Teaching Media Quarterly

Teaching (with) Popular Music: Editor’s Introduction

Runchao Liu — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0500

Introduction to the special issue "Teaching (with) Popular Music"

Examining Afro-Japanese Encounters Through Popular Music

Warren Stanislaus — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0500

The following lesson plan introduces a class-wide collaborative creative project that requires students to select songs to be compiled into a class Spotify playlist. Originally delivered in an online format at Rikkyo University’s Global Liberal Arts Program in Tokyo to a class of Japanese students in the fall of 2020 as part of the course “Afro-Japanese Visions: Past, Present and Futures,” this specific assignment asked students to imagine that they were leading a cultural exchange event to introduce Black British artists and culture to the Japanese public as part of the UK’s Black History Month celebrations through their curated Spotify playlist. In particular, this assignment aims to use popular music to encourage students to consider how contemporary Japanese society represents “blackness” as well as connecting this to wider historical Japanese interactions and intimacies with African diaspora populations.

Learning about Music Fanzine Cultures

Eleftherios Zenerian — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0500

In this article, I present a lesson plan taken from one of the sessions of an undergraduate module titled Music, Technology and Everyday Life. The lesson plan is on Music Fanzines. Students are introduced to key scholarly themes around zine-making during a one-hour lecture, and during the seminar they work towards the production of their own music fanzine. Through this process, students are encouraged to reflect on the practice of zine-making from the perspective of the participant, in close dialogue with scholarly literature, and learn about music culture by becoming part of music culture.