Many music educators feel unprepared or are unsure of how to use popular music in their classrooms. This article details the author's experience designing, implementing, and revising a student-centered guitar curriculum in an urban middle school. Reflecting on this experience, the author defends the place of popular music and informal pedagogy in…

Popular music can be used to study many subjects and issues related to the social sciences. "Geographies of American Popular Music" was a workshop that not only examined the history and development of select genres of American music, it also introduced students to basic geographic concepts such as the culture hearth and spatial diffusion. Through…

This paper examines the value of a task-based approach to engaging with original works of art and focuses in particular upon the experiences of a group of PGCE Art and Design trainees when they visited an exhibition entitled, Air Guitar: Art Reconsidering Rock Music, to carry out given tasks. The extent to which a task-based approach might…

Human geography can be taught by focusing on popular culture contexts with which undergraduate students may already be familiar such as rock music. The Geography of the Beatles introduced undergraduate students to concepts of "new" cultural geography such as space, place, representation, geopolitics, social space, and tourism-pilgrimage…

Describes the use of rock music lyrics to illustrate and personify key concepts in a Sociology of Deviant Behavior, course. Includes examples of the lyrics, related sociological issues, and ways that the combination facilitated class discussion. Student response was consistently favorable. (MJP)