Toward an Anti-Racist Music Education: A Critical Pedagogy of Popular Music Teacher Education

In this article, we propose a framework for a critical pedagogy of popular music for teacher education to better prepare music teachers to enact anti-racist praxis within their classrooms. Although a growing body of literature in music education addresses issues of racism within the field, fewer scholars have studied this within teacher education. Drawing from critical pedagogy, our framework centers popular music as a means for music teacher educators to interrogate issues of identity and power and (re)contextualize pedagogy, considering the socio-political contexts and communities from which music practices originate. These processes facilitate reflection on how racisms shape taken-for-granted practices within music education by centering the socio-political contexts of popular music. Through our framework, music teacher educators could prompt pre-service music educators to consider the multiple racialized epistemologies of musical value students and teachers bring to the classroom, working toward the possibility of enacting a multicentric approach to music education.