The Values of a Site

As our society wrapped up the most recent Symposium on Music Teacher Education, discussion and planning almost immediately turned to preparations for the 2023 Symposium. While conditions related to the ongoing pandemic required us to hold our 2021 Symposium as an online event, our intention as a society is to return in 2023 to an in-person gathering as we did every 2 years from 2005 to 2019. That intention comes amid many important conversations occurring across higher education and other professions with regard to the future of professional meetings (Flaherty, 2021). Not only do conference organizers need to be concerned with how people can travel and gather safely, but we must examine how we can avoid marginalizing any persons due to cost, identity, or geographic barriers. The Society for Music Teacher Education (SMTE) remains committed to equity in our work on music teacher education, and this commitment has to extend to how we engage in equitable practices in professional meetings. Much as our parent organization, the National Association for Music Education (NAfME, n.d.), is committed to promoting equity and access for PK–12 students to have music included in their education, SMTE has to promote equity and access in the selection of a site for our biennial Symposium. This has been especially relevant since 2017, when the Executive Board joined many other organizations in moving events out of North Carolina due to a new discriminatory law targeting gender identity in restroom access (SMTE, 2016). This was a major undertaking for our society, as the University of North Carolina Greensboro had been home to the Symposium for the first 10 years of its existence, and in many ways the Symposium was only successful because of the generous support of the faculty and administration there. After holding our 2017 Symposium in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we returned to Greensboro in 2019 after the law had been repealed. During the 2019 Symposium, we heard the concerns from our members that the repeal had not fully addressed the discrimination enshrined into the laws of that state, and that some members were barred from accessing state funding for travel to