Exploring teachers’ approaches to popular music: Attitudes, learning practice, and issues in South Korea

In recent years, a strong focus on popular music has increased in South Korean music education. Although this shift in the curricular content has led to studies on the formation of popular music repertories in the curriculum, few studies have attended to teachers’ attitudes and learning practices to popular music as related factors. To understand popular music education in South Korea, we investigated music teachers’ attitudes, learning practices, and critical issues that have arisen in their teaching. We conducted an online survey with secondary music teachers ( N = 138) followed by a focus group interview ( n = 6). The findings suggest that teachers’ attitudes toward popular music (positive, neutral, or negative) were associated with their learning practices, including the time they spent on popular music, their selections of popular music genres, and musical activities. This provides a starting point for further investigation of the teachers’ attitudes related to their learning practices in shaping popular music curriculum. Regardless of the teachers’ attitudes to popular music, they agreed popular music a good place to start for their students. In addition, they had similar or divergent perceptions and concerns of teaching popular music depending on their attitudes, as they have found their own individual ways of incorporating popular music.