The importance of popular music has been considered for its potential benefits in Education, since these musics imply an important challenge in both theoretical and methodological approaches. Factors such as cultural industries, family musical context, communicative exchanges, the curriculum, or didactic materials are elements that articulate concrete forms of popular music education. This paper presents some of the main approaches in the study of the relationship between popular music studies and music education, and reflects on how canon and heritage determine the teaching-learning processes. Instead of the described model, based on the prototypical pedagogy of Western Art Music History, this paper deals with the importance of active listening, analysis, and interpretation of popular music. Two methodologies from popular music analysis studies, musical signification and the analysis and interpretation of recorded popular song, are considered for adaptation into to music education in order to open and increase the theoretical and methodological paradigm of active listening of these musics in the music classroom. Finally, the author reflects about the necessity to implement an active popular music pedagogy that overcomes some inertia in educational practices, places the educator as intermediary, and goes in depth on the links between culture and the languages of music in concrete pedagogical contexts