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.
Culturally responsive teaching is thought to connect student’s cultures, languages, and life experiences with what they learn in school. The human brain is wired to make connections between the known and the unknown, and it’s easier for our brains to learn and store information when we have a hook to hang it on. The hook, for most students, is the knowledge they bring into the classroom. Unfortunately, music educators have tended not to recognize what students know about music, and far to seldomly, do they champion student’s prior musical understanding in the classroom. This has been an ongoing issue in traditional ensembles such as band, choir and orchestra, where students encounter “quality” styles of music. These musics tend to be those that the teacher enjoys and values. On the surface it would seem that teachers of popular music classes and ensembles wouldn’t suffer from the same issues. After all, many students have significant understanding of popular musics and enroll in these courses for that reason. However, I suggest that too often popular music teachers bring their traditional ensemble roots with them when teaching popular music ensembles. They fail to allow students to make use of what they know, and as a result miss out on many culturally responsive opportunities. In this session, I will examine issues that limit culturally responsive teaching in popular music courses/ensembles, and I will suggest a strategy that approaches teaching and learning, in these classes, that can result in a deeper level of cultural responsiveness.
