Popular Music in the High School: Crafting and Implementing a Curriculum

Julie Beauregard While popular music education has become increasingly prominent in research and practice, discourse predominantly centers on issues of pedagogy and policy. Between these two lies the less-discussed issue of curriculum. This chapter charts, from the teacher’s perspective, the process of inception, curriculum writing, and fruition of a course devoted solely to the teaching and learning of and about popular music — a narrative that lies at the intersection of popular music education discourse and curriculum studies. I use the term “popular music” as a catch-all for any musics that fall outside of otherwise established genres in classical, folk, world, or jazz idioms from the inception of rock and roll in the 1950s to the present, regardless of commercial availability or mainstream acclaim. These include, but are not limited to, rock and roll, pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western, and subgenres of each such as death metal, electronic...