Music education in North America remains loyal to the ideals, materials, and methodologies of a bygone era despite widespread calls for pedagogical change. Popular music has a limited role in schools although culturally relevant programming is increasingly important in modern contexts. Guitar class has the unrealized potential to reach those many students who are eager for music opportunities but unable to work within traditional formats. Guitar is motivational, inclusive, and relevant to students, and therefore has an appropriate place in the pluralistic classrooms of the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, a model is l lacking to bridge the gap between guitar performance, and materials from popular guitar-based genres, with traditional values of formal music education. Guitar instruction is consistently portrayed in opposition to, or as an alternative to, success in the time0homored priorities of school music. The question remains, then, as to if popular guitar performance can be reconciled with an emphasis on theory, literacy, and fine musicianship. This narrative study details a public school teacher's attempt to synthesize an original electric guitar curriculum for his middle school classes, one responsive to both academic and cultural concerns. Suggestions for concrete steps towards an achievement-oriented popular guitar pedagogy are presented, amidst the argument that such developments are feasible, necessary, and overdue.

Popular guitar pedagogy: fostering traditional musicianship in the culturally relevant classroom