With unprecedented human mobility and expanding international collaborations, educational institutions around the world are experiencing increasingly diverse student populations. In response, many national curricula have begun to incorporate music from a wide range of cultural contexts. However, music teachers often face challenges when teaching music that is unfamiliar to both themselves and their students, which increases the risk of reinforcing stereotypes in their teaching.The purpose of this literature review is to synthesize recent research in music cognition and music education to illuminate how humans cognitively perceive, process, and respond to culturally unfamiliar music. It further examines how these findings can inform music educators in developing culturally sensitive and inclusive pedagogical practices for diverse musical traditions. The three central areas of this literature review are: 1) enculturation, 2) emotion, and 3) narrative engagement. In each section, I articulated the implications of the reviewed literature for music teaching. Firstly, enculturation-related research shows that musical preferences and memory are shaped early in life and resist short-term instruction changes. Thus, early childhood and the low elementary period present critical windows where broad musical experiences can prevent cultural bias solidification and foster musical flexibility.Secondly, emotion-related studies offer another entry point. The Cue-Redundancy Model (Backwill & Thompson, 1999) explains how universal acoustic features like tempo and timbre can serve as initial anchors for interpreting unfamiliar music emotionally. While students may initially rely on these universal cues, teachers can use them as stepping stones toward understanding culturally specific expressive qualities. This approach not only supports comprehension but also encourages students to explore emotional values embedded in different musical traditions.Finally, narrative engagement provides a powerful strategy for deepening students' connection with unfamiliar music. Studies show that listeners construct stories differently depending on their cultural background, but the act of storytelling itself is nearly universal. Thus, music teachers can invite students to create or interpret narratives around music to foster students’ curiosity, empathy, and appreciation of unfamiliar music. All in all, as classrooms become more culturally diverse, it is the responsibility of music educators to empower students by representing their cultural backgrounds in the curriculum. Cross-cultural research in music cognition offers valuable insights into how the brain processes unfamiliar music, helping teachers to design instruction that is responsive to students’ cultural backgrounds and cognitive development, and that fosters more inclusive and effective learning.