When I was in music school, “vocal pedagogy” was largely framed as content knowledge, and always about singing: physiology, acoustics, phonetics, and the like. There’s a lot to know about the mechanisms and processes of voice, so it makes sense to spend some time learning about them. Even later in an MFA program devoted to theatrical voice & speech pedagogy, we focused largely on what to teach, not how to teach.
But knowing about the cricothyroid muscle, vowel formants, and diacritic marks doesn’t necessarily help me with encountering the actor in front of me in a meaningful coaching relationship.
In many pedagogy courses, just beyond content knowledge lies the assumption that one can use that knowledge to elicit change or growth in a student. But that process is often framed as a “diagnostic” one, drawing from Western medicine and leaning heavily into a deficit model of education: find what’s wrong and fix it.
I don’t think that best serves us as artists.
Even among actors, the “tell me what to do” mindset is tempting. Finding what’s wrong and fixing it feels concrete and doable. But real vocal growth (and real artistry) requires agency. The actor must be an explorer of their own sound- and meaning-making; otherwise, they’re just a puppet. Some theories of directing embrace that idea (English director Edward Gordon Craig coined the concept of the Über-Marionette in 1907 and elements of that idea persist today), but as someone who admires actors as expressive, autonomous human beings, it doesn’t sit well with me.
When I think about voice and speech pedagogy, I want a field that’s curious about how artists create, how actors learn, and how actor-trainers teach. And although I freely use the term “training” as a shorthand for what I do, that term is really most appropriate for learning rote processes like operating a deli slicer or installing gutters. Actor education is closer to what I intend, and that requires uncertainty and curiosity about outcomes and the learner’s co-equal participation.
That, to me, is what pedagogy entails, but I think we are still far off from articulating this as a discipline. Certainly, many excellent educators tackle this project in their own ways over the course of their careers. But how do we train the next generation of trainers to really teach, when there’s so much content knowledge to acquire along the way?
We need content knowledge and pedagogy–the what and the how–but they’re not the same thing. I think a starting place is to acknowledge that fact, and to be clear what we mean when we say “voice and speech pedagogy”.