Improvisation and Higher Popular Music Education

Abstract This chapter explores the potential of improvisation as a foundation for liberatory praxis in higher popular music education (HPME), addressing its capacity to counter neoliberal, employability-driven educational models. While conventional HPME aligns closely with market demands, often marginalizing diverse human, cultural, and musical experiences, improvisatory practise presents a transformative opportunity for humanizing pedagogy in this area. Improvisatory practise has the potential to foster onto-epistemic heterogeneity by embracing the sensibilities of multiplicity, horizontality, and dialogicality as pedagogical principles and, as such, challenges the constraints of standardized curricula and positions improvisatory practise as a means to disrupt hierarchical and exclusionary conceptions of musicianship. Improvisatory practise in HPME enables learners and educators to work together in the counterhegemonic project of co-creating inclusive, equitable environments that celebrate diversity, resist commodification, and empower participants as agents of cultural and social transformation.