TeachRock, a part of guitarist Steven Van Zandt’s music-education-focused Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, creates K-12 curricula and provides free materials to educators in the wide-ranging goal to “address the challenges of an environment in which schools face cuts to arts funding,” and the initiative’s latest round of class and program ideas is centered around the culturally rich world of the Grateful Dead.

Here are some examples from TeachRock’s Dead-centric course suggestions:

Beat Culture and the Grateful Dead (High School English): Students engage with excerpts from several “Beat” writers and consider how the Beat worldview both influenced and was reflected in the Grateful Dead’s music

Feeling the Vibrations (Elementary/Middle School STEAM): Using the Dead’s history of catering to the needs of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Fans, students explore the science of sound as vibration and learn basic sign language

Jerry Garcia, Addiction, and Intervention (Middle/High School Social Emotional Learning): Students use clips from LST to confront the idea of infallibility and learn intervention strategies developed by the Mayo Clinic

Loudspeakers, PA Systems, and the “Wall of Sound” (Elementary/Middle School STEAM): Following an introduction of Augustus Owsley “Bear” Stanley and the Wall of Sound, students construct simple but functional speaker cones

1960s Counterculture (High School English/Social Studies): Students explore the 1960s Countercultural Movement in Haight-Ashbury by examining the early career of the Grateful Dead and reading journalistic accounts of the neighborhood at that time

Deadheads and Reagan’s America (Middle/High School English/Social Studies): Students consider the idea of the family as it applied to the Deadhead community and the conservative values promoted by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The Original “Going Viral” (Middle/High School General Music): Using the history of Grateful Dead tape trading, students explore the concept of virality beyond its current internet-related connotations


Learn more at TeachRock.org.