I believe the most valuable way to include music into a unit of study is to include songs that represent alternative or minority voices. If anything, finding authentic voices that address the issues being studied in a personal way could really add to the curriculum. While I appreciated White's suggestion of using song parodies to help students memorize important facts (I once heard of a teacher rewriting "The Thong Song" to help his students learn the presidents or something) I think using music as text that actually adds something new to the curriculum is a more valuable application.
Here are a couple of ideas I've been thinking about:
As an English teacher, I often think about ways to pair poetry, especially less contemporary poetry, with more modern texts. I had a professor in college that paired Walt Whitman's poetry with Sufjan Stevens, and we discussed both the style and the view of America that Whitman portrays in "Leaves of Grass" and in Stevens' "The 50 States." It was one of the most interesting lessons on poetry I can remember (and not just because I LOVE Sufjan Stevens) because it reminded me that there are artists that continue to write about America in the same way that long-dead poets did.
Another idea I've considered is looking at the perceptions of war and the role of the soldier. If teaching a unit on The Things They Carried, for example, which deals with soldiers in Vietnam, I might pair it with poetry (like "Dulce es Decorum Est") that portrays what being a soldier is actually like. "Soldier Boy," a song by my favorite artist Mason Jennings (who writes many songs that include social commentary) would fit in quite nicely, as it is another text written from the perspective of a soldier that satirizes a soldier's attitude. These texts would feed into a discussion of the demands of war, and whether it's okay for a country to ask its citizens to take on the role of soldier.
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