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.
School music educators are often seen as occupying one of two distinct “camps”. This dichotomy has been characterized as “preservation vs. progress” or “tradition vs. change”. On one side are those concerned with the maintenance of traditional ensembles and the curricular foundations of Western music history and notation. On the other side are those driven toward curricular reform that nurtures students’ agency and imagination. Popular music educators usually identify with the latter side and employ distinct curricula and pedagogy to pursue its goals. However, this empirical study of 22 high school music students in Toronto found that using popular music pedagogies (PMPs) can enhance, rather than take away from, students’ ability to achieve traditional curricular goals such as performing Western European Art Music (WEAM) in large ensembles. More specifically, students’ experience with PMPs helped them to proactively identify and correct their own mistakes, better understand the stylistic characteristics of the music, and develop a greater sense of responsibility to master their parts. One implication of this finding is that popular music educators can more easily justify using PMPs in the classroom, as doing so can contribute to the achievement of traditional learning goals. Another implication is that traditional music educators can feel more confident to explore PMPs, as doing so won’t necessarily detract from their pursuit of teaching excellence in WEAM.
