Give a room of elite music students a genuine creative choice — no right answer, no rubric — and a lot of them freeze. Dr. Sarah Gulish has spent her career asking why, and what to do about it.
Sarah is an assistant professor of music education at West Chester University, where every course she teaches centers on creativity: improvisation, student-centered learning, progressive methods. Before that she spent sixteen years teaching in public schools, including a high school course called Creativity and Collaboration that she co-taught with an art teacher. She's a working songwriter and performer, a card-carrying devotee of The Moth, and the founder and CEO of F-flat Books.
In the academic half, Sarah traces her big questions — student agency and autonomy — back to the students she couldn't serve, and walks us through her current research on improvisation and confidence. Two findings stand out: students' creative self-efficacy grew dramatically over a semester and they credited the environment for it, and their own sense of how creative their playing was didn't match an outside judge's — but their confidence still gave them real pride in the making. She also talks honestly about being a qualitative researcher doing a quantitative study on purpose, because numbers are the language administrators speak.
Then the turn. In 2015, Sarah got her first academic book contract and was stunned by the terms — 2% royalties, no marketing, and the loss of rights to her own work — and more stunned that everyone told her this was normal. So she built something else. F-flat Books turns seven this week, with more than 200 resources, over 80 creators, and hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to authors who keep their rights. Her hardest-won lesson: the people who resonated weren't other academics, they were classroom teachers doing the work. Her question for anyone sitting on research is the one that gave this episode its title — if the people you want to reach aren't reading journals, where are they, and how do you get there?
Plus: why creativity isn't just an arts problem, what happens when a university partnership rescues master's projects from a shared drive, and the case for public funding of arts research made to actual policymakers in DC.
Links:
https://seanisdwelling.substack.com
https://matthewkr.substack.com
Sarah Gulish — https://www.sarahgulish.com
Thoughts with Sarah Gulish — https://sarahgulish.substack.com
F-flat Books — https://fflat-books.com
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