Instructional Design Document

History of Popular Music

Type of Course

I usually teach this course for first-year university students in a large, lecture setting. It's meant to be a core or gen ed level arts survey course, often used to fulfill an arts requirement for the institutions where I've taught it. As I design this course anew, I'm maintaining the same potential audience, though reconsidering how I'm meeting the needs of those students, while considering my responsibilities to the institution in which I teach it. 

Course Overview

This course introduces students to the broad history of popular music, as it has developed and been experienced primarily in the United States. We examine the cultural and social histories of which dominant popular musical styles, artists, and pieces have been a part, while also thinking about how music reflects and defines those histories. We'll analyze some examples of music to familiarize ourselves with how music works, and we'll develop critical listening faculties that can apply across repertories. Develping familiarity with the histories of popular music and developing critical listening skills can deepen personal enjoyment of music and enrich understanding of the ways the arts reflect and define our culture and everyday lives.

Target Audience and Learner Profile

The target learner is an early university student with little to no academic study of music under their belt. In most cases, the student will be someone who likes listening to music, and has some experience with popular music in their lives, but without much experience of considering popular music critically or academically. Some students will have more extensive performance and academic music backgrounds, meaning that the course will have to cater across interests, musical experiences, and lived experiences. For students with more extensive musical backgrounds, opportunities for deeper analysis and/or independent study will be available.

Learning Gap

There will be a difference between a perceived learning gap and the actual learning gap in this course. Many students come to this course without confidence in their abilities to think critically about music, mainly because they'll have little experience or education in music theory. But the course will not be designed on this basis, and the learning gap will come more from the fact that students need to develop critical faculties, willingness, and confidence to write and discuss music critically and seriously.  Early diagnostic assignments will help assess students' comfort and familiarity with musical concepts.

Course Type

This course will be primarily informational, as there is no processual skills students will learn, and they'll instead enrich and edify themselves with knowledge of music's history in social and cultural contexts. While there are some analytical elements of the course focusing on "knowledge of" (as opposed to "knowledge that"), those will still be evaluated in an informational setting.

Course Modality

I'll offer the course in an aynschronous manner. While I'll offer students a plethora of opportunities to seek feedback and interact with course content, they'll be able to do so at their own pace, thus allowing for individual progress to dominate the pedagogical process.

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Identify and distinguish among a variety of musics that have been part of popular culture in the United States since the mid-19th century.

• Reflect critically on the recursive relationships popular musics have had to cultural, social, political, economic, and technological contexts in US history.

• Interrogate the ways popular music has been evaluated, appraised, and charted through its history in the US.

• Analyze and describe the processes of production and reception in popular music histories.

Learning Activities

The primary learning activities in this course will consist of:

• Lectures/presentations - Students in a course such as this will typically feel apprehensive to write about or discuss music without some training or intercession from an instructor. Particularly given the asynchronous nature of this course, some degree of asynchronous lecture will be necessary.

• Group project/song dissection - I'll ask students to use a video annotation tool to, as a group, describe and analyze particular songs to demonstrate familiarity with musical styles and production approaches.

• Readers/listener response reflections - In short, targeted reflections, I'll ask students to respond to questions regarding critical issues in popular music history. The default format for submission will be an essay, but students will be able to choose other media or modalities for submission.

• Gamify popular music charts - I'll ask students to devise their own method for charted/appraising the popularity and or significance of popular music at a given time. This method must reflect their developing critical faculties and must be developed on a quantifiable basis, as current charts.

Instructional Design Model

I will primarily work with an ADDIE model, while also thinking backwards through my course, thus using aspects of UbD.

Reasons for using ADDIE: Being a somewhat conceptual and broad thinker, particularly when it comes to designing courses, my courses often suffer from scope-creep as I try to do more and more in spaces and times that don't allow for such breadth. As a result, using more conceptual models tends to be frustrating to me as I benefit from more rigid frameworks that pare my ideas down to focus on fundamental learning outcomes and course goals. ADDIE's structure is ideal for reining my ideas in.

Reasons for using UbD: Similarly to why I choose to use ADDIE, the breadth of my courses sometimes loses sight of end goals. UbD will maintain the alignment I need while at the same time providing structure. It will also allow for focus on essential questions that will continue to inform design and pedagogy. 

By adopting a hybrid model between ADDIE and UbD, I think I can design the most effective course for my students, while making the actual instruction and assessment not overly work-intensive.

Learning Objectives and Assessment

Please find the first four modules of my course listed below, along with Module Learning Outcomes for the first two modules.

• Module one - What we ought to know about music.

  1. At the end of this module students will have mastered fundamental concepts in musical description and analysis. (This aligns with CLOs 1, 3 and 4). This will be assessed via collaborative comments on musical performances using a video annotation tool like Hypothesis.

  2. By the end of this module, students will understand the ways music accrues meaning via cycles of production and reception (Aligns with CLOs 1 and 4). This will be assessed by students comparing and contrasting multiple examples of a song as it's been recorded over time. They'll do this in a group discussion.

  3. Upon completion of this module, students will have become familiar with prominent critical outlets for the discussion and scholarship of popular music (Aligns with CLOs 3 and 4). This will be assesed in the group discussion in which students will be given an list and suggestions for sources to cite.

  4. Upon completion of this module, students will have begun building listening skills to effectively analyze music for stylistic aspects and performance practice (Aligns with CLO 1). This will be assessed with the same tool as learning objective 1.

• Module two - How popular music became popular.

  1. By the end of this module, students will be able to discuss effectively how music publishing affected the circulation of nineteenth century music (Aligns with CLO 2).

  2. By the end of this module, students will understand the importance of theater and live performance to the circulation of popular music (Aligns with CLOs 2 and 4).

  3. At the end of this module, students will be able to explain how local cultural production affected the popularity of songs and musicians throughout the 19th century US. (Aligns with CLOs 2 and 3).

• Module three - Turn of the twentieth century technologies and the recording revolution

• Module four - Popular culture and the culture industries

Subject Matter Experts/Resources

Other subject matter experts and resources I can and will consult for design of this course include:

• Switched on Pop - This is a podcast and accompanying textbook that focuses on dissecting and analyzing popular song. This is done with a non-expert audience in mind, and is thus ideal for novice students.

• The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader - This book is a collection of primary source readings in the history of popular music. 

• National Museum of African American History and Culture - This institution's website includes online exhibitions on a variety of topics pertinent to the development of US popular music and popular culture, including exhibits on blackface minstrelsy, race records, and rhythm and blues.

• Chris Molanphy - A music writer for Slate.com, Chris Molanphy is an expert on chart performance of popular music in the US, and his podcast, Hit Parade, is an indispensable listen for those of us interested in the history of US popular music. He has also been accessible and readily helpful to me in the past.

• YouTube music theory content creators - Creators like Rick Beato, Adam Neely and Andrew Huang produce short, digestible videos in laymen's terms that will provide novice students with references to music theory and critical listening throughout the course.

Digital Media