For some Canadian students, music class also means turntables and MIDI controllers

A class of university students listens with rapt attention as Shadrach Kabango, better known as the award-winning rapper Shad, shares his thought processes when feeling stuck while creating a new track. 

Maybe it needs to breathe, or a part of it can be dropped, he suggests. Perhaps he might sharpen a lyric, inject some noise or introduce a call-and-response element to get some audience participation.

Not long after, a smiling Shad is nodding along as his students try beat-making for themselves. It's a hands-on opportunity to apply what they're learning from his lessons, steeped in "a very hip-hop kind of mentality."

Step into a music class today and you might find laptops, turntables and MIDI controllers joining the expected clarinets, recorders and violins. From elementary through post-secondary schooling, some teachers are expanding music education and encouraging more students to try more contemporary forms of music-making.

Music educators always want students to appreciate and make music of their own, but that also requires showcasing more genres and "people who make different kinds of music," says Cynthia Johnston Turner, dean of Wilfred Laurier University's faculty of music. 

A student today might spurn a trumpet or violin, but be making music on a laptop at home, she said.

"So we need to figure out: 'How do we embrace this?'"

Enlisting Shad to help broaden the Waterloo, Ont., school's music offerings was a no-brainer for Johnston Turner, who called him the perfect choice "to have this conversation about 'What does it mean to bring hip-hop into music curriculum and higher education?'"

For his part, the acclaimed rapper and host of the Emmy-winning doc series Hip-Hop Evolution is thrilled to be exploring hip-hop — with "its own cultural priorities and values and esthetics and history" — alongside other musical traditions at his alma mater.

"Education is about that exchange and that expansion," he said.

His course, Hip-Hop to the World, marks an important step forward, says Lucy Gill, a third-year music student taking the class.  

"We focus so much on Western European art music, and we don't allow a lot of space sometimes in these music programs for other disciplines to be equally studied and respected," said the vocal major, who's also anticipating a class on Afro-diasporic music next term.

"It's exciting to me that our school is ... integrating genres like this."

Last year, Toronto teacher Michael Jameer's high school enlisted DJs, graffiti artists and breakers for mini workshops with students as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.