Teaching Metal

This is the first book to create a space for college instructors to teach Metal music and culture across multiple disciplines. It collects sixteen teachers’ innovative pedagogical strategies, from English, History, and Religion to Engineering and Media Communication Studies.

Each chapter takes a unique approach to teaching metal, including how it can be used to create academic freedom in the classroom, how to untangle its sonic complexity, how it can inform and be informed by other disciplines, and even how to sneak it into a curriculum. They also touch on core themes from both musical and non-musical disciplines, ranging from rhyme and meter to storytelling, politics and medievalism, tackling some of the challenges inherent in this field such as the role of women and separating the art from the artist. Metal Studies is still an emerging field, but this book is a pioneering effort to spotlight its value to the teaching process and interdisciplinary pedagogy.