About Me

30743088_10103782437312207_1046156855375560704_nDr. Shoshana Gottesman-Solomon’s experiences and passions as a teacher, researcher, and curriculum designer are rooted in her commitment to educational equity in nonformal education spaces, K-12 education, and academia. Her teaching philosophy seeks to activate interdisciplinary educational possibilities for all learners across teaching and learning disciplines. The intersections of dialogical musical spaces, critical pedagogies, youth-led conflict transformation, curriculum design, teacher education, dialogue facilitation, multimodal scholarship, and action research from the grassroots to academia are her current spaces of play.

In addition, Shoshana began her musical career on the violin at the age of six and transferred to the viola while an undergraduate student at the Frost School of Music of the University of Miami.  Over the years, she has studied violin and viola performance with members of the Houston Symphony, the Bergonzi String Quartet, and the Daedalus Quartet, and has participated in numerous music festivals in addition to performing in the United States, Tunisia, France, Germany, and Jerusalem. She also is the co-producer of the album, “The Road is Made By Walking,” which was a participatory and international album co-creation project by educators, musicians, and artists from over six countries. 

Shoshana received her master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University from the International Educational Development Department with a focus on peacebuilding and human rights education. As an educator and teacher, her experiences range from local and international contexts in formal and non-formal education and teacher and facilitator professional development. This has included teaching music at the KIPP Star Middle School in West Harlem, teaching and most recently, Deputy Director of the Cultures in Harmony – Atlas Music Festival for youth in Tunisia, working with music education-encounter dialogue programs in Israel – Palestine, teaching private violin lessons at a music center in Taybieh, and teaching and organizing professional development courses focusing on the expressive arts, facilitation, and critical pedagogy. In addition to her music and teaching career, Shoshana has gained a myriad of nonprofit management and entrepreneurial skills in the nonprofit sector.

Most recently, Shoshana graduated from Teachers College, Columbia University with an Ed.D in the Interdisciplinary Studies in Education Program with a focus on music and music education, and curriculum and teaching. For her dissertation research, she decided to engage in participatory action research to reflect with a collective of co-researchers upon their former experiences in Israeli and Palestinian music education-encounter dialogue programs, while imagining and enacting designing of what they could be. This research was a curriculum studies dissertation in retrospect that took a decolonial and music education activism approach to narratively understanding Palestinian and Israeli shared society music education spaces. The dissertation, “Feedback loops of disruption and growth in Israeli and Palestinian music education-encounter dialogue spaces,” is open-access, in addition to an open-access website sharing research findings as curricular and policy recommendations that will be launched in Summer 2025. 

Finally, she also performs with the Columbia Arab Music Ensemble under the direction of Dr. Taoufik Ben-Amor, and is a member of the Media and Social Change Lab (MASC Lab) under the direction of the Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College.

Her resume is available upon request. 

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