Josanne Francis is an accomplished steelpan performer, educator, and nonprofit director who takes influence from calypso, reggae, jazz, classical, and Hindustani music. She has performed at many venues, including Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Francis is the former Executive Director of the Cultural Academy for Excellence (CAFE) and teaches through her nonprofit, Steel on Wheels.

Francis grew up in Trinidad, where the steelpan has cultural significance as Trinidad’s national instrument. She began learning how to play the steelpan when she was eight years old after her mother found an ad for a beginner’s class at her community’s pan yard, a space where people practice and rehearse steelpan music.

Once she entered primary school, she enrolled in a steelpan class. Later, she joined the steelpan ensemble in her secondary school, became captain of the ensemble, and began arranging music. One of her first significant performances was playing with the Starlift Steel Band at a legendary music competition called Panorama during the 2005 carnival season. Since she loved teaching and performing music, she decided that she wanted to pursue the steel pan as her career.

When Francis was 19 years old, she left Trinidad and moved to the United States to attend the University of Southern Mississippi, where she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Education. Her undergraduate training exposed her to different percussion styles and instruments, which she teaches to her students today. After receiving a Master’s of Music Degree from Northern Illinois University, she began working for CAFE and has been in Maryland ever since.

As an educator, Francis is an advocate for first teaching music by rote before teaching students to read music, since she finds it more difficult to go back and teach students aural skills. She also values cultural relevance when it comes to teaching. In her words, culturally relevant instruction is when students can understand the learning material from their own background. She applies cultural relevance to her teaching approach by doing things that are relevant to the students’ culture that they can easily understand and relate to while still getting the content she wants them to learn. Francis explains:

You have to understand the environment that the students are in when they are not at school . . . also, when they are in school, you have to understand their cultural backgrounds and understand how all these different things in the environment come together and impact them and how they . . . act or how they take in information. So yes, as an educator, you have to learn and understand your students and their backgrounds.

Francis expands her educational outreach through her nonprofit organization, Steel on Wheels. Steel on Wheels brings instruments, materials, teaching lessons, and qualified steelpan instructors to schools that may not be able to afford the equipment to teach the steelpan. Francis’s purpose for starting Steel on Wheels was to make steelpan education more accessible and to create more opportunities for steelpan educators. Through Steel on Wheels, she has been able to complete residencies at places like the Good Hope Recreation Center in Montgomery County, Maryland. Because of the pandemic, the program has been put on hold, but Francis has been using the time to work on the program’s curriculum.

Today, Francis is pursuing a doctoral program for music education. She also hopes to work with the education system in Trinidad. Her desire is that Trinidadian students will have more exposure to music and the option to major in music education. When asked about why music education is important to her, Francis says:

It’s important to me because I know I have, I believe I have this gift of teaching and with knowing music . . . I like to transfer the information and it just makes me feel good seeing the students perform and not, not regurgitate, but apply everything that I’m teaching them. And let’s be honest [about] the way this world is right now. We need things like we need arts education . . . and art is a very, very, very important part of just being human. So [I] just feel like . . . it is my duty to do this.

Authored by Allie Stanich