Welcome to the APME Liverpool 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. We encourage you to browse the various presentations and to create a custom schedule. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community July 22–24, 2025!
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Exploring the integration of student voice and co-construction in lower secondary music curricula, this research examines teacher and student perspectives to enhance engagement and inclusivity. Through qualitative action research, it highlights strategies for developing responsive curricula that foster collaboration, cultural relevance, and improved retention in music education.
Utilizing Critical Race Theory to conceptualize this study, rhythm and pitch—two key elements of music— are used to explore literature around the interconnectedness of capitalism and racism. A greater understanding within this study may lead to more socioacademically equitable music learning and teaching in K-12 and higher education.
This session will detail the work being done at the SENSES Project, a music/podcast creation space at Syracuse University focused on increasing sense of belonging for first generation and other marginalized student groups. The space offers free access to equipment and education around music production, DJing, podcasting, and much more.
The AIRBAG framework offers educators an approach to exploring negotiated assessment methodology with their students to help them make personlaised meaning of their learning experiences. Utilising a combination of military debrief tactics and a inquiry focussed approach, the framework helps promote criticality and agency within HE study.
How can studying the popular music tradition and encouraging students’ innovations be balanced most fruitfully? This session shows how they can feed off each other. A music tradition is like a language – our students must learn to speak it in order to join a conversation and say something innovative.
This music teacher education program includes popular music from diverse cultures throughout the curriculum. Freshmen learn guitar informally and perform cover songs in bands. Senior student teachers teach Hip Hop and Latin pop through iPad classes. The program enhances preservice teachers’ development of both comprehensive musicianship and cultural competency.
Award-winning filmmaker Martin Shore’s "Living Documentary" blends traditional filmmaking with real-time, evolving art to create interactive, dynamic storytelling. This workshop explores integrating this innovative approach into the classroom, using examples from Shore’s films Take Me To The River and Take Me To The River New Orleans and Berklee student projects.
This interactive session will take participants through a comprehensive deconstruction of a recent Hot 100 #1 hit, utilizing the proprietary methodologies and visualization tools of Hit Songs Deconstructed. Participants will also discover unique and engaging ways to teach "pop theory" to students, making complex concepts easy to understand by using the Hit Songs Deconstructed tools themselves.
This presentation explores "Illuminated Songs," a multimodal assignment in Taylor Swift-themed courses that engages general education majors in musical and lyrical analysis. By visually annotating songs, students explore themes, narrative structures, and musical elements. This accessible, interdisciplinary strategy fosters active listening, critical engagement, and highlights the cultural relevance of popular music in education.
This session examines essential skills for success in the modern music industry, including digital literacy, entrepreneurship, networking, and resilience. Attendees will gain practical insights into aligning with industry demands, navigating emerging trends, and preparing for diverse career pathways in an increasingly competitive and dynamic global music ecosystem.
“The jam session is…the…true academy ” according to Ralph Ellison. Jam sessions continue to exist and have branched out into other styles, like blues, rock, and funk, better known as “open jams.” Where do open jams and PME align and conflict? How do we better create “the true academy”?
The presenter describes his work as a professor and provocateur at a US university. The presenter gives drum kit performances in a university art gallery, modeling noisy, relational resistance in co-musicking as fundamental to a necessary paradigm shift to counter perpetuation of racist, regressive social policy in the United States.
Join Drs. Davis, Kennedy, and Wacker as we present our analysis of Journal of Popular Music Education articles (2017–2024). We’ll explore trends in research methods, participant types, and topics, compare findings with other music education journals, and discuss emerging gaps and future directions in the field.
This panel explores how music education can better support students’ mental health by addressing industry-related challenges. Attendees will gain insights into current training gaps, discover successful wellbeing initiatives, and leave with practical tools to foster resilience, self-awareness, and sustainability in the next generation of musicians.
This paper outlines the interdisciplinary approach taken in an undergraduate module in which music students to analyse visual aspects of their promotional materials and performances. Theories from disciplines including persona studies, visual studies, image studies, performance studies, audio-visual studies and fashion studies are synthesised to inform constructively critical analysis.
This presentation explores the integration of video game music (VGM) into higher education curricula as a tool for teaching popular music. I illustrate how VGM can serve as an effective pedagogical tool for engaging students in the study of popular music history, theory, composition, and performance at the tertiary level.
This interactive workshop offers practical strategies to support neurodivergent students in music education. Participants will explore inclusive teaching techniques, engage in hands-on activities, and leave with a toolkit for fostering creativity, wellbeing, and resilience—both in the classroom and throughout students’ careers in the music industry.
While popular genres are slowly being integrated into music theory curricula, many university music programs continue to struggle with how to accomplish this task while serving the needs of their entire student body. This session is meant to foster a discussion of solutions, both tried and untried, failed and succeeded.
How do collegiate R&B ensemble directors gain and develop their knowledge for teaching R&B music? How do these ensemble directors employ their expertise in their instructional contexts? This session will present the findings of a dissertation study that focused on the pedagogical content knowledge of three collegiate R&B music instructors.
This project centres around music literacy education practices and teaching 'active consumption', a phrase and method for combining various states of critical thinking about popular music. It also focuses on determining teaching methods that prioritise students' own interpretations and independence over binary correctness and incorrectness.
Popular music related materials exist in archives, museums, libraries, and private collections, providing knowledge and evidence of events, individuals, institutions, and cultures. This paper consider the role of artefacts in popular music higher education, the treatment of the curator, and collections as a tool for narrative building to be fostered through more inclusive and considered circumstances.
his presentation introduces a four-step framework for hybridising metal and Iranian classical music as a model for inclusive, student-centred music education. It explores the facilitator’s role in guiding students through cross-genre composition, fostering cultural diversity and creativity. The session invites feedback on implementing this approach in diverse educational contexts.
Songwriting camps, structured for intensive collaboration, have influenced higher education by highlighting essential creative skills. This paper, based on the Songwriting Camps in the 21st Century (SC21) project, examines how these camps teach interpersonal dynamics, adaptability, and teamwork, preparing students for professional songwriting through immersive, industry-aligned educational experiences.
Teaching students to think independently requires a reexamination of ingrained cultural biases. This demonstration will discuss some of the ways in which curricular structures, creative projects, and collaborative experiences in popular music education may be designed to interrupt the feedback loop of social normalization and foster independent artistic thinking.
In teaching performance, we rely on conceptual analysis to assess and feedback on performance quality. But audiences experience performance as something far more immediate and visceral. In this talk, I discuss a method for measuring audience experience as a series of visceral responses. But is this valid or hopelessly flawed?
The PLR Toolkit: Practice-led Research and Inclusivity in Postgraduate Music Industry Education presents results from the introduction of PLR to a postgraduate MA in Music Industry HE which pushes the boundaries and conventions of academic research and extends the possibilities for future practitioner researchers, creating an inclusive and diverse learning space and a vital toolkit which connects students to music industry employment opportunities early on in their careers,
