo essay served as a kind of personal catharsis as well. Just as we cannot separate the social context from our epistemology, we also cannot deny that such social contexts accompany strong emotional memories. Through creative and artistic works, we are “…able to make deeper meaning of their experiences by seeing their recollections reflected back through their art, as well as their ability to separate themselves from their trauma experience through externalizing their thoughts and feelings using art” (DeHart & Hash, 2024, p. 44). In consideration of my development as a researcher, and for providing understanding to my colleagues and mentors, reviewing this history also allows a deeper capacity of connection to be formed towards my future epistemological development. This is similar to how Talero (2007) describes the phenomenological effect of the experiential workspace upon our capacity of knowing through negotiating and opening up about one’s epistemological self in the communal space. From a personal (emotional), social, and scholarly orientation, this arts-based format is productive in nearly every regard.
Thus, it is with deep humility and earnestness that this project is presented.
Critical Event #1
“A Great Contradiction”
2015-2016
Growing up, there were certain familial and cultural pieces of knowledge that I had been taught, and therefore assumed, to be universal. Ideas such as ubiquitous goodness of love and service were values that had been ingrained in me since I was young. The fact that such ideals could be contradicted, that a pluralistic, non-positivist reality was a profound cognitive dissonance. From sophomore year through the rest of my high school career was incredibly challenging and forced in me a reconciliation of who I was, how I thought, how I was raised, and the assumptions about truth that I had always been led to believe. This period of my life was marked by two primary challenges:
The first (not pictured below), was a fundamental challenging about the parent/child relationship. My mother and I had always been quite close growing up. Unbeknownst to me, she had always struggled with a mental health condition. Her moods were erratic, and we developed a kind of (what I would realize later in my life to be) unhealthy codependency that I had to later understand as something that — while I had been taught to understand was a form of parent-child love — was, in fact, an unhealthy coping mechanism what the home in which I had grown up. After an incredibly difficult event where my mother had attempted to take her own life, I began to see a marked difference in her personality. She was less interested in me, our family, our home, and chose to ignore the familial fallout of her decision. Even when I asked her to attend a therapy session with me, she refused to acknowledge in the session the harm that her choices had caused me. This was a side of my mother that I had never seen before and, yet, had always existed. And, even more profoundly, she was choosing to live in a psychological reality that I simply couldn’t share. This forced me into an internal reckoning that multiple realities between individuals can coexist and contradict. These contradictions can even, if given credence, can cause harm. The parent-child relationship was not all good. It was not all loving. And it was not all knowing.
The second was a challenge about love that reinforced these ideas in a different venue. My first relationship in high school lasted for three years (on and off) from my sophomore year through the Summer of my senior year. While I’m not going to say more than some brief vagueness regarding the content of our time together, her relationship and mine very much mirrored my mother’s. She was someone who struggled with a profound mental illness and, combined with a violent and unstable home life, led to us forming an unhealthy codependency of rescuer-rescued tendencies (which wasn’t what was actually happening). While loving and well-intentioned, I had to once again reconcile the unhealthy nature of our relationship with the long-taught values about the goodness of love, service, and self-sacrifice.
This period in my life forced my mind to reconcile with the fact that contradiction exists unresolved in our lives. To this day, my relationship with my mother is fractured, at best. The responsibility she chooses to forego, and the reality she chooses to create about her perception of my life is something I’ve come to simply avoid confronting. I choose to look back upon my memories with Courtney and to thank her for what she had given me during that time, and I acknowledge it was best we could both do for each other. It also forced me to consider As a scholar, I believe these life events led me towards the epistemological lens of postmodernism (though I certainly didn’t have a name for it at the time). Meta-narratives like the ones I had grown up being told no longer became convincing because I had witnessed their inconsistency first hand. Furthermore, truth became to plural to me. I understood now that what I had experienced, while valid, was not what others chose to believe or had experienced in their own mind. Neither of our lives invalidated the other, and fighting/arguing/contesting each other’s lived experience was useless. We can seek understanding and empathy with one other, and, if the other chooses to reject that path, then we make peace with it. The path of my epistemological leanings towards plurality had begun.
