Making the Schoolhouse Rock: A Content Analysis of Two Popular Music Pedagogies

In popular music education, there has been an increase in the amount of literature, pedagogical resources, and organizations that are available, and two pedagogical approaches for teaching popular music are informal music learning (IML) and modern band (MB). However, there is little existing scholarly critical analysis comparing these approaches. The purpose of this qualitative directed content analysis was to explore the similarities and differences between IML and MB in kindergarten through 12th-grade settings and examine how major characteristics of each approach are represented in scholarly and curricular resources. While similarities exist in the literature on these approaches, there are also distinct differences between them, such as orientation toward process or performance, use of composition and improvisation, and teacher role and approach. Moreover, the representation of the principles of both IML and MB were not always consistent in the resources we examined, with some aspects highly represented and others rarely mentioned. Learning more about both approaches could be beneficial to scholars and teachers interested in popular music pedagogy and how they are implemented in classrooms.