Postcolonial Music Teaching and Learning: Children’s Engagement with Global Pop in an Elementary School Music Program

Abstract

Global popular music, from a critical postcolonial perspective, acknowledges the ways in which music and artists have been marginalized by the music industry and in the field of Music Education. At the intersection of World Music Pedagogy and Popular Music Education, global pop offers possibilities for postcolonial teaching and learning and is situated for both culturally responsive and culturally expansive musical engagements. Whereas World Music Pedagogy is often directed only to folk and traditional musical practices, global pop can be responsive to children’s familiarity with transnational popular music. Whereas Popular Music Education is often culturally responsive, but reinforces the “Western mainstream” hegemony, global pop provides an opportunity to disrupt this marginalization with expansive teaching and learning. The outcomes of this culturally expansive approach to popular music education relate to previously studied and theorized aims and values that include global citizenship, intercultural understanding, empathy, and anti-oppressive sensibilities. Engagement in culturally expansive music teaching and learning can lead with similarity rather than difference when the familiar sonic and visual aesthetics of transnational popular culture are centered.The purpose of this ethnographic case study was to examine the possibilities that surround and extend from the utilization of global pop in a U.S. elementary school. The case study of a public elementary school music program comprised regular weekly music classes of kindergarten through third grade students and an optional recess-time small-group music club of fourth and fifth grade students. Children, ages 5-11, engaged with global popular music over the course of their school-based general music instruction during the fall semester of the 2022-2023 school year, in a ten-week unit. Adopting a stance as teacher-researcher, ethnographic techniques were utilized, and data collection included observations, audio recordings, interviews, and material culture. Although young children were still undergoing processes of enculturation into popular culture and developing their identity consciousness, the results indicate that elementary school students can benefit from engaging with global popular music. Global pop offered both culturally responsive and expansive teaching and learning opportunities for children by way of the pedagogical, musical, and sociocultural dimensions of children’s engagement. Emergent is a model where multiple spectra acknowledge the ways in which music teaching and learning can be simultaneously responsive and expansive. While global pop is well-positioned to acknowledge this multiplicity, music educators can consider how their instruction and repertoire of any genre might relate to the multiple overlapping components of culture that are meaningful to children.