Goering Co-Edits Book About Using Music in English Class

Photo Submitted

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – University professors attend meetings of professional associations in their field to meet people doing the same work as them, to learn from them, and sometimes it leads to collaboration. That’s what happened after Chris Goering from the University of Arkansas met Lindy Johnson from the College of William & Mary at the National Council of Teachers of English convention in 2012.

The result is the newly published Recontextualized: A Framework for Teaching English with Music from Sense Publishers, co-edited by Goering and Johnson. Goering has long been interested in using music to teach English. After joining the faculty of the College of Education and Health Professions in 2007, he took an exercise he developed called “The Soundtrack of Your Life” to audiences ranging from high school juniors in Arkansas to teachers gathered at Florida State University for a National Writing Project summit.

Goering directs the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project, an affiliate of the national organization. He has published a number of articles and book chapters about the process of using music to teach other subjects. Johnson gave a presentation at that 2012 conference that led the two professors of English education to organize a one-day workshop for the next year’s conference.

“We tossed around the idea of putting together a book that could help teachers - new and experienced – adopt and apply a framework for using popular culture in their classrooms that would hold the potential to further the practice,” they wrote in the book’s introduction.

Using music is a way to create community in a classroom; by incorporating pop culture, specifically music, teachers can create a temporary shared social world, Goering and Johnson wrote. This community helps students relate to the work they study in literature classes, resulting in improved understanding.

The introduction describes four established models of teaching with pop culture: utilitarian, cultural capital, critical and recontextualized, and the book bases each chapter on one of these four models. The chapters provide a rationale for the teaching method, followed by specific lesson plans, strategies and activities that teachers can use in their classrooms.

Goering teamed with local teachers Tara Nutt of Bentonville and Ashley Gerhardson of Fort Smith to write the first chapter: “It’s Like When the New Stuff We Read Mixes with the Old and Becomes One.” The title came from an observation a student in Nutt’s class made when she was teaching the classic Greek play Antigone, which was written around 441 B.C. by Sophocles.

Lessons included having students match text references from the play to popular music, a process known as making intertextual connections. The 27 sophomores made 380 connections from Antigone to songs by musicians including Taylor Swift, 3 Doors Down and Tim McGraw.

Goering also wrote the 10th and last chapter in the book, “Language Power: Saying More with Less Through Songwriting.” Goering is himself a singer-songwriter and played guitar on the two CDs he has released. He describes a process for moving high school English students to write their own original songs by incorporating play and using models of other songwriters along the way.

Donna Alvermann, distinguished research professor at the University of Georgia, wrote the forward to the book. Goering described her as the nation’s leading scholar on adolescent literacy and popular culture.

“Recontextualized: A Framework for Teaching English with Music is the book I needed in last semester’s methods course for preservice middle grades teachers and the current semester’s graduate level seminar on integrating popular culture in literacy classrooms K-12,” Alvermann wrote. “The contents of the chapters speak to a range of teacher preparation levels by offering concrete ideas for entangling and disentangling situated meanings that are both cognitively and socioculturally demanding. And this is as it should be, especially given the increased emphasis on literacy practices that mediate (and are mediated by) seemingly endless curricular reforms.”