Professional Knowledge in Music Teacher Education

Pamela Burnard, Eva Georgii-Hemming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409441113
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317075332
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicologie

The complexity of the various forms of knowledge and practices that are encountered by teachers, university lecturers, teacher trainers, student teachers, policy makers and researchers, demands careful thought and reflection. Professional Knowledge in Music Teacher Education focuses on how knowledge is understood, what theories are held and the related assumptions that are made about teachers and learners, as well as how theory and practice can be understood, with useful and imaginative connections made between the two in music teacher education. Internationally renowned contributors address a number of fundamental questions designed to take the reader to the heart of current debates around knowledge, practice, professionalism, and learning and teaching in music as well as considering how all these elements are influenced by economic, cultural and social forces. The book demonstrates how research can inform pedagogical approaches in music teacher education; methods, courses and field experiences, and prepare teachers for diverse learners from a range of educational settings. The book will appeal to those interested in the development of appropriate professional knowledge and pedagogic practices in music teacher education.

PART I
Understandings of Knowledge

Chapter 1

Music as Knowledge in an Educational Context

Eva Georgii-Hemming

Being a music teacher involves so many kinds of knowledge ... To be able to describe them, or say in words what music is ... Well, isn’t that one kind of knowledge? Probably the most difficult, at any rate for those of us who work with music. That’s why it’s so important we try. (Student music teacher Linda, in an interview, 2010)

Introduction

This chapter discusses the concept of ‘knowledge’, and what it may mean in the context of music education. It has often been said that we live in a knowledge society. Knowledge is invariably singled out as an important factor in national or regional success, and is a buzzword in the political rhetoric of education (UNESCO 2005), yet the nature of knowledge seems largely to be taken for granted and is rarely problematized. The idea that education is an important ingredient in national success has led to educational priorities that are expressed in terms of efficiency and measurability (Peters and Olsen 2005). However, people as seekers of meaning, equipped with qualities such as imagination and curiosity, are rarely visible in the education debate; neither are the questions of the content, meaning and worth of different kinds of knowledge, whether for individuals or for a democratic knowledge society as a whole. The way in which we use, understand and value ‘knowledge’ influences the education system. Therefore, reflecting upon epistemological matters is important for anyone who is involved in education.

‘Knowledge’ is used and understood in a variety of ways depending on where we live, what we do for a living and how we interpret our surroundings. Yet the roots of our Western perspective on knowledge can be traced back to antiquity. This chapter will discuss Aristotle’s treatment of the meaning of knowledge. The starting point is that knowledge exists in different forms, and this text is constructed on the basis of Aristotle’s distinctions between episteme, techne and phronesis.

My aim in this chapter is to facilitate discussion about what ‘knowledge’ means. By doing so, two objectives can be achieved. Firstly, such facilitation can help to structure and identify differences in, and relationships between, the ways in which knowledge is understood in modern society. Aristotle’s distinctions are still topical and are mirrored in learning outcomes such as ‘knowledge’, ‘understanding’, ‘skills’ and ‘attitudes’. Secondly, the discussions can give a voice to different forms of knowledge and, by doing so, these voices can be respected and valued as well as being critically observed and developed.

In order to illustrate how we can understand the three forms of knowledge, I use material from a study of Swedish student music teachers. The students were asked, individually, as well as a part of a focus group, to consider what knowledge means in the context of music education: What is the nature and what are the characteristics of different kinds of knowledge, and how do they manifest themselves in teacher education? The students’ deliberations address a whole series of themes in music and art, in school and beyond – themes that are being discussed within music education, music pedagogy, music philosophy and artistic research. Some of the responses can only be touched on in this chapter. To redress at least some of the imbalance, the references in this chapter can be viewed as suggestions for further reading.

I will first explain the theoretical assumptions that underpin this chapter, before briefly presenting some information on the kind of empirical material that I have used to illustrate Aristotle’s ideas about knowledge. I will then discuss these ideas in separate sections, and illustrate how they can be beneficial, either when thinking about music teacher education, or in music teaching and/or in discussions about music and ‘musicking’ (Small 1998) in general.

Theoretical Assumptions

The text, like the study, is grounded in a hermeneutic view of knowledge, which holds that knowledge evolves in the encounter between the familiar and the unfamiliar (Gadamer 1994), and presupposes people to be historical beings who exist in a social and cultural context. In order to understand and create meaning, we interpret the world. This is something which we do in the everyday setting in which we feel most at home – our lived world – where there are traditions, notions, and accepted ways of acting (Georgii-Hemming 2007). Whenever ‘we ourselves’ – our understanding and earlier experiences – encounter the Other – the unknown, others’ experiences, or new ideas – there is the potential for us to change fundamentally. Yet for such an encounter to lead to new understanding, it is necessary that we change perspective. Understanding the Other also requires us to have the courage to view the ingrained or familiar with different eyes (Schuback 2006). In this way, thinking beyond what is now to what might be means that knowledge combines experience and fact with imagination (Bernstein 1983; Gustavsson 2009, pp. 91–107).

