Abstract
The purpose of this article is to utilize new conceptions of music literacy to support and encourage popular music experiences in music education. A new definition of music literacy is presented and authentic popular music resources that function as (newly defined) texts to develop music literacy are identified and discussed. Finally, considerations will be given for music educators on how to select and utilize popular music texts to engage students in meaningful music interactions that promote music literacy development.
The unmistakable opening chords of “Old Town Road” could be heard all the way down the hall. The sound of the music became louder as Katie raced toward the Thomas Jefferson Middle School music room. She dashed into the room and glanced at a well-ordered array of acoustic and electric guitars and basses hanging from the walls as she zig-zagged through five drum sets near the back windows of the classroom. Music posters all over the remaining wall space and the bulletin boards filled with announcements completed the familiar vibe in the room.
Some of the students had previous experience on their instruments. Kanitha had never sung into a microphone before but knew the words to almost every current pop song. Situated on each music stand were students’ phones. Every student had some sort of lead sheet, recording, video, or app readily available in case anyone forgot a chord, bass note, or lyric. Sandy’s favorite was Bass Tabs, an app she discovered on her own as she took an interest in bass before this class began. With that app, she could find and practice various bass licks for each of the tunes the band played.
As Katie plopped herself on the keyboard bench and took her phone out of her pocket, she flashed a wry grin toward Mr K, their teacher situated at his desk 10 feet away. Mr K returned Katie’s grin with a roll of the eyes and a half-hearted “teacher look” that only made the rest of the band laugh. With that “look,” the students rehearsing seemed to notice through the corner of their eyes Mr K.’s eyes closing and head bobbing up and down. It felt to Sandy and Katie that the music was not quite right as the tempo began to slow down. The two girls giggled at each other as Kanitha’s singing became increasingly flat during the chorus as she slowed down with the rest of the band. Without stopping, Sandy lifted her eyes from her music stand and with a slight movement of her head picked up the tempo. Although it took several measures, the rest of the band followed and locked into a quicker tempo. Sandy and Katie smiled at each other when Kanitha resumed singing in tune.
Sandy adjusted the levels on her bass and amplifier because she sensed she was a little too loud and didn’t want to drown out the vocals. She repositioned the amp 2 feet so that it was in front of the Kanitha’s mic stand. It was then that Javy stopped and said to Kanitha, “You need to sound more country, like Billy Ray Cyrus! Did you watch the video of their live performance with Keith Urban at the CMA festival that I sent last week?” Before Kanitha could respond, Katie shot back, “Wait? What? How is she going to do that? There’s no way she is going to sound like that. She has to have her own sound the way she wants to sing it.” “That’s right!” Lydia added to the debate, “ We don’t even have the right instruments for a real country sound. I’m playing this ukulele for the mandolin sound and Bobby is trying to figure out the banjo part on the guitar. We’re kinda faking it as we go along. ”
“Banjitar!” blurted Bobby as the rest of the band stopped talking and gawked. “Keith Urban is playing a banjituar. It’s a guitar neck and fretboard set up on a banjo body.”
Amid the banter and noodling, Bobby reminded everyone,
Remember what Mr K said. We need to do what we can. There’s no way I can play the banjo solo off the video, so I’m just going get close with the notes I know how to play. Isn’t that right Mr K?
Javy then said, “Let’s do this. My bus comes in 20 minutes and I gotta get home. One, two, three, four.” As the band resumed playing, Mr K. returned to his desk, sat down, and listened to the band, arms folded, with a smile on his face.
Expanding the PK-12 music curriculum
Music educators throughout the United States have expressed a need to diversify contemporary PK-12 school music programs to reflect present-day musical engagement and practices (Allsup, 2016; J. R. Barrett & Webster, 2014; Cutietta, 2017; Elpus & Abril, 2011; Miksza, 2013; Randles, 2014; Williams, 2019). Traditional music ensembles (i.e., band, chorus, and orchestra) continue to be the most common form of music education in the United States, with non-traditional music course offerings such as guitar, music appreciation, music theory, and keyboard found in only 25% of schools nationally (Elpus, 2017). The inclusion of popular music in music education has increased during the 21st century (Powell et al., 2015); however, the extent to which popular music is being implemented in American music programs is unclear (Krikun, 2017). In the United States, popular music is often used to augment traditional PK-12 music course offerings (Isbell, 2007), although there are some autonomous popular music courses and ensembles that exist in a variety of forms, such as popular music performance, guitar, songwriting, music technology, acapella, show choir, commercial music, rock band, contemporary music, and Modern Band (Powell & Burnstein, 2017).
