Love your
students!
It’s time to evolve our teaching.
As the industry of voice teaching continues to shift toward including more singers, our teaching also needs to evolve.
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, but until we change the way we think about our role as teachers we will continue perpetuating harmful practices that continue to limit the progress of our students.
The challenging, liberating truth:
Voice pedagogy is not anatomy, physiology, physics, or vocal function.
All the technical knowledge in the world does not make us good teachers.
The way we connect with our students to foster their learning—that is pedagogy.
Trainings for Voice Teachers and SLPs
It is our joy and privilege to share what we have learned working with gender-diverse, trans, non-binary, LGBT+, queer singing students—and voice teachers.
We believe that terminology lists and simple stories about the hypotheticals of trans experiences is not enough. Knowing how exogenous testosterone influences vocal development before and after adolescence is important, and we’ll talk about that, and for us it is imperative that you leave our trainings with a deeper connection to your own humanity and those of your students.
Available resources for voice teachers
Gender-Affirming Speech & Singing Training for Voice Teachers and SLPs
Join us for this 8-week course to delve into some of the frameworks and iterations of gender, along with gender’s various intersections. Gender holds a lot of sway on the industry of singing and we want to guide and learn alongside you to continually be part of our students’ support systems.
The Singing Teacher’s Guide to Transgender Voices
This seminal text, co-written by Voice Lab owner Liz Jackson Hearns, is an invaluable resource both for beginning conversations about gender and practical knowledge and tools to explore with in the voice studio. Also included in the text are several asides and narrative stories of students describing their experiences.
One Weird Trick: A User’s Guide to Transgender Voice
Another book written by Voice Lab owner, Liz Jackson Hearns, this resource is more bite-sized and direct in guiding the reader through vocal exercises that can influence gender perception in a voice. The book is directly mainly toward our speech feminization students, but many voice teachers have also found value and insight here.