Read,
Write,
and
Rock!

Puttin' the Pop in the Classroom

LitTunes is a collaborative online community designed to serve three purposes:

1) to provide educators with a centralized source of materials and support for using popular music in the classroom;

2) to provide a forum for educators to share their successful experiences and research involving the use of popular music, and;

3) to inspire educators to reach the disenfranchised with their own language — music.

Why?

There are several solid reasons for using popular music in the classroom.

Recognizing music's power to influence thought, style, and culture is the first step toward incorporating pop tunes into classroom lessons in a way that inspires students to learn in a language and style unique to them. As one of the dominant modes of popular cultural expression, music provides a way to promote student interest in a variety of interdisciplinary subjects.

Using popular music in the classroom is a valid teaching strategy. The source material is continuously changing, always up-to-date, and unlimited in scope and style. Music provides a rich body of material that can be effectively incorporated into the curriculum to challenge and interest students in the learning process.

Overall Educational Rationale:

The use of music in the classroom can:

• Facilitate interdisciplinary study
• Encourage different learning styles
• Involve multiple intelligences
• Provide a multicultural curriculum
• Encourage cooperative learning among students
  and teachers
• Promote higher order thinking skills

Language Arts Rationale:

The use of popular music encourages students to:

• Recognize poetic devices of sound and sense
• Identify the "voice" of the poet/narrator
• Express literary themes
• Deepen understanding of other literature
• Improve literary analysis skills
• Develop an emotional reaction to the work

More Support
for Using Music in the Classroom

Dethier, Brock. From Dylan to Donne: Bridging English and Music. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook. 2003.

Synopsis:
Every life has a soundtrack, especially during high school and college, when young people tend to live passionately and develop lifelong tastes. Everyone identifies with song lyrics that express the love, angst, frustration, and anger we all feel at times. Brock Dethier recognizes the power of students' identification with music and turns their musical enthusiasms into material for learning and self-expression. Analyzing music and its effects makes students think. Besides, "it's the cheapest, easiest, most fun tool we can use in our classrooms," writes Dethier — no small thing for educational institutions smarting from budget cuts.

As Dethier demonstrates, music provides an effective way to introduce and explain virtually everything about literature and composition-from the importance of leads to the concept of the unreliable narrator, from the value of radical revision to romantic irony. Both teachers and students benefit from listening to music with focused attention and from analyzing their reactions just as they analyze texts. Each chapter of From Dylan to Donne presents a different way in which music can help students see, understand, appreciate, and analyze aspects of literature, composition, and their world. Each chapter provides teachers with specific suggestions for assignments, activities, and new approaches to difficult concepts.

It takes only a few minutes each day to make the musical connection. And it requires no experience as a musician or music critic to enjoy and use this book. Teachers just need to apply the book's insights to their own classes and to let students be the experts on the current music scene. For a fresh tack in English class, build a bridge between English and music — and chart a path that even the most bored and alienated students will follow to read, write, and rock.

Excerpts from the Introduction....

     From Dylan to Donne:
     Bridging English and Music

"So many literary themes and techniques that might otherwise become mired in boredom, familiarity, indifference, irrelevance, or other obstacles to the appreciation and understanding we as English teachers hope to transfer to students can be conveyed easily through music."

"Music makes for a very honest experience."

Music is political.  "The corporate-controlled media are now a primary, if not the primary, pedagogical force in this country, one that children encounter long before entering the public school system and one that continues to exercise its influence throughout their lives" (Ogdon, 507).

Young people already discuss and analyze music enthusiastically. It provides a subject with which teachers, as Sheila McNamee puts it, can "engage participants in very practical activities where they bring the conversations of the classroom into a domain of their lives." Christenson and Roberts attest to the importance of music in young people's lives: "for every adult who is convinced pop music is responsible for the moral decay of our youth, there is an adolescent who believes music is the only positive force in contemporary society." When asked which medium they would take to a desert island, seventh, ninth, and eleventh graders chose music over television, books, computers, video games, radios, newspapers, and magazines.

Music functions as a universal language with its own dialects, some of which students can call "mine." David Riesman writes, "by learning to talk about music, one also learned to talk about other things." And says Gaughan: "if we want to break down walls between living and learning in our students' lives, we need to immerse them in topics that concern them both in and out of school."

We can use music efficiently, without devoting a lot of class time to it. I typically start playing the song of the day two or three minutes before the class officially starts, rewarding early birds and giving everyone another reason to get to class on time. I spend two or three minutes explaining how the music illuminates some class topic, and we're off.

Music shapes students' identity growth. It provides language and metaphors with which students make sense of their experience and leads to insights that inspire outstanding writing.

Music motivates.  Students demand it to get psyched for the big game or to start the weekend with the proper energy. And it can change students' lives.

Songs can help students create and understand their personalities and personae. They provide titles, quotations, and central metaphors for introspection, discussions, and presentations.

Music is neutral territory; it offers an unusually open market for the fabrication and exchange of opinions, without the dominance of one opinion source. Unlike literature or art, it isn't the accepted domain of the teacher, and unlike fads, drugs, and sex practices, it isn't the private preserve of students. Teachers and students can share it.

Students understand that taste, evaluation, and judgment about music involve both underlying principles and subjectivity. Therefore they can accept divergence of opinion without feeling threatened or dominated.

Music is pleasure. I've met a few students who say they're indifferent to music, but none who associate it with suffering, as an unfortunate number of students do with English.

Music provides interesting analogies to all the processes of reading and writing. It involves inspiration and discipline; writing, reading, and performing; language and style and voice; sophisticated, precise notation and widely varied interpretation. Any lesson about music applies, it seems, to other forms of writing.

Listening may be the most important and most neglected communication skill; most of us do it more than we read, write, or talk, yet we seldom receive even the most cursory training in it.

Music and its elements are almost infinitely varied. Listening to music can involve emotion and intellect; the lyrical, the nonsensical, the wordless; research knowledge and spontaneous response, happiness and sadness, simplicity and complexity.

LitTunes is an educational outreach directed by Dr. Christian Z. Goering, Assistant Professor of Secondary English/Literacy Education at the University of Arkansas. LitTunes is a part of the CornDancer family of developmental websites. CornDancer has participated in the World Wide Web since the summer of 2000. Submissions are invited. Contact webmaster at threadspinner@corndancer.com