Popular music in American teacher education: A glimpse into a secondary methods course

Abstract

Popular music is pervasive in our culture and in the lives of our students. Its inclusion in music education curricula requires authentic approaches through collaborative informal learning processes. It has been our experience that college students may be notation dependent and while they may recognize and utilize informal processes outside the classroom, they have not pedagogically considered its use in their future classrooms. This article revolves around the experiences of American University students in one secondary general music methods classroom and their engagement of informal learning processes in order to foster a vision and formulate a pedagogical plan for the incorporation of popular music in the classroom. From the instructors’ perspective a three-fold process occurred that enabled meaningful engagement in this experience, that of: (1) disequilibrium; (2) breaking down existing barriers; and (3) student transformation. Corporately we discovered the inclusion of popular music unleashed a thriving discourse concerning connection and relevancy to students’ lives.