The apparent ideological tensions between popular musics and formal school contexts raise significant issues regarding teachers’ popular repertoire selection processes. Such decision-making may be seen to take place within a school censorship frame, through which certain musics and their accompanying values are promoted, whilst others are suppressed. Through semi-structured interviews with five Finnish music teachers, the narrative instrumental case study reported in this article aims to explore secondary school music teachers’ understandings of the school censorship frame and its influence on their popular repertoire decisions. The findings suggest that the school censorship frame is composed of dynamic and interrelated big stories: teachers’ cultural, religious and curricular narrative environments; and small stories: stories of school, staff, parents, themselves as a teacher, and stories of their students. This study illustrates the complex, situational and multifaceted negotiations involved in including or excluding popular repertoire from school activities, suggesting that teachers’ decisions require ethical deliberation in aiming towards an inclusive, democratic music education.
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