Andrew and Courtney at a movie night in the park in Northglenn, CO. *Note: This specific photo was taken after Courtney and I were both over the age of 18.
Critical Event #2
“Band Dad”
2018-2019
The second critical event in my life was introduction of a teacher and figure in my life who would have the most profound effect on my professional journey. As you can likely infer from my first critical event, my life lacked male role models. My father and I were never close and this fracture widened after my parents’ divorce in the Summer of 2019. But in Dr. Feagin’s arrival at CSU during my Sophomore year, he became one of the most important figures in my personal and professional development of my life. Simply as a student in his ensembles, he noticed me and took me under his wing. I became the Head Drum Major (conductor) of the CSU Marching Band, and our quartet became a close-knit “family” with him calling us his “sons” and he our “band dad.”
As a scholar and artist, he was unrelenting in his pursuit of excellence. He imbued upon me a work ethic and relationship to the aesthetic ideal that I carry with me to this day. Everything I do must be at 110% of my capacity because that is what I’m capable of giving — he empowered me to do so. He was intellectual and kind; professional and charismatic; justice- and equity- minded and fair; uncompromising and caring. What Dr. Feagin taught me was the value of authentically and relentlessly pursuing our own visions of excellence.
There was one specific event — more of a conversation between the two of us — I remember having after marching band rehearsal one evening that fundamentally altered my ways of knowing. We were sitting in his office talking more generally, and we got onto the topic of professional goals. This wasn’t uncommon as we often talked about where I saw myself going academically and professionally, and Dr. Feagin would often offer his insights and career advice. While I don’t remember the specifics of this particular conversation, I remember we got onto the topic of how we wanted to be remembered. In this conversation, Dr. Feagin made the comment, “I don’t want to be remembered as a great black conductor; I want to be remembered as a great conductor who happens to be black.”
This comment stuck with me because it had always seemed antithetical to the various discourses around identity and work in critical theory. As a young undergraduate scholar, I had always been bothered by the Western domination of music and music education. A large part of my personal studies and orientation around teaching in the arts was opening the space for everyone. Such a mission necessitated a reconciliation with identity, privilege, and marginalization. As I have reflected upon Dr. Feagin’s statement over the years, it’s loaded — and I won’t pretend that I can deconstruct the entirety of his position; this would violate my own internal pluralistic epistemology. However, I can recognize the fact that his perspective embodies the ultimate purpose of why we engage in critical work. We endeavor to undo the systems of inequities that exist in our world to empower individuals to be able to express and exist in the manner they choose. Dr. Feagin had one of the strongest impacts on my life of any mentor/teacher and it was because of this multidimensionality. He taught me that excellence can exist in every manner of work. That we are each a multidimensional intersection of experiences, identities, and passions as an individual. He is who I endeavor to be as a teacher, a scholar, and as a person.
Dr. T André Feagin interacting with the CSU crowd on game day.
Dr. Feagin posing with his Drum Major "sons" on game day at CSU's Stadium. Markus (left), Dr. Feagin (middle-left), Andrew (middle-right), and John (right)
Dr. Feagin conducting the CSU Marching Band at the President's Fall Address.
Dr. Feagin with Andrew and Markus after an emotional and artistic Spring concert. Andrew (left), Dr. Feagin (center), Markus (right)
Dr. Feagin and his Drum Majors leading the CSU Marching Band down campus on a Game Day.
Critical Event #3
“A Great Force in This World”
2020
While I was less connected with my parents throughout my life, my grandparents — in particular, my grandmother — have always been solid pillars upon which I could stand. They gave me the unconditional love and support I longed for growing up, and, as I became older and had reconcile with the truer nature of my parents, I realized they had been in the background of most of my life, silently ensuring that I was always taken care of. Most weekends and large portions of my Summer were spent at their home and many of my fondest memories are with them. As such, 2020 was a challenging year for me — as it was for most of the world.
