Popular Music in the K-12 Classroom and the Quest for Education Justice

Popular music can be an exceptional tool, and popular music scholarship and pedagogy can help sharpen that tool in the K-12 classroom. Teachers work to prepare K-12 students to go to college or vocational school, to have successful careers and to perhaps move beyond their economic circumstances, and popular music studies can provide intellectual and practical models to engage with professional development. Offering students different access points to what sometimes feels a crushing, oppressive history of racism and classism has the potential not only to accommodate differentiated learning, but also to stimulate critical thinking and analysis. We, as over-educated academics, tend to be very dismissive of K-12 education, without realizing or acknowledging how lack of access to quality music education shapes who shows up in our collegiate classrooms.