Music Teaching & Learning at the Women’s Resilience Center: Connecting Music Pedagogy and Refugee Services in San Diego County

Amy Cimini
Music
UC San Diego

This project supports music class programming at the Women’s Reslience Center (WRC), a community hub that serves refugee and asylee women and children in San Diego’s East County. It builds on a collaboration with WRC staff and clients, through which UCSD music graduate students developed and implemented piano and group music classes for children, adults and seniors in summer 2022, 2023 & 2024. The work is informed by a growing, collaborative understanding of how music learning speaks to the traumas of forced migration and resettlement and how music programming integrates into a holistic suite of programs in a non-profit environment. This is a rare opportunity for graduate students to develop pedagogies attuned to the specificities of local refugee and asylee communities guided by non-profit professionals whose programming builds from client perspectives from the ground up. We have a track record of success, evidenced by ongoing client interest and demand. This project supports a new series of classes, complemented by structured, dedicated spaces for graduate students to engage in knowledge exchange with WRC staff about US immigration politics, trauma, strengths-based and social-emotional frameworks in refugee services, centering client feedback and self-reflexive understandings of their experiences.