Popular music meta-pedagogy in music teacher education

This chapter discusses issues surrounding the training of secondary school classroom music teachers in England and shares some findings from a small-scale action research project. In order to prepare beginning music teachers to teach music lessons which have value and are meaningful to a broad range of young people, it is important to include pedagogies for popular music as part of initial teacher education. Popular music deserves separate consideration from other types of musical stylistic learning, in particular because it has no long history of pedagogy, and expertise can be gained without formal musical tuition. Placing beginning music teachers in learning communities presents the possibility of challenging preconceived ideas about teaching based upon their own experiences in education. The meta-pedagogy for popular music challenges dominant discourses in music education, which tend to centre on a performance modality with the associated skills of reading and playing music.