While music educators in the United States continue to work toward greater inclusion of popular music and popular music ensembles throughout the PK-12 school music curriculum, popular music education is much more established in the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries (Kallio, 2017; Smith et al., 2018). The Nordic countries have been lauded for their model of both democratic and inclusive music education practices that include popular music education (Allsup, 2011; Georgii-Hemming & Westvall, 2010; Väkevä & Westerlund, 2007). A democratic music education requires music educators to move beyond cultural traditions and habits to provide learning opportunities that account for the individual needs and potential contributions of the students (Väkevä & Westerlund, 2007). In Finland, popular music is prevalent in secondary school music classrooms, and both the study of and engagement in popular music are essential parts of music teacher training (Väkevä, 2006; Westerlund, 2006). Although popular music education is encouraged and celebrated in Finland, there appears to be some question regarding music appropriateness and best practices for selecting and utilizing popular music repertoire in the music classroom as “popular repertoire decisions are ethically, ideologically, and politically loaded” (Kallio, 2017, p. 319). Kallio (2017) warns, if popular musics in schools receive little critical attention, are regarded as an “easy solution” to student motivation or participation, or as a culture-lite panacea for educating the masses in an accessible way, there is a risk of undermining the great strides that have been made towards a democratic and inclusive music education. (p. 329)
While the inclusion of popular music and popular music ensembles in music education programs continues to gain momentum internationally, it appears that a need exists for music educators to develop a more concrete understanding of how popular music education curricula might be constructed and presented in a way that supports the shared vision of a democratic, inclusive, and rigorous music education. The purpose of this article is to introduce a new conception of music literacy and how it can be used to guide the development of popular music experiences and curricula that enhance music meaning-making as students learn to connect, interpret, discern, navigate, decipher, and participate in their vast musical world. To illustrate this, we will examine a new definition of music literacy (Broomhead, 2018), which we will use to identify popular music resources that function as (newly defined) texts to nurture music literacy, and discuss considerations for selecting and utilizing popular music texts to develop curriculum that will engage students in meaningful music interactions that will promote music literacy.
Redefining music literacy
Literacy is multi-faceted, having evolved beyond traditional, print-based notions to include multi-modalities (e.g., written, oral, visual, audio, tactile, gestural, spatial) and to consider social, cultural, and technological change (Kalantzis et al., 2010; Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). Kalantzis et al. (2016) suggest that definitions of literacy and literacy education must include diverse resources that (a) support the learner in the work, public, and community life of a society and (b) help develop the knowledge, skills, and understandings needed to acquire and create meaning. These fundamental ideas regarding definitions of literacy and literacy education can be applied to music literacy. Music educators should determine what the desired social outcomes of music-related meaning-making are, and how best to cultivate the meaning-making necessary for those outcomes. We offer a new conception of music literacy that enhances teachers’ and students’ abilities to generate meaning-making in music.
Meaning-making
Before describing these conceptions of music literacy, it is important to clarify the expression “meaning-making” and its significance to music literacy. Considering the societal- and individual-oriented purposes of music education, we propose that a primary purpose of music education is to maximize the abilities of individuals to gain all types of personal (including musical) meaning through their interactions with music. Elliott (1995) uses the term “praxial” to emphasize that “music ought to be understood in relation to the meanings and values evidenced in actual music making and music listening in specific cultural contexts” (p. 14). The focus on meaning can lead to lifelong music-making that will include music engagements that extend beyond the classroom. Ideally, our music literacy lens should be broad enough to address a full range of meaning.
Meaning-making is a dynamic process and cannot easily be subjected to, directed by, or even identified by a discrete set of rules or guidelines (New London Group, 2000). We focus on musical meaning-making while recognizing the complex intersection of musical and extra-musical (life) meaning. Green (1988) differentiates between “inherent” and “delineated” musical meaning, both of which “exist in a dialectical relationship” and must occur in all musical experiences (Green, 2006, p. 102). Inherent meaning refers to implicit materials or elements in the music itself (e.g., sounds and silences). It refers to the formal aspects of the music and ignores matters that are uncharacteristic of the music itself. However, according to Green (2006), “no music can ever be perceived as music in a social vacuum” (p. 102); thus, delineated meaning addresses the extra-musical connotations within music that relate to the context of production, distribution, and reception.
