World Music Pedagogy (WMP) isreflective of music learning processes as they tend to occur outside formal music classroom spaces, processes characteristic of music enculturation, exploration, and expertise-building. Several of its foundational aspects can be illuminated through the lens of music psychology and cognition, a discipline that is, itself, increasingly raising questions explicitly situated within a global or inter-cultural music context. This chapter addresses cognitive challenges and cornerstones that characterize cross-cultural music learning: listening, a process of pattern recognition and learning that serves to sustain musical systems shared among groups of people, and cultural distance, a conceptualization of differences in pattern familiarity between musical systems. Considered within these contexts is the task of guiding students to think within unfamiliar music systems, a kind of learning that is complex and covert, and that takes place itself within the group/community context of the music classroom. The chapter ends with a Brief Response by Timothy Rice.