Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching

Mark Robin Campbell, Linda K. Thompson, Janet R. Barrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415871853, 9780415871839
• eBook ISBN: 9781136950841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Desarrollo profesional

Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching promotes inquiry and reflection to facilitate teacher growth, lifelong learning and a disposition toward educational change. Strongly grounded in current theories and research in teacher education, the text engages readers in analyzing their own experiences in order to conceptualize the complexity of teaching; involves them in clarifying their reasons for seeking a career in teaching; supports their insights, questions, and reflections about their work; and promotes a reflective, critical attitude about schools in general as teachers are urged to think of themselves as change agents in school settings.

Appendix 1
Ethics of Going Into The Field

Every act has potential moral significance, because it is, through its consequences, part of a larger whole of behavior.

John Dewey, Ethics, 1932

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

Jane Addams

Getting Oriented

As music teacher educators and authors of Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching, we are strongly grounded in a conception of teacher learning that is informed by practices and methodologies of self-study (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Russell & Munby, 1994) and theories of learning in a community (Bruner, 1996; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Dewey, 1916). That is, we place significant value on the individual teacher as a primary source of knowledge, reflection, and action. We also place significant value on the importance of learning from others and from learning within different teaching and professional contexts. Furthermore, we believe that being a member of the professional world of music education requires not only the kinds of knowledges and skills obtained in traditional music education degree programs, but sets of knowledges that can only be developed within specific teaching and professional contexts that exist outside of the university. In other words, we see “in the field” experiences as an equal partner with experiences found in the college classroom. Thus, we view music teacher learning and development—whether preservice or inservice—as particularized, situated, and contextualized (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978).

One of our main goals in Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching is to encourage preservice music education teachers to “take to the field” and learn from others. A key requirement for achieving this goal is the active engagement of teachers in inquiry-based learning activities. Although there are many definitions of inquiry-based learning, we see inquiry-based learning in teacher education as the systematic and persistent investigation by a teacher into his or her own teaching and professional environments in order to address problems of practice. For preservice music teachers, inquiry-based learning is an essential component in constructing knowledge of practice—knowledge that is personal and practical and based in well thought-out investigations. This knowledge, as Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) state, “is constructed collectively within local and broader communities” (p. 271). Thus taking to the field and learning from others serves as an integral part of learning within a community and an important component in becoming an active agent in career-long professional development. Each of the following is an essential knowledge construction site for inquiry-based learning: teaching, learners, curriculum, schools and schooling.

The Ethics of Going into the Field

The advancement of music education could not go forward without systematic inquiries into many aspects of teaching and learning and schools and schooling. Nor could our understanding of the nature of music and learning, and the contexts that characterize and influence both, increase without the generation of new knowledge. However, all investigations—those formally constituted and those less formally organized—are bound by both moral considerations and ethical obligations. Good research, along with good teacher inquiry projects, is marked by certain standards and norms of practice that guide individuals in their actions and judge the conduct of others. In short, a distinguishing marker of a profession is that it is guided by the application of ethics. The healthcare profession is a case in point. Medicine has a long history of being guided and assessing its actions by a code of ethics. Some principles commonly included in the healthcare profession are:

Beneficence—a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient.

Non-malfeasance—“first, do no harm.”

Autonomy—the patient has the right to refuse or choose treatment.

Justice—concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment.

Dignity—the patient (and the person treating the patient) have the right to dignity.

Truthfulness and Honesty—the patient should not be lied to, and deserves to know the whole truth about his or her illness and treatment.

Notice that each principle is value-based and defines the essentials of honorable behavior for individuals in the profession.

Education does not have a “code of ethics” similar to the healthcare profession. For the most part, teachers and schools tend to rely and operate on the values and codes of behavior of the society at large. As the values of and within a society tend to be contested and mediated by conflicting ideologies, a universal set of ethics is too difficult to derive. Yet, if you were to generate a list of values that would likely achieve a high level of consensus and that might act as the ground rules for ethical conduct you might find: trust, honesty, truthfulness, integrity, or acting in good faith. You might also find: respect, dignity and autonomy, tolerance and acceptance, social justice. Or the list might include: responsibility and fairness or caring. Each of these values suggests certain ways of acting and thinking about relations with others. Going into the field and learning from others requires a set of core values to guide our actions. We believe each of the values mentioned above can act as core values in your work in education.

Carrying out your work

There are many kinds of inquiry-based projects in Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching. The most commonly encountered that require human interaction are:

Observational activities

Participatory-interactive studies

Interviews

Shadow studies

School profiles.

The nature and intent of the projects in these books are strictly educational and fall within the boundaries many individuals and institutions would call normal educational practices taking place in accepted educational settings.

Because these studies involve the participation of humans, your college or university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) may need to be consulted before you initiate any one of the projects or activities. Many activities may be exempted from a formal review or may be dealt with in a fairly quick fashion or expedited. But technically, federal law requires that any activity involving the participation of others be subjected to a review process by a group of individuals who oversee and ensure that the activity is managed in a way that is ethical and protects the rights, safety, health and welfare of those who participate in it. The key concern in any data-gathering and reporting project involving people is for the protection of individuals who participate in it. That is, individuals must be willing to participate freely and voluntarily and be informed of all aspects of the project. Individuals must know that they can terminate their participation at any point in a project, without recriminations of any kind.

Because you are a member of a class and the instructor may be giving you an assignment, you probably will not be required to go through any kind of IRB review process. If your institution does require a review process, the responsibility of obtaining permission will most likely fall on the instructors using the text. Regardless of whether a review is required, the safeguards required by the protection of human subjects research laws should guide your work. The three main safeguards are:

Informed consent

Full disclosure about purpose and scope of work

Risk/benefit statement.

Dispositions to Guide Inquiry-based Learning

In all of your work related to the exercises in Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching that involve interactions with individuals, we suggest the following two core dispositions be used as a compass to guide your thinking and actions.

Generating knowledge that involves learning from others is a privilege not a right.

Sensitivity to and respect of the dignity, autonomy, needs, desires, concerns, and legal rights of others is a responsibility.

Dispositions are “habits of mind” or ways of being and acting. By assuming and acting with the mindset that we are offered a privilege to learn from others, we honor others and ourselves, plus are afforded freedom. With this honor and freedom comes responsibility, a duty to act in certain ways and be held accountable for our actions.

Appendix 2
How To Use This Book

See Table

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Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• one Starting the Journey
• two Learning to Teach
• three Learning from Others
• four Orientations to Teacher Preparation
• five Searching for Horizons
• six Methodologies for Exploring Teaching and Learning
• Appendix 1 Ethics of Going Into The Field
• Appendix 2 How To Use This Book
• Notes
• References
• Index