Through the power of music, some University of Pennsylvania students are bonding with, teaching and learning lessons from West Philadelphia elementary and high school students.

Fisher Hassenfeld College House’s freshman “Music and Social Change” residential program links Penn undergraduate mentors with students at the Henry C. Lea Elementary School and West Philadelphia High School.

A joint venture involving Fisher Hassenfeld, Penn Arts and Sciences and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, the students volunteer for three hours each week to support the K-12 music teachers by leading classes such as strings, bucket drums and choir. 

Under the living and learning model of the College Houses, students in the program are required to take the Arts and Sciences class “Music in Urban Spaces” with instructor Molly McGlone, who developed the course.

“We talk about race, class, gender in the context of urban public schools and education and music in general to prepare the first-year students as mentors,” says McGlone, assistant dean for advising in the College of Arts & Sciences and a faculty fellow in Fisher Hassenfeld.

“I learned a lot about understanding people and about people who are different from myself,” says Daniel Tan, a May graduate from Cupertino, Calif., who worked in the program through his four years at Penn. 

After officially completing the program as a freshman, Tan continued in the mentoring program as a volunteer and as a work-study student.

In his sophomore year, he led a weekly West Philadelphia High School class in analyzing the lyrics by popular music artists including Kanye West, Katy Perry and The Roots. The songs selected by the Penn mentors contained SAT vocabulary words, so that they could discuss the meaning of words in the lyrics. In a West song, the students learned the definition of “diligent,” “paragon,” ‘persevere” and “tedious."

While mentoring and teaching, the Penn students have the opportunity to see how a big city school district operates and how schools are affected by budget cuts and staffing issues. 

“The Lea students and the West Philadelphia students teach all of us what its like to grow up in a city where you have uneven resources,” says McGlone. “What is it like for a student who’s teacher is out a whole semester? They’re put in these situations where their world is not stable.”

“We all do have a sense,” says Tan, “that we have privilege, but it wasn’t until my time in the program that I really understood what privilege means. Because of the way the school system is structured, I understand this problem is much more than any one person or group of people can do, but what are some of the small things that we can do to help out people in West Philly who have less than we do?”

Tan says he now understands the root of some problems that the young students have in class, is that often, when students misbehave in class, there are underlying reasons, such as family or socioeconomic issues.

“I’ve learned that it is better to talk to the students to find out what those problems are and address them.”  

McGlone says the Penn mentors have learned lessons that could influence how they vote, their views on social issues and even their career choices. 

“As adults, the more Penn students know and the more they understand, the more they will advocate later on,” says McGlone. “A lot of them are becoming teachers or doing education policy or they’re doing urban studies in a research capacity.”