Kalantzis and Cope (2000) affirm that no two meanings are alike as we consider different life experiences or lifeworlds that the students bring with them into the classroom. Silverman et al. (2014) address the intricate dynamic of extra-musical and musical meaning in the music experience through the lens of Elliott in praxial philosophy of music education, proposing, … that we conceptualize “music” holistically: as a verb (i.e., processes, as in “musicing” and listening), and a noun (compositions, improvisations, and so forth), as a hub of human interactions (social, cultural, political, and so forth), all of which depend on musical style-communities (social-musical interactions) in which people in different times and places make and listen to music of different kinds. (p. 56) Music is based in sound, and students can examine the varied ways that music moves through time … Personal associations and responses to music are also part of its expressive power. Music is also influenced by the time and place in which it is created, performed, and experienced; these social and cultural meanings convey nuances of understanding. Any educational encounter with music may foster multiple responses to these multiple dimensions … As students experience musical works and related ideas from multiple perspectives and through multiple media, their capacities for forming strong connections are deepened. (p. 144)
Role of literacy
Similar questions have concerned literacy scholars from various disciplines. They have grappled with how to describe meaning-making that occurs through interactions with resources other than printed texts. In many disciplines, students must “read” not only words, but graphs, images, natural objects (both static and in motion), and must draw meaning from these resources that is equal in richness to that of a language resource. Draper et al. (2010), a team of content area literacy researchers from an array of disciplines, have found that concepts of literacy are well-suited to explain meaning-making interactions of all kinds with resources of all kinds. They define literacy as “the ability to negotiate (e.g., read, view, listen, taste, smell, critique) and create (e.g., write, produce, sing, act, speak) texts in discipline-appropriate ways or in ways that other members of a discipline would recognize as ‘correct’ or ‘viable’” (Draper & Siebert, 2010, p. 30). In turn, they define a text as anything “that humans intentionally imbue with meaning, either in the way they create or attend to the object, to achieve a particular purpose” (p. 28).
Note that these definitions do not imply that everything is a text, only that anything can be a text if it is being attended to as a text, that is, it is being negotiated and/or created for meaning. It is not the natural composition of an object that makes it a text, it is the way in which a learner is interacting with the object. Objects may be involved in an interaction but if they are not being actively negotiated or created for meaning, they are not texts. For example, although a pencil could be a text for a toddler who has just discovered its ability to make a mark, for someone with more experience, the pencil takes on the role of a tool as it is used to create a text such as a written work or drawing.
Application to music
Although music scholars have frequently called for more expansive notions of music literacy (M. S. Barrett, 1997; Leonhard, 1999; Levinson, 1990), researchers and practitioners have commonly invoked the term to refer to reading notation and other symbols in a musical score (Demorest, 1998; Elkoshi, 2004; Rodriguez, 2004). It would behoove music educators to expand the generally accepted definition of music literacy beyond a single text (music notation) to embrace the inclusion of multi-modalities, particularly given the fact that music production and dissemination continues to evolve with social, cultural, and technological change. By reenvisioning what constitutes a musical text, we begin to see that anything may be considered a text if it is being negotiated and/or created for meaning, and musical “texts” must include not only the musical score but many other musical resources. A conductor’s gestures may be classified as texts as could musical models and demonstrations during rehearsals, the sounds of the ensemble, performances, the instruments themselves, and even musical imaginations, to the extent that music learners are negotiating and/or creating them for meaning. Consequently, we embrace the following definitions of music texts and literacies:
Music texts are music resources that humans intentionally imbue with musical meaning, either in the way they create or attend to the resources. Music literacy is the ability to negotiate and create music texts in ways that music experts would recognize as “correct,” or “viable,” in order to create meaning (Broomhead, 2018).
To say that abilities to interact with music must be recognizable (by experts) as “correct” or “viable” in order for them to count as literacy does not mean that actual persons must approve. Rather, in order for music interactions to be considered “literate,” they must be identifiable within some set of conventions. Conventions essentially are groups of characteristics that can be recognized as belonging to some real or imagined model of how things of a certain type are usually done. The presence of such a model suggests expertise. If real or imagined experts in a set of conventions “would” recognize the interactions as “correct,” or, “viable,” then they qualify as literate interactions. Also, the expertise needed for such judgments may not always be found in the teacher; students may at times possess a better sense for what is or is not viable within certain conventions. Then, given literate interactions, meaning is made that can be infinitely diverse. Note that the definition applies judgments of correctness or viability to musical interactions but not to meanings made. This is because, whereas some meanings are subject to judgment (notes have universally understood durations, for example), personal meaning cannot be so.
