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.
Having evaded majoring in music as an undergrad student at Vassar College due to the exclusion of popular music in the curriculum, I took a roundabout path to becoming a community college music professor only to find myself straddling parallel universes in the form of my open admission community college and the ultra-elite Ivy League through Princeton University’s Community College Faculty Program. In this session I explore how different approaches from disparate institutions can inform our inclusion of popular music education for a variety of students at all levels. The session will speak to this year’s conference theme focused on “History, Culture and Society in Popular Music” by comparing historical and current attitudes towards the inclusion or exclusion of popular music through the lens of my experiences as a student in a suburban New York public school system, at Vassar College and at Princeton, and as a professor at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. I will explore past and present course and content offerings at these institutions and how the philosophies and practices of these institutions affect student participation in music programs and empower or alienate students’ artistic expression and overall appreciation of the role of music in society.
