The panel curators from England, Scotland and the USA, present theoretical and practical framing for this panel session as well as context from their personal and professional experience as musicians and teachers. Following this, four panelists from culturally diverse regions of the United States present their respective perspectives on and practices in improvisation as liberatory praxis pertaining to diverse contexts and notions of popular music education. All focus on work that conceptualizes improvisation as human-centered and inclusive, and not merely an approach to music-making but path of individual and collective freedom intrinsic to living fully as humans.The first panelist outlines the history and development of the New York City’s York College Community Jam Session, hosted on campus weekly since 2017 and online since 2020. The session is the product of various challenges and successes teaching jazz on campus for 20 years. The presenter initially hosted a traditional jazz-centered jam session focused on standards, which evolved into a less traditional session focused on welcoming anyone interested in jamming. The new jam session format had only a handful of guidelines and emphasized inclusion. Students speak about the session as positive and transformative. For their musical lives at York College and beyond. The presenter plays excerpts of music from sessions and responses from students who have participated in the sessions over the years. The spirit of inclusion germane to the session is repeatedly centered, such as in the weekly e-mail inviting students to participate, ending, “the door is open…”The second panelist is a classically trained pianist and self-proclaimed rule follower, who has always found the notion of improvisation intimidating. Educational policies in the US, influenced by neoliberal ideals, have supported and compounded this feeling through promoting competition-centric and achievement-focused practices the presenter has clung to including, and especially in, her own identity as a musician. She continued to conform to noncreative, restrictive structures and practices in her early years as a mathematics and choir teacher at the high school from which she graduated. In this talk, the presenter walks us through her journey of appreciation for the improvisatory nature of the art of teaching and her pursuit of disentangling from oppressive structures to embrace liberatory praxis for her and her students, in and through her work and experiences as an educator. The outcome is a pedagogical approach that celebrates the humanity of self and others in and through music education, resonating profoundly with students who identify with and express themselves through popular music in myriad forms.The third panelist describes how music educators have historically approached pedagogy from the perspective of relatively prescriptive classroom methods (Benedict, 2010). However, the role of formalism is increasingly being interrogated in the field. Community music practices, along with their contingent focus on non-formal and informal approaches, are being integrated into classroom teaching and learning. This talk describes the presenter’s experiences negotiating formalism with the implementation of the New American All-Stars, a community music program for refugee youth in Syracuse, NY. He frames his experiences as the facilitator of the program in a dialectical relationship with the band members within Freire’s conscientização. He extends Freire’s work to include Ed Sarath’s recent focus on improvisation and consciousness to analyze his pedagogical work as an act of improvisation. Finally, he relate Sarath’s criticism of music studies’ reliance on developing “interpretive performance specialists” to Thomas Regelski’s warning of methodolatry.The fourth panelist responds to persistent patterns of superficialized engagement with improvisation that he has observed in music studies in US institutions, and ramifications of this for liberatory discourse. Particularly conspicuous is continued marginalization of seminal Black American Musical contributions in understanding the ethno-epistemological ramifications of improvisatory praxis, including in music studies change discourse. The Black roots of most popular music continues to elude much Popular Music Education research, thus suggesting that a field which one might expect to exemplify liberatory vitality may nonetheless be prone to liberatory lapse. Improvisation, understood more fully, redirects critique into the interior dimensions of the liberatory phenomenon itself. The deeper one interrogates the first, the greater the insights into the second. The panel curators briefly offer a synthesis of these respective perspectives and share commonalities pertaining to the empowering and challenging principles of a liberatory praxial stance These include encouraging teachers and learners to move beyond normative conceptions of improvisation as perpetuating commercialized, capitalistic musical creativities, instead recognizing improvisation as foundational to a liberatory praxis rooted in investigation, discovery, collaboration, and human freedom.