As students interact meaningfully with musical texts—whether by performing, creating, listening, and responding, or connecting them to personal knowledge, experience, and/or societal, cultural, and historical contexts—they are developing and/or demonstrating musical literacies (May et al., 2016). Accepting the idea that a musical text is a resource that potentially conveys musical meaning requires an educator to thoughtfully consider a variety of resources that provide rich meaning for their students. Educators may also loosely identify literacies that students will demonstrate or develop as they interact with particular texts (resources) in attempt to maximize the meaning-making. The term “literacy” now encompasses all abilities to make all meaning from all resources that are being treated as texts. Subcategories such as knowledge, skills, and dispositions are subsumed into the present notion of “literacies,” which offers a more holistic viewpoint of music literacy. While it may be helpful to use the traditional subcategories of knowledge, skills, and dispositions to identify and create measurable learning objectives, the compartmentalization of what students learn about and do with music does not account for all the various individual meanings that are created and interwoven throughout a given musical experience. By focusing on the texts (resources) with which students will interact, music educators can address literacy more holistically, reflecting the complex interwoven nature of meaning in the real world.
To illustrate the new definitions of texts and literacies, we identify specific texts (resources) and possible literacies demonstrated by students in the opening vignette of this article. It was apparent in their dialogue that the students had frequently listened to and watched audio and video recordings of “Old Town Road,” which served as primary texts for learning how to produce the song. All of the students can be considered texts to each other as they responded to one another’s tempi, pitch, volume, tone, and verbal feedback. Other texts primary to the experience were the instruments that students were learning to negotiate. The Bass Tabs app was also an essential text to Sandy as she relied upon it to negotiate her bass guitar. The teacher, Mr K, was yet another text with whom meaningful interactions seem to have taken place as revealed by the fact that Tommy quoted him to Kanitha and by the fact that the students seemed to attend to his reactions (approving head-bobbing) to their playing. Mr K also served as a text when he demonstrated a technique on the guitar and when he coached Kanitha. There is also the possibility that students were engaging with many secondary texts as well. For instance, the classroom might be considered a text depending on how the students interact with it throughout rehearsal. They may, for instance, admire a particular guitar on display, read announcements, or thoughtfully examine a poster of a musician. The equipment such as amplifiers and the public address (PA) system, as well as other environmental factors including smells, lighting, weather, and mood could all become secondary texts depending on how the students attend to them throughout the rehearsal.
Literacies addressed in the vignette include many of the National Core Music Standards including the artistic processes of creating, performing, responding, and connecting (National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS), 2014). For example, literacies for negotiating the instruments might have included the ability to distinguish and reproduce the various musical aspects of a piece of music for a given instrument, the ability to simplify or approximate an instrumental part for one’s skill level, or the ability to sing while playing an instrument. Literacies for creating a specific tone involved knowledge of amplifiers, instruments, and effects pedals. Literacies for “reading” other members of the ensemble included identifying the individual instrument parts and perceiving how they fit together, as well as achieving a groove through the ability to read visual and aural cues from other band members. Each text (or resource) requires multiple literacies, of which these are but a few examples (see Table 1 for general examples of identifying popular music texts and literacies).
Common popular music texts in popular music ensembles with examples of possible literacies.
With these broad conceptions of music literacy as the foundation, we argue that music texts related to popular music and genuine interactions with them—such as those found through participation in popular music ensembles—can be rich sources of meaning for music learners. The significance of these popular music experiences are notable as one considers the personal, cultural, and historical meaning students stand to gain from engaging with familiar music of their choice.
Examining popular music texts
In order to identify a popular music resource as a text, consideration must be given to how students will engage or interact with it. Music is considered “popular” due to factors related to popularity, consumption, dissemination, and/or social group (Middleton & Manuel, 2001). Popular music texts, then, include not only the actual music for study but also any resource that (a) provides context for the music (social messages, historical significance, language, dress), (b) relays the music (e.g., audio recording, live performance, music video, tablature, chord chart), or (c) disseminates the music (e.g., recording technology, contemporary instruments, PA equipment).
