Digital Development Concert!!!

Welcome to my online digital development concert!

"What is a digital developmental concert?" you may ask. Well, it is an online concert (meaning it's posted online and you can watch it whenever you want), and it's been recorded digitally! (I know, right? Way to marry technology with student development!)

This idea has morphed quite a bit since I got the idea to do something musical. At first, I thought that maybe I'd write a song about one of the theories...but that never came to fruition. Then, I thought, Hey! I'll do songs geared for the developing college woman using theories focused on women (ie. Josselson, Gilligan, Belenkey, etc.) But then I thought about it more and thought, you know while more females may more closely identify with this song, males can (and should) have something to gain from these songs as well!

Each song is posted separately with some commentary on why I picked it and how I think it's related to college student development. Perhaps some of the ways I will tie these specific songs to student development will be tenuous at best I hope y'all will appreciate the effort that me and my calloused fingers have put into this.

WARNING: While I do fancy myself a hippie, indie, folk singer wannabe (think Joni Mitchell & Joan Baez), and I am far from the American Idol pop/rock singer of today! There are a few botched chords here and there but...well...just go along with it!

I Hope You Dance (Original: Lee Ann Womack)

Okay, so I'm pretty sure this song is about breaking up, but, I know that parents find the lyrics appropriate and sentimental when they reflect on their children growing up. Lyrics like, "I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance, never settle for the path of least resistance" conjure up images in my mind of the messages that parents send their children off to college with. -It's about growth and challenging yourself.



Breakaway (Original: Kelly Clarkson)

This song carries a somewhat similar meaning as the previous song, but this one is from the first-person perspective. Both this song and I Hope You Dance make me thinking of Chickering and Reisser's vector of "moving through autonomy towards interdependence."



You Were Meant for Me (Original: Jewel)

At first, I wasn't going to include this song. It doesn't exactly have a "positive message" to send out and it's kind of whiny. However, college is a time where students are learning to manage emotions and develop mature interpersonal relationships (more vectors!) and thus, many students will probably like this song because they'll be able to identify with it.
"Dreams last for so long, even after you're gone. I know you love me and soon you'll see you were meant for me and I was meant for you" - just not wanting to let go of a relationship that's over.



Luka (Original: Suzanne Vega)

I read somewhere that this song is about a child that is abused at home. I thought of this song from a couple perspectives. First of all, I saw this from the perspective that you actually know this child which got me thinking of Kohlberg's stages of moral development. What do you do? What can you do? And then I got to thinking about the fact that there are many students in colleges and universities across the nation that were abused as children by their families or even now by their significant others. Going through experiences such as abuse, depression, and other psychological issues can hinder development, which is one of the reasons it's important for colleges and universities to have counseling centers to help support students that may need some extra help dealing with issues from their childhood so they can develop into healthy adults!



What Do You Hear in These Sounds (Original: Dar Williams)

Oh, Dar. How can you not love Dar? This kind of continues the trend of the previous song. "What Do You Hear In These Sounds" is about a woman in therapy. Dar has been very public with the fact that she was depressed in college and that, had she not seen a therapist, she didn't think she would still be alive today. There's a part in this song where she talks about having walls and basically, being afraid of her own voice and herself. She makes the Berlin wall analogous to her own psychological walls at one point, which I thought was brilliant:
"I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in and I say, well, I'm lucky because I am like East Berlin. I had this wall and what I knew of the free world was that I could see their fireworks and I could hear their radio. And I thought that if we met I would only start confessing, they would know that I was scared, they would know that I was guessing. But the wall came down and there they stood before me and they're stumbling and they're mumbling and they're calling out just like me." --Powerful stuff. This song also got me thinking about Josselson's identity development for women as well (perhaps from moratorium to achievement???)



He Thinks He’ll Keep Her (Original: Mary Chapin Carpenter)

Okay, so I love this song and I loved it in college, so I just had to put this one in. It follows the life of a woman through her marriage, having children, getting divorced, and entering the workforce at 36 years old for minimum wage. Hrm. Perhaps the fear of this happening is why the average age of marriage keeps going up, and is why women from my generation are getting their education and working towards self-sufficiency. I'm not sure if this song should be a "lesson" necessarily, but I love it.



As Cool as I Am (Original: Dar Williams)

Yes, more high-quality Dar! This song is completely brilliant. The lyrics that in the chorus that repeats are "I will not be afraid of women." This song follows the relationship of a woman that is with a man that just keeps on looking at and talking about women and saying things like, "I hope you're not threatened" by the fact that he does this. The man has essentially managed to both make the woman feel worse about herself, AND make her jealous of other women! At the end of the song, the woman leaves the man to "go outside and join the others - I am the others." YES!



I am Woman (Original: Helen Reddy)

Thanks to my mother, I was practically raised on this song. This is definitely the "women's anthem" of the 70's! So empowering, and so full of pride! (Think identity development here!) While the song definitely feels full of that "I am woman" pride, the end of it makes me think the perspective is really beyond one of immersion. My favorite line is in the last verse, "but I'm still an embryo with a long, long way to go until I make my brother understand." <-- Sing it, sister! It's not enough to merely empower women - it's the perspective of the all the men out there that we need to change! (Agent group -- Hardiman & Jackson anyone???)



Everything I Need (Original: Melissa Ferrick)

This song was very popular at my college - and why not? Empowering women towards self-authorship! You've got what you need - yes, there will be hard times, and it won't always be easy - but you've got what you need within you.



Closer to Fine (Original: The Indigo Girls)

First of all, I love this song. Second of all, it's complex and simple at the same time! Relating this song to our readings, I think this song shows a very high level of cognitive thought processing. Basically, the song is talking about all the complexities of life and how you can search high and low for answers (going to college, reading the bible, the fountain of life, children, going to a bar), but there is no one answer! "There's more than one answer to this question pointing me in a crooked line." -It's not about finding the right answer, it's about making sense of the many different answers there are and making sense of it for yourself.