For many years, my family and I had started to see signs of a deteriorating memory in my grandmother. She would often ask the same question twice, forget small things and events, and just generally become more emotionally unstable. It wasn’t until 2020 when she started becoming physically and emotionally harmful to my grandfather that my family made the choice to move her to a memory care facility. Of course, no one could have predicted this choice would be immediately followed by a pandemic. My grandfather at this time was a wreck. Following my parents’ divorce, my mother was mostly absent. This left me to ensure my grandfather and grandmother were being taken care of. During the year of 2020 (Spring of my junior year at CSU, and Fall of my senior year), I spent many weekends traveling down to my grandfather’s, making him meals, helping him around the house, and nursing him back to health. His physical and emotional health was ravaged in the previous months, he lost more than half his body weight and his partner of more than sixty years was now completely inaccessible due to COVID restrictions. I took great care in ensuring that my “COVID bubble” was as limited as possible — and testing before and after every visit — so that I kept him safe. On my way down to his house, I would stop by the memory care facility and spend time with my grandmother as well. I had arranged a routine with their director that in copious testing both prior to and once arrived as well as limiting my contact to 30-minute intervals while masked, I could see her. Between her mental challenges, the transition into the care facility, and the commencement of the pandemic, it had been nearly nine months since I had actually seen my grandmother. The first time I saw her, it was like she was a brand new person. She couldn’t hold a conversation, sentences were partially formed, and she could barely move around. It was heartbreaking. And yet, she still remembered me and every visit was opened with a vigorous hug, spent with nearly constant hand-holding, and ended with a tearful goodbye. In many visits, I would small gifts of food and old household items or clothes to make her more comfortable. Unfortunately, my grandmother passed quite suddenly after a serious fall in mid-October of 2020. It was two hours after the last time I saw her.
The epistemological shift in my thinking occurred after her passing. As the extended family gathered in Texas for her funeral (that’s where she wanted to be buried), my mother and uncle began talking quite openly about my grandmother. They would say things that directly contradicted by knowledge of my grandmother. The sweet, always loving person I had grown up with was now being portrayed as a monstrous tyrant who ran her household with an iron fist. The sadness and loss that my grandfather commiserated in was at conflict with the feelings of relief and resentment that were percolating by others. For me, it felt like one of the great forces of our world had suddenly vanished, and for others, it was an event that had been a long time coming.
It quickly became apparent to me that what I knew — the knowledge that had been so historically embedded in my mind — wasn’t the same truth others shared. That their own histories and experiences could contradict and coexist in the same space. And both of our knowings were valid. The loving grandma that had existed for me was the same tyrannical mother that had existed for my mother and uncle. Neither one was “more correct” than the other. As a scholar and thinker, this became a vital cornerstone of how I conceived knowing. Our knowledge, beneath my transforming epistemology, was uniquely formed out of and pertinent to my historical standpoint. This would eventually lead me towards a fascination and love of Foucault’s genealogical method as a way of uncovering periods of sociological knowing.
Grandma holding Andrew as a newborn after being transitioned out of NICCU intensive care.
Andrew having fun playing with his Grandma.
Andrew visiting his Grandma's memory care facility during 2020. She was not able to form sentences at this point in her life, but still remembered Andrew and was happy to be with him.
Critical Event #4
“My Scholarly People?”
2023
In January of 2023, I had my first scholarly presentation at the Colorado Music Educators Association Conference. It was exciting to be able to share my ideas and research around education with the community I had grown up learning from as a young scholar. Having caught the research “bug,” I applied for and was selected to present at the conference for the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education in Oslo, Norway. It was a unique experience. The panel-like presentation I was a part of was a conglomeration of doctoral students with faculty and professors from around the world. We presented our work and was then led through a session of discussion and feedback. Overall, I highly enjoyed the experience — it was fascinating hearing the perceptions and work in music education on a global level as well as broadening my own understanding of the content’s place and space in the education system as a whole. However, at the conclusion of the conference, I couldn’t help having the thought… are these my people?