Our music literacy lens recognizes a high value in popular music texts. While we do not intend to resolve the various debates surrounding the use of popular music in music education and the implementation of popular music ensembles, we do assert that popular music texts and literacies are particularly conducive to meaning-making. We highlight two reasons for this: accessibility and relevance.
Accessibility
Popular music is the musical culture (Green, 2005) or “life music” (Dunn, 2011) of students, and it plays a fundamental role in their musical lives and identities. Researchers have found that students are more likely to discuss, engage, and enjoy the music they listen to outside of school than the music used in formal music training (Davis, 2016; Dunn, 2011). Popular music resources are prevalent throughout everyday life activities. As a result, opportunities abound for students to engage in meaningful musical interactions involving performing, creating, responding to, and thinking about popular music texts (resources) that can lead to music literacy development.
Access to popular music has become practically automatic on modern electronic devices. It permeates TV shows, commercials, movies, sporting events, social functions, and even dining and shopping. Popular music instruments are often portable, easy to access, and relatively inexpensive. Online resources have made instruction on how to play an instrument very accessible. Music educators can easily facilitate opportunities for students to engage meaningfully with these resources as texts to develop music literacy.
While adolescents engage with many different types of music, most prefer, listen to, and create popular music (Hargreaves & Marshall, 2003). Popular music pieces that are chosen by students enhance learning contexts and are ideal for study because they are already familiar with the music, and therefore primed to develop literacies that lead to meaningful music-making. Music literacy is nurtured as students engage with texts (e.g., song recordings, instruments, ensemble members, etc.) and develop the ability to aurally distinguish the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements of their particular part. Literacy development thrives as students then reproduce their part at their present skill level and strive to acquire the advanced skills necessary to reproduce the part with higher fidelity. Because of the accessibility and adaptability of popular music, students promptly experience success that is meaningful to them, creating an upward spiral of meaning and motivated engagement with music texts.
Popular music also has the potential to stretch a motivated learner’s ability to access more complex meanings. Many popular music examples use complex meters (e.g., Dream Theater “Dance of Eternity”), complicated rhyme schemes (e.g., Eminem “Lose Yourself”), innovative harmonic progressions (e.g., Radiohead “Karma Police”), polyrhythms (e.g., Nine Inch Nails “La Mer”), and inventive instrumental sounds (e.g., Tom Morello’s use of guitar pedals) that can challenge the learner when meaningfully studied in an accessible, vernacular context. Even in cases of musical complexity, popular music enjoys a meaning-making advantage over Western classical music and jazz because students tend to already possess a high level of music literacies developed from out-of-school music interactions that will yield greater meaning-making.
The preexisting literacies learners have with popular music provide a solid foundation for further music literacy development through genuine popular music experiences. In the vignette, Sandy had already been developing bass playing literacies before coming into Mr K’s class with the technology available to her. She then had the opportunity to “hit the ground running,” applying her previous skills to new levels that she must now develop for meaningful new experiences. Kanitha had clearly been developing singing literacies her whole life as she sang popular songs outside of the classroom. Other members of the band also benefited from preexisting literacies developed during self-directed musical interactions up to that point in their lives; however, both the context of the ensemble and the teacher facilitating the experience provide students with opportunities to further their music literacy development beyond what they can do individually.
The informal and experiential contexts in which students engage in popular music-making activities also speak to the accessibility of popular music. Popular music pedagogies refer to the “design, practices, methods, and approaches to the learning of the practice of popular music” (Weston, 2017, p. 102). Popular music pedagogies consist of both informal and nonformal teaching practices that promote a cooperative environment where students and teachers share expertise (Rodriguez, 2004; Vasil et al., 2018). Popular music pedagogies can be effective in helping to promote democracy, autonomy, diversity, and inclusivity (Cremata, 2017), and often invite opportunities for students to contribute and cultivate cultural capital by selecting the music for study (Green, 2008). The use of popular music pedagogies also creates a learning environment that nurtures the development of important 21st-century skills that include critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2007; Vasil et al., 2018).
