Traditionally, and perhaps inevitably, a person's journey to becoming a teacher is a complex one. Concerns about how music teachers are prepared raise questions about the quality of programmes that prepare pre-service teachers to teach. Within this context we are invited in this issue to reflect upon all phases and experiences of music teaching.
The majority of articles focus on pre-service training of music teachers in the higher, secondary (or high) and primary school sectors. Understanding how we learn to teach and how music teachers can best teach and inspire, are challenging topics across all sectors of schooling. There is however little research that includes the perspectives, questions and voices of cooperating teachers and prospective teachers. Instead, the voices and perspectives of university-based researchers predominate. In this issue, different researchers with different research frameworks and approaches go beyond simply studying teaching techniques or, on the other hand, simply studying music teachers’ thinking. They explore a range of thought and action which acknowledges the diversity of factors that could be an extremely powerful influence on practice.
Research on ‘best practice’ and innovative programmes is increasing over time and across school sectors. In an interview study involving primary music specialists, Melissa Cain (Australia/Singapore) reports a study of a successful programme based on cultural diversity. Within the context of Singapore, the study documents five International Schools’ programmes which offer exemplars of ‘what occurs when policy, philosophy, professional development and practice are aligned to contribute to highly relevant and successful experiences for students’. Insights into the challenges teachers face when diversifying their music programmes, and the importance of appropriating culturally diverse music education programmes, are examined.
Whichever approach to teaching one adopts as the foundation of one's practice, we can see creativity as, effectively, offering young children opportunities to explore music learning in a range of exciting ways. Using a mixed methods case study approach, Margaret Lau Wing Chi and Susan Grieshaber (Hong Kong) provide one such account of aspects of an innovative music education programme. The case reveals how children take their existing musical knowledge on to a new place when teachers explore new approaches to nurturing children's musical creativity. The setting is a Hong Kong kindergarten and concerns the potential of music teachers to influence the development of creativity in children's early years by becoming actively involved in their musical free play.
Anne Power and Mike Horsley (Australia) move away from a sole focus on music education to a consideration of how the teaching of pre-service music teachers supports the aims of Global Education, which they define as (amongst other things) learners’ awareness of the world around them and supporting the creation of a more cohesive society. They demonstrate how the perspectives which characterise pre-service music teachers’ approaches to the teaching of global education, and the way in which they integrate and promote it within their teaching, is rooted in, and reflective of, their individual experiences of musical learning and practices. They suggest that there is a need for teacher education and teachers’ professional development to explicitly identify opportunities and links between music education and the aims of global education.
Employing questionnaire-based research methodology, Dimitra Kokotsaki (United Kingdom) explores Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) music students’ perceptions of the impact that engagement in music making outside of the school has both on their teaching and on their lives during their training year. Results of the research suggest that there are potentially many positive benefits to teachers’ involvement in musical activities outside of school including avoiding ‘burn-out’, maintaining an enthusiasm for music and addressing the sometimes ‘lack of congruence’ between music inside and outside of school.
Looking back to how music teachers were prepared in the late nineteenth century, Michael Lynch (United Kingdom) provides a unique account of music in the training colleges in the period 1872 to 1899. Drawing on documentary analysis, he demonstrates how present-day concerns about the restricted amount of time that teacher education courses devote to music education, standards-driven educational agendas and a focus on raising the quality of singing are nothing new. Most of all, he shows how the determination of one individual can have a positive impact on the musical lives of many teachers and children.
The final paper uses a social constructionist framework to explore what constitutes the role of institutional values in advanced music training institutions in Greece. Using an ethnographic case study approach, Angeliki Triantafyllaki (Greece) explores how performance teachers’ professional identity is constructed and constrained by the ‘cultural scripts’ within their workplaces.
