Teaching Media Quarterly

“We both had to admit that popular songs really had no academic significance.” This is what Ray B. Browne was told upon being rejected from a journal in the first issue of Popular Music and Society fifty years ago. This prejudice still exists in the academy and has been perpetuated in the curriculums across a number of disciplines. However, with plenty of academic monographs and a good amount of dedicated peer-reviewed journals today, popular music is now a prolific field for critical and interdisciplinary inquiries. Popular music scholarship explores musical (sub)cultures, music in visual and digital media, music as propaganda, music as activism, and more. Thus, music is a ripe avenue through which media scholars contend with issues of power, identity, nationalism, environmentalism, (de)coloniality, globalization, and social justice. For media instructors, then, teaching a critical perspective on popular music can address many of the multisensory and transdisciplinary dimensions of media literacy.

Teaching Media Quarterly is seeking submissions of creative, intersectional, and inclusive lesson plans that engage how media instructors mobilize the critical pedagogical value of teaching (with) popular music. Lesson plans that consider media examples beyond the North American and British landscape or adopt comparative and transnational lenses are particularly welcomed. Lesson plans may use any (sub)genres of popular music but they need to have a focused topic with a set of clear and achievable learning objectives. We welcome submissions that speak to a variety of teaching contexts, including face-to-face, remote, and hybrid.

Download and use the TMQ Template in one Microsoft Word document, and submit using the Submit Lesson Plan. Submission deadline: October 1st, 2021.