Relevance
Davis (2016) finds that popular music is what students most often listen to in their lives outside of school and that they generally associate such listening with enjoyment, entertainment, creativity, imagination, emotional regulation, and personal identity. We add that musics students listen to by choice, outside of school, are extremely diverse and may perhaps fit only very loosely into the overarching category of “popular.” Indeed, one may make the case that some genres are not really very popular. And, the claim above about students’ music choices certainly is not limited to students or even a certain age. However, regardless of these caveats, students are by choice engaging with music that may be called popular. These interactions with popular music allow them to develop connections and understandings independent of any formal instruction. Popular music and its oral/aural tradition afford opportunities for students to engage in intuitive listening where they create their own mental representations of music (Dunn, 2014). According to Dunn (2014), Such mental representations create a holistic framework that becomes our vehicle for remembering, making sense of, and finding meaning in a given listening experience. In repeated listenings, this mental representation allows us to recognize the piece, to recall objective, subjective, imaginative, contextual, and emotional information about it; and to make adjustments and additions to the framework with each new encounter. (p. 71)
Participatory and popular-culture literacies
Popular music texts are unique in that they can also be used to foster participatory-culture and popular-culture literacies, which are both relevant and necessary to everyday life in the 21st century. Digital technologies have changed the way students learn, play, socialize, participate, and engage with both society and music (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011; Tobias, 2013). According to Jenkins (2009), a participatory culture is a culture with (a) relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, (b) strong support for creating and sharing creations with others, (c) some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices, (d) members who believe their contributions matter, and (e) members who feel some degree of social connection with one another.
Forms of participatory culture include affiliations (memberships in online communities), expressions (producing new creative forms), collaborative problem-solving (informal and formal), and circulations (flow of media) (Jenkins et al., 2009). Participatory culture necessitates the development of new media literacies, a set of cultural competencies and social skills that are needed in the new media landscape and include play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation (Jenkins, 2009). Some of the ways people engage with music in a participatory culture include covering, arranging, parodying, satirizing, multitracking, remixing, sample-based producing, creating mash-ups, creating tutorials, remediating, commenting, and discussing (Tobias, 2013)—all of which can be considered music literacies.
According to Gee (2004), participatory cultures are ideal learning environments because they are informal learning environments or “affinity spaces” where people are actively engaged in participating and learning about popular-culture endeavors that (a) bridge differences in intersectionality, (b) allow people to participate in various ways based on their skills and interests, and (c) depend on peer-to-peer teaching and shared expertise. Participatory-culture literacies that include expressions, circulations, affiliations, and collaborative problem-solving are easily explored through meaningful engagement with popular music texts and through the use of popular music pedagogies. Popular music ensembles provide a platform for students to employ popular music texts in an “affinity space” environment that supports the development of music, participatory culture, and new media literacies that are relevant to real-world civic engagements.
Popular media and culture significantly influence students’ thinking, learning, and identity. According to Beach and O’Brien (2009), popular culture is “partly defined by audiences’ desires and needs” (p. 776). Students today acquire most of their knowledge through multimediating—simultaneously engaging in multiple media activities, which afford students multiple ways of knowing and valuing the world through fragmented, limited constructions (Beach and O’Brien, 2009). Students employ popular texts such as movies, music, television, and video games, to construct their knowledge, ignite their imagination, and communicate ideas.
Popular music is popular-culture text. Popular music is used to impart ideas, beliefs, and values in combination with musical meaning. By studying popular music, students can develop literacies that will help them navigate and interpret popular culture while informing their popular music practices. In the vignette, the song “Old Town Road” by Little Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, YouTube videos, music apps (i.e., Bass Tabs), lead sheets, and the band members themselves, are all examples of relevant texts. As the students from Mr K’s class interacted (create, perform, respond, connect) meaningfully with each of the texts, they developed and demonstrated music literacies and other important 21st-century popular-culture literacies. For instance, as Kanitha learned how to channel Billy Ray Cyrus’ style intensity within her sound, and when Bobby figured out how to play the guitar solo at his own level, they were inserting and situating themselves within a culture. Students also developed participatory-culture literacies through shared interactions with digital technologies, such as YouTube videos, the downloading and creation of lead sheets, and their engagement with the Bass Tabs app which is a database of tabs developed and shared by users. Finally, the students demonstrated their ability to collaborate, discuss, problem solve, and share expertise with one another in an affinity space as members of a band.
