Suzanne L. Burton

Transforming Music Teacher Education Through Service Learning

Service-learning initiatives have become prevalent on the campuses of higher education. In teacher education, preservice teachers involved in educational partnerships that are service-learning based respond to the needs of a community partner, apply pedagogical knowledge and skills they have acquired in their coursework to real-world problems, and engage in critical reflection. Service-learning offers preservice teachers increased opportunities to develop their teaching practice and teacher identities and provides a backdrop for preservice teachers to develop personally and become socially integrated into the field of teacher education. In this article, we provide descriptions of four service-learning contexts for music teacher preparation. We discuss the role of service-learning in transforming preservice music teachers, their music teaching practice, and the community partners they served. Finally we present challenges to engaging in service learning in music teacher preparation, characteristics of meaningful service learning work, and discuss the transformative potential of service-learning in music teacher preparation.

Perspective Consciousness and Cultural Relevancy: Partnership Considerations for the Re-Conceptualization of Music Teacher Preparation

Strong school-university partnerships yield effective music teachers. However, music teacher preparation curriculum has undergone little reform over the years, resulting in a homogeneous P–12 curriculum. Encouraging preservice music teachers to consider cultural and pedagogical differences holds promise for changing music teacher preparation and preservice music teachers’ views regarding content and contextually relevant practice. In this article, an international collaborative course is presented as one model to help preservice teachers confront previously held attitudes regarding music education, develop flexible cultural competency, and become more open to curricular innovation. Recommendations for policy that would enact an international partnership agenda for music teacher preparation to meet these aims are provided.

Stepping Aside From Myself: Intercultural Perspectives on Music Teacher Education

Preservice music teachers enter the profession with firmly held beliefs of what music education entails. With an increasingly diverse population of students in PreK–12 education in the United States and Sweden, a collaborative, intercultural immersion course was designed to challenge preservice music teachers’ beliefs. Twelve music education majors participated in the intercultural course. Data consisted of focus group discussions. With Bildung as a theoretical framework, the following five themes emerged: Beyond Tourism, Democracy and Classroom Management, Shared Experiences, Something to Bring Back, and Old Meets New. The intercultural immersion course provided a scaffold for the participants to consider what and why they teach the content that they do and the ramifications of making such decisions on their potential teaching practices of PreK–12 music students.

School-University Partnerships: Re-Envisioning Music Teacher Education: Foreword

With teacher accountability at the heart of the current wave of educational reform, and the persistent attempts of policymakers to tie compensation and job stability to the results of high-stakes testing, the notion of what it means to be a highly effective teacher is often lost in rhetoric. Policies designed to promote new teacher effectiveness rarely take into consideration the complex dynamics of students, teachers, and the larger school community in shaping outcomes. This situation is compounded for music teachers, whose licensing requirements often require expertise in multiple musical domains, while curricular and scheduling constraints demand that they produce more results, despite more students and less instructional time than their academic counterparts. Preparing new music teachers to face the increased challenges awaiting them as they enter the field requires a rethinking of traditional curricular practice rooted in learning about teaching toward practice that favors a concentrated emphasis on multiple, context-specific, field-based experiences throughout the course of their studies.

Serve and Return: Communication Foundations for Early Childhood Music Policy Stakeholders.

ABSTRACT Serve-and-return interactions between a young child and caregiver are cited as integral to healthy child development and language development. In this article, the authors assert that serve-and-return interactions offer a relevant model for policy development in early childhood music education. They share contemporary evidence that music learning and development begins in the womb, continues during infancy, and needs to be prioritized in preschool and early elementary years. Next, they trace the policy landscape for early childhood education and music education in the United States since 2008. Although the landscape has remained stark, the authors offer recent glimmers of possibilities and conclude with actionable steps for improving early childhood music education policies.

Staying in Tune with Music Education: Policy Awareness among Music Education Majors.

A nationwide sample of undergraduate music education majors (N = 260; 69% completion rate) completed an electronic survey to determine awareness of music and general education policy and advocacy efforts. Students reported concern with the impact of policy on school music programs and their future careers. They were informed about music education policy issues at the state level but less so at national and local levels. Although respondents indicated involvement with professional associations, they rarely or never participated in policy initiatives. Methods courses provided policy information; professional organizations effectively convey policy information to undergraduates. NAfME Collegiate chapters offer music and general education policy-based activities, though many respondents were uninformed of their chapters’ efforts. Students were unfamiliar with key buzzwords, people, and acronyms of present-day education policy. Involving students in educational policy endeavors will equip them with a knowledge base from which to speak and act, securing the future of music education.

Making music mine: the development of rhythmic literacy

ABSTRACT In this study, I explored childrens development of rhythmic music literacy using a language acquisition paradigm. An emergent, constructivist curriculum was implemented over one academic year with 39 children, 5–8 years old. Children were involved in audiation-based active listening, singing, moving, chanting, and playing instruments and engaged in musical dialogue through imitation and improvisation. They had rhythm stories read to them, they wrote and read their own. A comprehensive musical development progress log, individual and collective music reading assessments, analysis of childrens notated rhythms, and video recordings of children reading their notated music comprised the data set, which was analysed regularly and triangulated for validity. For trustworthiness, early childhood and general music practitioners observed the curriculum in action and reviewed childrens notational artefacts. Findings indicated that, as children wrote and read their rhythm stories, they self-corrected when making mistakes – revising their stories upon reading them aloud, giving clues to their formation of musical meaning through the audiation and sound of notated music.

Music-Based iPad App Preferences of Young Children.

Music-based technology is frequently included in early childhood classrooms as an attempt to incorporate music education in the curriculum. However, there is a lack of research that addresses the educational benefits of music-based tablet applications (apps) for young children. Researchers in this study explored the preferences of 4-year-old children (N = 16) for music-based apps in a preschool setting. They found that children preferred those apps that had a high frequency of visual stimulation, were easy to navigate, and/or had familiar music. Although children in the study engaged in social interaction, there was a lack of outward musical behavior. It is anticipated that a knowledge of children’s preferences for music apps will assist with the provision of developmentally appropriate and interactive music-based technology for young children. Additionally, understanding the qualities of music apps that are most likely to promote musical responses (such as singing, rhythmically chanting, moving, or combinations thereof) may help developers create music-based technology that will provide the maximum educational benefits for young children.

Book Review: The Power of Questions

Teacher research is a type of inquiry that is designed to connect teaching practice with student learning outcomes. This type of inquiry has been noted for its ability to directly influence the process of teaching and learning and is an effective form of practical research for music educators. Through inquiry, teachers become empowered to address educational issues by active problem solving. In the 2005 book The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research, Beverly Falk and Megan Blumenreich have provided an accessible framework for music educators to design and carry out inquiry within their own teaching contexts.