The concept of knowledge used here also differentiates between knowledge and fact or information. Information provides the building blocks that can be refashioned as knowledge, but is not identical with knowledge. Information is something we gather from outside, from the Internet or books, while knowledge is borne within people. Information can be repeated, replicated, and learned by rote. In order to utilize information and transform it into knowledge, we have to interpret, process, evaluate and understand it. In the process of transformation, information must be related to an individual’s existing knowledge or experience, and be set in a meaningful context. The historian of ideas Sven-Eric Liedman has described this distinction between information and knowledge as ‘the necessary detour taken by knowledge’ (Liedman 2001, p. 24).

Aristotle separated knowledge into three distinct kinds: episteme (knowledge), or certain knowledge; techne (craft), or practical, creative knowledge; and phronesis (sense), or practical judgement. The classic definition of knowledge to be found in reference books, and as much used in philosophical debate as in everyday discussion, derives from Plato (427–347 BC). His criteria for the distinctions between true and certain knowledge (episteme) and subjective belief or opinion (doxa) are still useful. There has never been full agreement on Plato’s definition of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’, but arriving at certain and objective knowledge is widely believed to be the chief criterion of science (Gustavsson 2000; Stanford n.d.). Aristotle (384–322 BC), following in Plato’s wake, broadened the discussion by introducing various forms of activity, but also by speaking of the various purposes of knowledge, thus asserting that ‘truth is the aim of theoretical thought as action is of practical thought’ (Aristotle 1998, p. 44).

In addition to Plato’s episteme, he wrote of techne and phronesis, two forms of action. In techne, action exists to produce an end result, be it a house or a piece of music. Yet it should be noted that Aristotle rarely used the word ‘practical’ for this type of action, since for him praxis in the first instance was linked with phronesis – with ethics and wise actions between individuals. This latter form of action is desirable in itself. Aristotle, like Plato before him, believed that scientific knowledge is objective, and that the universal is all we can have hope to have knowledge of (Nordin 2003). At the same time, he argued that knowledge is anchored in different forms of human activity and groups. Aristotelian philosophy therefore provides a framework for discussing the knowledge implicit in music education without reducing it to the level of practice versus theory; art versus craft; verbal versus tacit; and so on.

Empirical Material Used

This chapter uses empirical material taken from the study Music, Knowledge, and Teacher Education (Georgii-Hemming 2008, 2011). The participants in the study were fifty or so students, with women and men in equal number, all of whom were training to become specialist music teachers. The length of the current music teacher education programme varies from four and a half to five and a half years, depending on the students’ chosen combination of subjects. The degree qualifies them to teach music in compulsory school and, depending on choice of specialism, to teach singing or a musical instrument; students who specialize in music, instead of combining it with courses in, for example, history or mathematics, must also qualify to teach in a Swedish upper secondary school. The data was collected over a number of years (2008–10), and consisted of discussions in groups of eight to ten participants and a number of individual interviews. Each group met for three 60–90-minute discussions a year. The group discussions were thematized according to three main areas that the participants would be able to recognize from their music teacher education, and relate to art, scholarship and pedagogical practice (see Nielsen 1998). In the discussion of each theme, we attempted to identify what characterized these themes both as branches of knowledge and as phenomena, rather than trying to judge what constituted pedagogy or music as subjects per se. Candidates for the individual interviews were selected qualitatively on the basis of gender and educational background. All the participating students were in their third, fourth or fifth years.

Conversations about the nature of knowledge, conceptualizations and values are complex and do not provide immediate or precise tools for music education practice, in the same way as, for example, teaching can. Materials from the studies are used in order to make the different knowledge forms tangible and aid reflection by the reader. The forms of knowledge are tied to different activities, but they do interact and influence each other. Furthermore, it is difficult to attach the different knowledge forms to separate parts of the music teacher education. Therefore, the following sections are not entirely similar in their design. I have instead chosen to use the examples that provide the most useful illustrations.

