Rate My Professor Merryl Goldberg

Dr. Merryl Goldberg is a professor in Arts and Culture at California State University, San Marcos, serving as Professor of Music Education in the School of Arts. She earned her bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and her master's and Ed.D. in Teaching, Curriculum, and Learning Environments from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before entering academia, she performed as a professional saxophonist, touring internationally for 13 years with the Klezmer Conservatory Band and recording over a dozen CDs with major labels. With more than 25 years at CSUSM, Goldberg has demonstrated leadership as Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts from 2010 to 2014, Executive Director of Center ARTES since its founding in 2003—a university center dedicated to restoring arts to education—and director of the ART=OPPORTUNITY campaign, a research-based initiative promoting arts literacy for K-12 students. Her teaching emphasizes arts integration, instructing future educators in her signature course "Learning Through the Arts," where music, dance, theater, visual, and media arts are used to teach reading, mathematics, science, and social studies, fostering academic success, empathy, and career development.

Goldberg's publications include Arts Integration: Teaching Subject Matter through the Arts in Multicultural Settings (5th edition, Routledge, 2017), Teaching English Language Learners through the Arts: A SUAVE Experience (Allyn and Bacon, 2004), and Arts as Education (Harvard Educational Review, 1992), alongside numerous articles, chapters, editorials, and blogs. She has been principal or co-principal investigator on grants from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement, Stuart Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, Spencer Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, California Arts Council, Fulbright-Hays Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Key projects encompass the DREAM initiative (2009-2012) for improving reading through arts methods and a 2015 white paper for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, influencing statewide Teaching Performance Expectations. In recognition of her teaching excellence, she received the 2018 Wang Family Excellence Award. Goldberg speaks regularly at national, statewide, and international conferences on the benefits of arts in education.