Why Use Pop Music in Education?

"Miss K. I hate Shakespeare.  I don't get it."

"This play is stupid, can we please do something else?"

"No I haven't done the reading, Shakespeare sucks."

Ugh.  Yet again, another day in 11th grade English.  For both teacher and student, lack of motivation in students can be incredibly frustrating.  Students don't understand the reading so they don't do it.  We don't assign it because they don't understand it.  This seems to be a vicious cycle of the English classroom today, that of student engagement and motivation due to lack of understanding.  Since so many districts require that certain texts be taught (generally those by dead white guys), what can be done about getting students to comprehend their big ideas, and show them that ideas in Shakespeare, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Harper Lee, and John Steinbeck are still completely relevant today and that is why cannonical literature exists?

A solution to making texts relatable is through the use of popular music in the classroom.  Cameron White writes, "if we are truly interested in students being motivated to learn and apply this learning to the broader spectrum of social literacy, then we must make stronger efforts at integrating meaningful curriculum and instruction that includes real world connection" (2005).  In teaching The Taming of the Shrew this past spring, I was intent on helping my students make meaning and have a real-world connection by teaching it through the feminist lens.  This proved to be much more difficult than I thought.  We began by examining gender stereotypes in the media and in sports, and talked about gender roles in same-sex classrooms.  Still, students weren't making connections to the real world.  For them, their "real world" consisted of little more than the 4 walls of AHS.  I was thinking students would be engaged by showing clips from Eddie Murphy's 1980's movie Coming to America.  Instead, I was constantly confiscating iPods and cellphones in hopes of getting them to pay attention.  Despite my best efforts, it was hard to make the ideas of a 16th century play and commentary on gender roles become real for the 70 11th graders in front of me.  So why not combine these ideas?  Why not take something they love (like music) and use it to our advantage? 

And eventually, my efforts paid off.  While they may not all remember the names of the characters in Taming of the Shrew, they will more than likely remember our enduring understanding of the social construction of gender.  In my experience, most students took more interest in the play when they saw that it was applicable to their lives today.  Cameron White writes, "most music genres or individual artists contain examples of songs that contain social commentary or historical references. Many people are under the assumption that social commentary in music reached its peak in the late sixties and early seventies. Punk (Clash, Green Day), Hip Hop (Public Enemy, Eminem) and Grunge (Nirvana, Pearl Jam) are genres from the eighties through today that provide considerable social commentary and historical references. And Pop and Rock (Springsteen, Dylan) still have much to say regarding social issues" (2005).  I gave students the task of finding songs in partners that confirmed gender stereotypes and was pleasantly surprised by the discussion that ensued.  Students who rarely participate were commenting on the use of negative images of women in songs like Flo Rida's "Get Low" and most other contemporary rap songs.  In contrast, others responded with songs like Alicia Keys's "Real Woman."  Even still, someone brought up songs like Britney Spears's "Womanizer" that they argued fought gender stereotypes.  Other students argued that her appearance/clothing in the video only reinforced the traditional role of women that Shakespeare was fighting against as well.  In all, it was fantastic.  

The important thing is, as teachers, we should be doing anything we can to get our students to actually retain the information they learn in class, not just memorize it long enough to write a paper or take a test on the material.  Unfortunately, this is how most of my own high school experience went.  Read, memorize, regurgitate, repeat.  As a future English teacher, I'm embarrassed to admit I can't tell you the plot of Death of a Salesman or A Separate Peace, but I can tell you that I remember the day my 10th grade social studies teacher brought in Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" to teach us about Vietnam.  To this day, I can literally picture his classroom and the passion he had teaching the subject.  Don't we want this passion to rub off on our students too?  The point is, as English teachers, we are in the unique position of being able to teach our students about big ideas and concepts, and not just the facts of a book.  By helping students engage in a text not just for the words on the page but for the social commentary or overarching theme of power struggles, identity, death, gender, race, poverty, etc., we can not only afford the opportunity for engagement and motivation, but hopefully for a love of learning as well.  If students are invested in a text because they find it interesting AND entertaining, what more could we ask for?  After all, if we can get students to become critical thinkers, make meaning of the world around them, question the actions of society, and hopefully bring about some sort of societal change, aren't we doing our job.  Music in education provides an outlet for all of these goals.  Above all, promotes active learning because students are less likely to get frustrated and disengaged with a text if they are actually able to find a text understandable and relatable.  There is a reason certain texts have been around for 500 years, and there are reasons the same texts are required in most school districts to this day.  As English teachers, it is our job to help our students understand why, to make these texts accessible to a contemporary audience, and help young readers get beyond difficult language to the big idea and societal commentary behind most of those books.  I believe pop music is the perfect way to do so.