mus302

MUS 302: What to Listen for in Music

Course materials for MUS 302, an online asynchronous upper-division general education course at California State University, East Bay, taught by Inés Thiebaut. The course surveys American popular music from the 1940s forward, organized around four cultural traditions and the dialogues between them: African American foundational traditions, Latin diasporic traditions, Asian American traditions, and European American immigrant and working-class traditions.

The live site is at https://csuebmusic.github.io/mus302/. This repository is the source.

What is in this repo

The repo holds two kinds of content. Student-facing HTML pages render on the live site through GitHub Pages and serve as durable references students return to throughout the term. Markdown source files alongside them hold content that gets pasted into Canvas (discussion prompts, quizzes, project assignment descriptions), so the repo stays the canonical source of truth even when the delivery happens elsewhere.

Layout

mus302/
  syllabus.html             Live syllabus
  syllabus.md               Markdown source for Canvas paste
  README.md                 This file

  assets/
    style.css               Shared stylesheet for all pages
    glossary.js             Click-to-reveal glossary behavior
    glossary-data.js        All defined terms, growing as new pages are added
    images/                 Hero photos and figures for listening guides and readings

  module1/                  Orientation and Methodology
  module2/                  African American foundational traditions
  module3/                  Latin diasporic traditions
  module4/                  Asian American traditions (not yet drafted)
  module5/                  European American immigrant and working-class (not yet drafted)
  module6/                  Cross-Cutting Threads / Synthesis (not yet drafted)

  final-project/
    index.html                          Final-project landing page (linked from Canvas)
    01-proposal-and-bibliography.md     Combined proposal + preliminary bibliography (Canvas paste source)
    02-draft.md
    03-peer-review.md
    04-final.md

  under-the-hood/
    STATUS.md               Working snapshot: what is built, what is next, what is open
    conventions.md          Editorial conventions and locked design decisions
    audit-notes.md          Glossary intentional-skip categories and audit-script blind spots
    scripts/
      check-glossings.js    Audit script for gloss-button coverage

Each module folder follows the same pattern: an index.html landing page, listening guide HTML pages for the module’s anchor tracks, optional roots-and-routes.html framing reading where the module warrants one, plus discussion.md and quiz.md Canvas paste sources.

Course architecture

Six modules. Module 1 must be completed first (orientation and methodology). Modules 2 through 5 run in strict sequence after Module 1, one module per week, in this order: Module 2 (African American foundational traditions), Module 3 (Latin diasporic traditions), Module 4 (Asian American traditions), Module 5 (European American immigrant and working-class traditions). Each has its own deadline. Module 6 follows Module 5 and synthesizes across the four traditions, adding Indigenous popular music and queer liberation as cross-cutting threads.

A research project runs in parallel with the modules across the term and is worth 40 percent of the course grade. Students research a genre and a single artist or group of personal significance and present as a slide deck (18 to 20 slides, including title slide and sources slide, with up to three slides carrying embedded audio or video media) plus recorded video commentary. The project is scaffolded into four graded checkpoints. Materials live in final-project/.

The hard-date schedule lives in the syllabus. The summer 2026 term runs May 26 to July 31.

Live pages

Module 1: https://csuebmusic.github.io/mus302/module1/
Module 2: https://csuebmusic.github.io/mus302/module2/
Module 3: https://csuebmusic.github.io/mus302/module3/
Final project: https://csuebmusic.github.io/mus302/final-project/
Syllabus: https://csuebmusic.github.io/mus302/syllabus.html

GitHub Pages rebuilds within a minute or two of a push to main.

Working with the repo

When student-facing content needs revision, edit the HTML directly. When Canvas content needs revision, edit the Markdown file and copy from its paste block into Canvas.

Before committing changes to a glossable HTML page or to the glossary file, run node under-the-hood/scripts/check-glossings.js to audit gloss-button coverage. Editorial conventions, locked design decisions, and the audit-script intentional-skip categories are documented in the under-the-hood/ folder.