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.
There is a need for music in retirement homes, especially memory units. This presentation offers ideas that APME educators can adapt to encourage students – soloists or combos of any genre of music – to share their music with seniors in a way that brings joy to everyone.
My name is Brian Wansink, and I’m a retired Cornell marketing professor who has published best-selling books and 200-some journal articles. Now, as a later-life musician, I play sax in a Motown band (and in a Grateful Dead band), and I research how popular music can be used to encourage... Read More →
Thursday June 5, 2025 2:30pm - 2:40pm CDT Classroom 105 - Legacy Building3775 Central Avenue 129 Music Building Memphis, TN, 38111
This session will focus on the transformative power of participatory music-making in fostering social-emotional development, enhancing musical fluency, and embedding culturally and linguistically sustaining practices (CLSP) in the classroom. Designed for educators across disciplines, the session will invite teachers to explore the value of integrating participatory music-making activities into their curricula. Through collaborative, real-time music creation, students can enhance their musical skills, build community, and develop critical thinking and growth mindsets, all while placing creativity and cultural identity at the center of their learning experience. Rather than relying on a traditional, performance-based teaching model, this session advocates for a facilitation-based approach where educators guide students through creative processes, encouraging experimentation, reflection, and personal growth. This shift promotes a student-centered learning environment where students take ownership of their creativity and are empowered to express their cultural and linguistic identities through music-making.
This session will explore the challenges and rewards of putting on live student concert events in the local community, based on recent experiences of Bergen Community College (NJ) faculty and students producing events at established venues and festivals as well as creating and producing their own local music festival. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit New Jersey in 2020, students were not only deprived of in-person instruction but also of opportunities to develop as performers and build confidence through live, on campus performances. In hard hit Bergen County, NJ, this prompted Bergen CC faculty and students to put on outdoor concerts in the community - curating, producing and performing at an event as part international Make Music Day as well as working with county officials to put on a concert series featuring both student and community-based songwriters at the county park amphitheater. These events, which build on Bergen CC’s tradition of putting on concerts for its Pop/Rock Ensemble and songwriting students at indoor community venues, shed light on the value of arranging student performances off campus. The presentation will discuss necessary funding, promotion, pre-production and day of event needs for putting on off-campus concert events, as well as possibilities for working these aspects of concert production into classroom instruction.