Other possible learning activities that use popular music texts to foster both music and popular-culture literacies might include
learning how to search for and organize popular music texts (e.g., music videos, recordings, images, tablature, instructional videos) in order to create and share popular music; interpreting and using features of popular music genres; connecting and linking popular music to other popular-culture texts (e.g., music to film, television, video games, media, celebrity, social language); using hypermedia production tools such as PowerPoint and Prezi to connect popular music with other popular-culture texts (e.g., images, music, and video clips); studying local, translocal, and virtual popular music scenes (Bennett & Peterson, 2004) and how they reflect certain music genre conventions, cultural practices, and promotional efforts; exploring aspects of identity related to race, class, subculture, and gender through popular music; examining how popular music can reflect and perpetuate consumerism, political agenda, and ideologies; and recognizing how and why popular music is used within one’s own life.
Popular culture texts can be used to engage students in meaningful music experiences that can help develop and support literacies and skills needed to create, perform, respond, and connect to music. Popular culture texts are powerful in the music classroom because of their relevance to the personal, social, cultural, and musical lives of students. Arguably, students are accessing popular culture texts on their own and developing popular culture, new media, and music literacies as they do so. However, an astute educator can facilitate learning experiences with familiar texts that will challenge learners to further literacy development. In doing so, students are able to assimilate and apply knowledge acquired inside and outside of the classroom; engage in learning activities that will have greater meaning due to their applicability to the real world; and participate in dyadic interactions with the teacher that encourage collaborative, bidirectional teaching and learning, which will result in meaningful engagement with popular culture texts and enhanced literacy development.
Role of teachers
In our discussion of participatory and pop culture literacies, we have highlighted learner-oriented processes that occur quite independent of any formal leader. These ways of developing literacies are powerful. Music teachers can facilitate music literacy development without imposing intrusive outside controls on the otherwise organic processes. Teachers can provide opportunities for students to interpret and construct popular-culture texts in order to define their individual beliefs and values. Critical literacy, which includes interpreting and constructing musical communication, can be nurtured by providing students with opportunities to purposefully select music for study and discuss cultural, social, economic, and political institutions and systems (Beach & Bolden, 2018).
While taking care to celebrate informal learning and students’ individual development of relevant literacies, teachers can facilitate access to resources and provide coaching related to scaffolding and sequencing, thus enhancing students’ choices in terms of complexity level and ordering of experiences. Teachers who have nurtured broad literacies in themselves can bring broad perspectives even when student literacies related to certain conventions surpass the teachers’. In addition, even without specific expertise within a set of conventions, teachers’ overarching musical and instructional expertise can help students move toward interactions that are “appropriate” within a set of conventions. In other words, teachers may not always be experts in a given set of conventions, but they will often possess more expertise about expertise than their students.
Teachers using the present literacy lens can also coach students toward a purposeful balance of the orientations (creator, performer, responder, connector), which can guide student experiences without dishonoring preexisting student literacies, musical tastes, or the ability to independently make relevant meaning. So, the teacher does not take over the meaning-making of the students, but does offer broadened experience to keep students’ literacies and meanings from remaining narrow. Wise teachers can help students make connections without taking over the meaning-making processes of the learners. Much of this may be a matter of helping students bring meaning that they are already making into a more fully conscious sphere. These are just a few of the ways teachers remain relevant to largely independent literacy development processes.
Criteria for text selection
We have argued for the inclusion of popular music experiences in formal music education, asserting that meaning-making opportunities they afford students are distinctly accessible and relevant. The meaning-making that occurs as a result of students engaging with popular music texts is facilitated by students’ familiarity with those texts, and the meaning they make is personally, socially, and culturally relevant. However, even when accessibility and relevance levels are high, popular music does not guarantee depth or value of meaning. It is possible for meaning to be both accessible and shallow, and to be both relevant and detrimental, for example. While rich substance in a music resource is of little value when the meaning available is not accessible or relevant to the learner, accessibility and relevance are also of little value when the meaning available is inconsequential or inappropriate. Even though judgments of appropriateness regarding potential meanings are and must be made by teachers as they consider texts—including those chosen by students—this is not the same as assigning value to actual meanings that students derive from their interactions. This, of course, is highly individual and often private.
Therefore—just as judgments of quality are essential in the process of selecting traditional band, choir, and orchestra literature for rehearsal and performance—judgments of quality and value are important when selecting popular music texts (songs, instruments, types of ensembles, etc.) for use in instruction. Those judgments are difficult to make, as caliber, value, substance, and meaning are extremely ill-defined. One needs to evaluate a text on multiple aspects rather than single or discrete elements. For example, some might attribute the substance of a piece of music to its complexity. Yet, just as a poem or image can present great substance in a very simple form, a substantive musical resource can also be quite simple. Whether simple or complex, quality can manifest through subtle transformations in musical patterns, expressive use of tone color and rhythmic texture, traditional or unique instrumentation, chromatic movement of a melody, implied tonality, a lyrical rhyme scheme, or complex interactions of all of these traits.
