Renowned Music Educator Begins Residency With Talk

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Alice Hammel

The Department of Music in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is proud to host Alice Hammel for a week-long residency at the University of Arkansas. Hammel, a faculty member at James Madison University and Virginia Commonwealth University, will give lectures, conduct workshops, and will be a featured speaker at the 3rd annual Teach Music Conference held on campus.

Hammel's residency begins with a special talk aimed toward freshman music education majors in the Department. The talk will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 9, at in the Lewis E. Epley Band Building, Worthington Hall. Hammel's talk will engage issues and strategies of effective teaching as well as advice for students training to enter the education field. While the talk is geared toward freshman, all music majors and interested campus and community members are welcome to attend this free event.

In addition to her residency, Hammel is a special guest of the Department of Music and teaches online curriculum in music education for special needs students for the University of Arkansas. Her workshops on the subject are vital to the growing resources the University of Arkansas offers on special needs learning and teaching.

Hammel, a diverse and widely known music educator, currently teaches for James Madison and Virginia Commonwealth Universities. In addition, she has a large flute studio and is the music intervention specialist for ASSET (Autism Support, Education, and Training). Hammel spends her summers teaching musicianship and pedagogy to graduate students and K-12 music educators at several universities.

In addition to teaching at the university level, she has many years of experience teaching general, instrumental and choral music in K-12 classrooms. Hammel continues to regularly teach students who are at-risk and in need, and is often asked to guest teach at universities in the US. She is in great demand as a keynote speaker, researcher and clinician in the field of music education, and has published widely in music, special, and general education journals. Two co-authored text and online resources, Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs: A Label-free Approach, and Teaching Music to Students with Autism, are available through Oxford University Press. A third Oxford resource, Winding it Back: Teaching to Individual Differences in Music Classroom and Ensemble Settings will be released in 2016. Hammel has also contributed chapters to several other Oxford University Press and National Association for Music Education (NAfME) resources.

Hammel is affiliated with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts and is a member of the Kennedy Center National Forum: Examining the Intersection of Arts Education and Special Education. She serves on the planning committee for the national conference co-sponsored by the Kennedy Center and Very Special Arts. She is also chair of the National Association for Music Education Task Force on Students with Special Needs. Hammel enjoys serving as a consultant and clinician for several organizations including Conn-Selmer and United Sound. She serves in many concurrent state and national professional leadership positions and is a multiple award recipient honoring her commitment to music education and music teacher education.

Her primary goal is to become a better teacher with each passing day.