Popular music is pervasive in our culture and in the lives of our students. Its inclusion in music education curricula requires authentic approaches through collaborative informal learning processes. It has been our experience that college students may be notation dependent and while they may recognize and utilize informal processes outside the classroom, they have not pedagogically considered its use in their future classrooms. This article revolves around the experiences of American University students in one secondary general music methods classroom and their engagement of informal learning processes in order to foster a vision and formulate a pedagogical plan for the incorporation of popular music in the classroom. From the instructors' perspective a three-fold process occurred that enabled meaningful engagement in this experience, that of: (1) disequilibrium; (2) breaking down existing barriers; and (3) student transformation. Corporately we discovered the inclusion of popular music unleashed a thriving discourse concerning connection and relevancy to students' lives. Downloaded from Davis and Blair 125 music classrooms and have discovered that when given the opportunity to engage with popular music in school settings, our K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) students have demonstrated sophisticated musical understanding that was previously unknown to us.We have found that in spite of their youth and affinity for popular music, pre-service teachers in our classrooms initially seemed skeptical about the appropriateness of its use in school contexts. With the prevalence of popular music in the lives of our students and their students, it seems important for pre-service teachers to have opportunities for meaningful engagement with popular music in order to foster a vision for its authentic use in their future classrooms.In this article, we discuss the evolving experiences of students in one secondary general music methods classroom engaged in informal learning processes in order to better understand the notion of popular music and popular music-making. Narratives shared here were drawn from class discussions, performance experiences, online forum discussions and students' journals. The co-author, as the class instructor, and her pre-service teachers worked together to 'cover' (copy) a popular song, perform it in class, and then dialogue about their experience and the potential for using informal learning processes in a music classroom. Through the process of engaging in performance, listening, analysis of popular music (selected examples) and reading current literature, students verbalized their increasing awareness of using aural processes in a new and rich way and its value in overall musicianship. Central to their experience was the realization of (1) the importance of using music that is 'rooted in students' cultural lives' (excerpt from student journal) as a means of meaningful musical engagement; and (2) that popular music and the authenticity of aural and informal musical processes enables students to exper...

Mentoring new teachers is critical to music education, not only for purposes of retention and attrition, but also to provide the support they need to become reflective practitioners. Researchers consistently report that novice music teachers share feelings of being overwhelmed by the duties and responsibilities of teaching. In 2004—05, a local school district (USA) employed five novice elementary general music teachers. Through the district, I offered a professional development program to these teachers to provide mentoring during the entire school year. With their consent, this program was used to collect data reflective of their experiences throughout the year, exploring the nature of their lived experience and, emergently, the growth of a community of practice. Data included the email correspondence of all participants, each teacher's end-of-year reflective journal, a personal log reflecting my perspective and an audio-recorded group discussion conducted at the end of the school year. Two key issues arose during the year that profoundly affected the professional self-confidence of these novice teachers: their struggles with classroom management, and issues that arose during their experiences with the district's process of teacher evaluation. Within the context of these common problems, the teachers seemed to value the meetings as an opportunity to give and receive support in a safe, collegial environment, in which all those present understood the parameters of their unique jobs and cared about each other as individuals and music educators. What began as a group of individuals emerged as a community of practice.

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Learner agency: To understand and to be understood D e b o r a h V. B l a i r

In this study I explored, with Chelsea, her journey of becoming a music teacher. At the time of the study, Chelsea had completed her second year of teaching. Together, we revisited the artifacts of her undergraduate coursework and practicum experiences (journals, online forum posts, videotapes of her own teaching, written reflections of her teaching). We engaged in a narrative exploration of her journey of becoming a teacher as Chelsea provided written and verbal narratives of “then and now”— a process of ethnographic hindsight in which Chelsea was able to provide both emic and etic lenses of the experiences revisited via the data. A thread of connection and detachment is pervasive throughout the data and the interpretation of themes as Chelsea’s path toward becoming a teacher is positioned in the juxtaposition of these stances.