Welcome to the APME Memphis 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. The conference schedule will be available in late spring 2025. At that time, you can view the schedule and select the presentations you’d like to attend. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community June 4–7, 2025.
Popular music education has long been vaunted for its capacity to reach marginalized populations within schools. By providing access to popular music education, school districts can more effectively engage students of diverse backgrounds by providing music activities that are more culturally and personally relevant. However, the inclusion of popular music as part of a school district’s offerings does not ensure equitability in terms of access nor in terms of support. In some rural areas, it is common for students to opt into vocational training during the school day that removes them from their primary school campuses and substantially limits their options for enrolling in music courses. Often, these students come from the most impoverished families, thus, access to music classes is defined in part by socioeconomic status. In this presentation, I explore and reflect upon this aspect of teaching and learning music in a rural, largely impoverished district. In my particular teaching context, a guitar class was offered as an alternative to the traditional large music ensembles, but due to district scheduling policy, this site for popular music education was often used as a “dumping ground” for students who needed to earn a music credit, including many who attended off-campus vocational training. Although the district’s inclusion of popular music provides an important outlet for the students who utilize it, I argue that the policies of the district and other districts in the area re-entrench the physical separation and cultural differences of student populations, largely along lines of class.
