My musical training and service as a classroom teacher is primarily in steel band. I served as the Director of Steel Bands at Leon High School from 2002 until 2009. During this time I expanded the program to include six curricular high school steel bands and four adult community bands. My bands were considered to be of a high performance quality, including in 2008 when the Canboulay Band won Grand Champion at the Virginia Beach Panorama, the largest curricular steel band event in the United States.

More than the performance aspect of my classes, I wanted to communicate to my students the important narratives I came to know and value as a student under the mentorship of Elizabeth DeLamater and Cliff Alexis. My classes always included a focus on the history of steel band, and how this history came to inform current steel band practices in Trinidad and around the world. I incorporated ethnomusicological texts, like Stephen Steumpfle's Steelband Movement (1995) and Shannon Dudley's Carnival Music of Trinidad (2004). During carnival season, my students researched prominent steel bands, their histories and their connections to their neighborhoods, as well as the calypsonians and soca singers who wrote that year's crop of tunes. In the off-season, I had my students delve into other facets of pan, like its earlier struggle for legitimacy in Trinidadian society and its later role within nationalism and independence.

In teaching pan, I realized steel band pedagogy needed to move beyond multiculturalism and its tropicalized representations in order to engage with the diverse and specific cultural practices of steel pan, including the incumbent complexities of race, gender, and colonialism in Trinidad and the Caribbean diaspora. In 2007 I founded Engine Room Publishing in order to make repertoire that told these important stories more accessible to curricular steel bands. This led to many new arrangements and compositions being available to bands, and altering performance practices in our community. I no longer run this company, but I continue to consult and invest in making arrangements available, including the new Calypso Monarch Series.

Now at Syracuse University I direct the Syracuse All Steel Percussion Orchestra where I introduce collegiate students to steel band practices. As an extension of my earlier teaching in steel band, I'm interested in the ways that this focus on teaching the steelband master narrative may be made more student-centered by combining steelband aesthetics and performance practices with a praxial orientation to music education. This curricular approach includes Trinidadian carnival music (e.g. calypso, soca), while also inviting students to arrange their own popular music for steel band. I believe this approach is better able to teach students about steel band practices by having them employ these practices using their own music, much in the same way steel bands have always adapted popular music for their own aesthetic goals. Finally, I typically align each semester's repertoire around a singular topic, like "Carnival Music and Women," or, "Race and Colonialism" so that we are able to interrogate the relationship between music and its sociopolitical context using a common lens.

Knapp, D. H. (In press.). Making music on the borders of world and popular musics: Curricular steel bands in the United States. In B. Powell, Pellegrino, K., & Hilliard, Q. (Eds.), Teaching Instrumental Music: Perspectives and Pedagogies for the 21st Century. Oxford.

Knapp, D. (2021). Trinidad Masterworks Series (Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Engine Room.

Knapp, D. (2019). Monarchs of Calypso (Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Engine Room.

Knapp, D., & Grisé, A. (2009). Introduction to Steel Band. Tallahassee, FL: Engine Room.