I’m looking forward to attending the Society of Music Teacher Education symposium later this week. A look through the program shows that it is going to be full of interesting papers and presentations.
Janet Barret and I will be presenting our position paper “Counterpoint or Remix? A Dialogue on Popular Music and Popular Culture in the Music Teacher Education Curriculum.” Here’s the abstract:
“Music education has professed the importance of including popular music in the curriculum for decades. Well-articulated rationales for popular music in the curriculum provide compelling arguments for its relevance to students’ lives and its eclectic representation of diverse musical practices. In this presentation, we will adopt a dialogic approach to problematize the disparity between generalized support for popular music and its scarcity in music teacher education. As a music teacher educator of several decades who feels admittedly distanced from popular music, and as a doctoral student who has worked closely with middle school students to understand how deeply they are engaged in popular music, we will explore the tensions, biases, and conflicting values that perpetuate this gap. The dialogue will address the institutional, programmatic, and ideological impediments that need to be confronted in order to prepare teachers for teaching popular musics in informed and relevant ways, and the challenges of shifting from a discourse of popular music as a product to one that addresses the ways that students engage in popular music. We aim to move beyond the rhetoric concerned with the place of popular music in the curriculum toward a discourse and praxis of popular culture.”
I’m hoping to report back from the symposium sometime next week. Look for a new “presentations” page on this blog that will have a list of references and resources related to the SMTE presentation.
If you haven’t had a chance to read some of the excellent articles in our professional journals regarding popular music it’s worth your time to catch up on some of the thinking that has gone beyond the “we should/shouldn’t include it” dialogue which has been going on in our field for around 80 years! At the very least take a look at the article “Popular music in the school: Remixing the issues” Music Educators Journal, 93(4), 32-27.