Episteme – Scientific Knowledge

Episteme is scientific knowledge, comprehension, or that certain knowledge of how nature, mankind and the world are constituted and function. It is a theoretical pursuit intent on the things that, in reality, humans cannot change, but about which they can most certainly obtain knowledge by studying, describing and explaining. Although Aristotle’s focus was fixed on universal and unchanging knowledge, he wrote that it is within our reach if we study the everyday world around us. In the specific there are qualities that are general. In order to explain natural phenomena or things (people, animals, statues, an octave) he therefore enquires as to their purpose and ‘innermost being’. For example, he writes that ‘man is a sensible animal’. This does not mean that all people are sensible, but that all people are meant to be sensible. In this manner, mankind’s characteristics or ‘innermost being’ are evident in each individual while remaining true of all people (Nordin 2003, p. 99). In other words, Aristotle included ‘why’ questions – seeking cause and purpose – in his science (2003, p. 99). The modern natural sciences began to emerge at the start of the seventeenth century, and scholars within this area argued that these questions were impossible to answer scientifically, and therefore focused on the problem of how Nature functioned. They sought the immutable in Nature’s Laws rather than the immutable in the nature of things (Alanen 2003).

Episteme: Student Music Teachers’ Perspective

Our modern, Western way of viewing scholarly knowledge has been evolving over a long time period. How we view science varies according to country and epistemic tradition, and within that from individual to individual (Pritchard 2010). There is a time-hallowed dividing line between the natural sciences and technology on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other. The difference is sometimes said to lie in the endeavour by the natural sciences to study Nature objectively, divorced from immediate human concerns. In this view, science is all that can be expressed about the world in true–false statements, while statements of right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, fall beyond its scope. The humanities and social sciences concern themselves with the questions of human ideas and experience, and the societies in which we live. This means that we study something of which we are a part, which gives us greater compass for individual interpretations (Gustavsson 2009, pp. 53–61).

The immediate response of the students participating in the study was that science was synonymous with the natural sciences; measurable and thus true knowledge. The question was whether qualitative and interpretive research on music education can be viewed as ‘real’ science. Certainly, the students saw a hierarchy of values built into the division between the various disciplines, a hierarchy that is equally evident in how people rate the importance of different school subjects. Their points of view varied considerably, but one relatively common notion crystallized when scientific knowledge was linked to the issues of its function and worth. One of the students, Louise, said indignantly:

Of course research on music education is science! It’s really important to try to grasp how teachers think and act when it comes to things like gender issues. After all, if we’re going to change society as a whole, we also have to understand the problems. Properly. Numbers don’t have much to say to us then, even if they say something else that is also important. I suppose we’re simply dealing with different types of problem?

Exactly. The criteria for scientific knowledge are founded on different disciplines and are determined by how issues are framed in each. People’s health problems can be studied, for example, by biologists, medical scientists or sociologists. The difference is that the explanations operate on different levels of human life – from the genetic to the physiological to the social and societal. In other words, we can obtain scientific knowledge about identical or similar problems, but from different perspectives. The different perspectives each demand their own theories and methods (Gustavsson 2009, pp. 47–61).

To summarize: students’ thoughts on the differences between, and the value of, the natural sciences and the humanities as being a ‘solution’ to problems relate to a long-running debate. It is more useful to describe natural sciences and humanities as two differing scientific cultures, studying different objects, rather than arguing about which is superior. In literature on the theory of science, this is sometimes explained as the difference between wanting to explain and wanting to understand. Scholars in increasing numbers, both within the natural sciences and humanities as well as in philosophy, are increasingly interested in combining these perspectives (Bernstein 1983; Ricoeur 1984; Kincheloe and McLaren 2000, pp. 285–90).

Episteme: In Music Teacher Education and Music Teaching

For obvious reasons, scientific knowledge in teacher education is most in evidence in the theoretical pedagogical courses. This kind of knowledge, as the students saw it, is characterized by its framing of concepts and reflections on (and by means of) theory. In the pedagogical courses, students encounter texts by the likes of Dewey (1999) and Vygotskij (2001); they are expected to discuss themes such as marking, gender and ethnic diversity in the classroom. The teaching profession is addressed in the literature both in general terms and in more specifically musical terms (see, for example, Green 1997; Whiteley 1997; Froehlich 2007; Burnard et al. 2008).

Views on the value and function of such pedagogical courses differ considerably, but the present study shows that the value and functions became clearer when students approached the end of their studies. The students also became increasingly positive towards pedagogy. With greater practice and experience of theory comes greater awareness. Pedagogical studies have an important function that all the participants singled out in their comments: they allow music teachers to discuss work with their colleagues ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Key Terms Used
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: The Context for Professional Knowledge in Music Teacher Education
• I Understandings of Knowledge
• II Professional and Pedagogical Practice
• III Re-Thinking Professionalism in Music Teacher Education
• Index