Music education has always had an unfortunate tendency towards standing apart from the rest of the academic education field (this is part of reason why my scholarly interests have moved away from the field). Trends, interests, and issues at the center of the discussion in education, writ large, are usually had in the field of music education about ten years behind. Our current reckoning with justice and our democratic society is one such example. Whereas organizations such as AERA, PES, and NAAPE are engaging in the pressing matters about education’s place in healing or deepening democratic and equity-centered woes, the music education has just begun having discussions surrounding work in JEDI. At this particular conference, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of urgency in research presented. The topics were engaging but were grounded in very theoretically niche studies. Little discussion was being had on the state of music education holistically.
I had always carried the idea that my research and scholarly passion was at the intersection of music education and other topics. However, this conference had me beginning to reconsider my scholarly focus. Was this the community of scholars — many of whom I had been reading and studying from for years — that I wanted to spend my life engaging with? Were these the topics that fueled my passion for research and helping the field of education meet the needs of all students? Before my eyes, the foundation of my epistemological area — music — was changing. A conversation with one of the conference chairs, Dr. Cathy Benedict (Teachers College, Columbia University), was extremely helpful. She came from a similar background as me. She grew up in the band world in the Denver Metro Area, went to college for music, and then had a doctoral change of heart. She discovered the white-male-centric band world was not something that resonated with her values. The academic field at the time simply wasn’t a place where her knowledge was valued nor was it knowledge with which she was passionate about engaging. She now teaches in a curriculum and pedagogy emphasis (with an emphasis on elementary education) but still refers back to her music education background. She described her journey and effectively gave me permission to explore my passions during my doctoral degree. This conversation has led to me understand the effectiveness and necessity in embracing the mutability of our epistemological foundations as our values and passions change. My axiology, the values from which epistemology take root, was no longer rooted in the music education field. While I had a bit of an identity crisis the remainder of the Summer and into the Fall, I stand stronger in my epistemological lens from a value standpoint. I’m no longer internally fighting my own epistemology compass.
Andrew presenting at the doctoral session (as a masters student) of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education conference in Oslo, Norway (July 2023).
The Norwegian Academy of Music (Oslo, Norway).
Andrew (far right) with all the other international doctoral scholars and faculty for our session. Scholars hailed from Sweden, Brazil, China, and the U.S. among others.
Conclusion
In reflecting upon these critical events of my life, I’d like to reorient towards and center the epistemological shifts of each period thus far:
Courtney and my mother taught me about the plural and contradictory nature of reality and knowing, that one’s existence may not be commensurate with another’s and that both can coexist (however difficult it may seem to reconcile);
Dr. Feagin taught me about the multidimensionality and value of each individual person and the reality of excellence in all forms, that each person’s knowing is unique;
My grandmother taught me about the significance of history in knowledge, that how we know is often encumbered with what we have historically known and thus may not mirror the knowing of another;
My international music education colleagues taught me that one’s axiology is intimately connected with how we go about knowing, that common values can often dictate the (in)validity of knowledge in a community but doesn’t necessarily dictate subjective truth or the validity of directionality in one’s knowing.
References
(Please note that the APA7 Style Hanging Indent is not possible on Squarespace’s platform)
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In: Richardson, J., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood: 241–58.
Byttebier, S. (2019). Handout on the photo essay introduction | Teaching Digital Multimedia Expression. CGS Rhetoric: Teaching Digital Multimedia Expression. https://sites.bu.edu/dme/handout-on-the-photo-essay-introduction/
Dehart, J.D. & Hash, P. (Eds.) (2024). Arts-based research across textual/visual media in education: Expanding visual epistemology – Volumes 1 & 2. New York, NY.: Routledge.
Harding, S. (1992). Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is "Strong Objectivity"? In L. Alcoff & E. Potter (Eds.) Feminist epistemologies (49-82). New York, NY.: Routledge.
Talero, M. L. (2008). The experiential workspace and the limits of empirical investigation. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16(3), 453-472.
Yosso, T. J. (2006). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006