When designing meaningful music experiences for students, it is easier for music educators to identify high-quality texts that will most resonate with their students than to anticipate all possible meanings. Setting robust theoretical parameters regarding the value of potential meanings available from a particular text seems infeasible because of the great diversity of individuals and their lifeworlds. Ideally, students should be provided with opportunities to select music for study in order to maximize meaning-making and nurture literacy development. In the democratic classroom these efforts by individuals will be made both for themselves and in consideration of meaning-making within a classroom community. The national core standards help in making judgments of value regarding musical literacies. However, for cultural and social value judgments, it is helpful to consider whether the potential meanings derived from music experiences promote messages that are generally accepted in a positive society.
One of the advantages of applying the present literacy lens in judgments of quality and value is that the overarching instructional goal is meaning-making. This perspective does not preclude the use of comprehensive lists or taxonomies of meanings and/or literacies to target in instruction, but this lens positions texts—including all instructional resources—in a prominent position in curriculum planning. Pre-organization of content in a curriculum is desirable, of course, but it is possible to give too much weight to distinctions and categorizations that tend to be somewhat artificial instead of accounting for a holistic music-making experience. Real-life meanings are integrated rather than divided into discrete categories. Rather than operating from a detailed taxonomy of literacies to address and using the list to decide upon what resources to use, we suggest prioritizing the selection of high-quality popular music texts that are rich with potential for meaning. Where required, specific literacies can be identified. However, it is important to understand that students are engaged in rich meaning-making that far exceeds these predetermined literacies.
One of the benefits of engaging and participating in popular music activities and ensembles is that the informal learning environment allows students to participate in text selection and share ownership in their musical experience. Greater student involvement does not relieve the music teacher of the responsibility for managing the quality and value of classroom musical texts but instead creates a bidirectional learning environment. When students are the primary agents in exploring popular music texts that they have selected from their individual musical starting points, meaning-making is guaranteed in that students must apply currently held meanings to the selection itself.
Conclusion
There is immense value in studying popular music and participating in popular music ensembles as they provide abundant opportunities for students to take ownership in their learning and engage in meaningful, relevant musical experiences that foster literacy development. The rapid societal, cultural, and technological changes in the 21st century have prompted literacy scholars to expand upon traditional definitions and views of literacy to encompass multiple modalities (e.g., written, oral, visual, audio, tactile, gestural, spatial). Popular music affords students opportunities to develop our expanded notion of music literacy in a meaningful, relevant way. Furthermore, popular music is particularly appropriate for study because it evolves with societal, cultural, and technological change. By studying popular music, students will have the opportunity to develop and nurture music literacy, which is interwoven with many of the other literacies (e.g., media, popular culture, 21st-century skills) that are crucial in today’s society.
The new definition of music literacy proposed earlier in this article should help music educators understand the all-encompassing view of literacy that focuses primarily on students engaging in meaningful music experiences. In order to design a music curriculum focused on music literacy, it is necessary to treat students’ musical experiences as the organizing center of the curriculum (J. R. Barrett, 2005). The most accessible way to plan for meaningful music experiences is to identify high-quality music texts (resources) with which students will interact (create, perform, respond to, or connect) and then to facilitate a variety of interactions with the texts. When selecting popular music texts, consideration should be given to the accessibility, relevance, and substance of the various texts to help predict the literacies (music and other) that students will demonstrate and/or develop as a result of their interactions with each text.
In recommending popular music as a rich environment for literacy development, we also recognize the complexity and even potential dangers of this approach. While meaning-making is enhanced through accessibility, relevance, and substance, the nature of the meaning may not always be desirable in terms of nurturing citizens, positive self-concepts, attitudes toward violence, and so on. The job of the teacher may be seen as unreasonably difficult considering political and values-driven responsibilities regarding students, which are already very difficult to navigate. Indeed, the approach to curriculum suggested here—selecting meaningful texts and associated—may be laden with difficult choices. However, this approach will bring enhanced opportunities as it leads to an innovative, flexible, inquiry-based, open-ended, and responsive learning environment.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
