Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching

Growth, Inquiry, and Agency

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

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000343823
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching: Growth, Inquiry, and Agency, ( Second Edition), is a textbook for studies in music education. Expanding upon the first edition, the authors promote inquiry and reflection to facilitate teacher growth, lifelong learning, and a disposition toward educational change. The revised text responds to current calls for social change and teacher education reform by reaffirming and intensifying the need for music teachers to adopt a personal orientation toward their work. A personal orientation encourages teachers to initiate their own growth, engage in inquiry, and exercise agency in school contexts.

Strongly grounded in current theories and research in teacher education, Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching: Growth, Inquiry, and Agency strives to do the following:

• Engage readers in analyzing their own experiences in order to conceptualize the complexity of teaching
• Involve them in clarifying their reasons for seeking a career in teaching
• Support their insights, questions, and reflections about their work
• Promote a reflective, critical attitude about schools in general as music teachers are urged to think of themselves as change agents in school settings
• Construct a moral purpose as a compass to guide their current and future endeavors in the profession.

Every chapter includes a wealth of pedagogical features, including new methodologies and examples of practice to engage the readers in processes of inquiry and reflection.

The second edition is organized in two parts. Part I focuses on positioning music teachers as learners in the profession, significantly expanding concepts explored in the first edition that are central to a personal orientation to professional growth. In the new edition, a reconceptualized Chapter 5 challenges teachers to cultivate their identities as change agents. The second half of the book—focusing on becoming a student of music teaching— features five new chapters. A provocative chapter on curriculum sets the stage for a set of additional chapters that invite deeper considerations of the commonplaces of teacher, learners, subject matter, and context. An epilogue speaks directly to the power of agency, imagination, and hope in teachers' lives.

Part I

Positioning Yourself as a Learner in the Profession

one

Starting the Journey

Developing a Personal View of Teaching and Learning

Purposes, interests, and meanings constitute the underlying facts of human experience.

Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life, 1951

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860/1876

FOCUS

In the first four chapters of Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching, we invite you to position yourself as a learner in the profession. One way to think of positioning yourself is to use the metaphor of a journey: A journey focused on yourself as a learner in a profession and a learner situated in relation to others—especially those who have informed your thinking about music and teaching, as well as those whom you have not met, but who will likely influence your thinking about music learning. As you explore the world of music teaching and learning, we draw your attention to the role both inquiry and reflection play in professional growth. We also note that “the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing of experience” (Dewey, 1916, p. 89) aimed at both meaningful transformation and greater control over the course of one’s own professional destiny. In this initial chapter we invite you to consider your own histories as learners and to explore and develop your identities as teachers. Our aim is to engage you in the process of constructing a personal view of teaching and learning through writing and reflecting on a wide range of experiences.

Getting Started

Each of you has a story to tell about how or why you got interested in teaching or how you became involved in the world of music. Many music teachers are drawn to a life of teaching because they have a genuine love of music, a deep concern for others, and a strong desire to “pass along” the joy of music to others. In fact, experienced music teachers (those with at least 15 years of teaching) say that being shown how they have affected the life of a student has been a positive and career-changing event in their teaching (Cutietta & Thompson, 2000).

Music teachers are hopeful that a new generation of young people will have opportunities to participate in many kinds of musical offerings and come to appreciate the varied musical activities of those around them. Music teachers are also eager to learn about the interests and desires of others and to teach from a solid base of musical understanding. The majority of music teachers, however, realize that there is more to teaching music than the simple transmission of a teacher’s knowledge and musical skills to less knowledgeable or less skilled others. Rather, to paraphrase Seymour Sarason, music teachers know that the stuff we traditionally call music—the activities, facts, skills, and concepts that make up the subject matter—only attains meaning when teaching processes take into account the “child’s curiosity, interests, conceptual level, and need to act on the world” (1993, p. 242). In other words, we not only teach music, we teach people. Or, as John Dewey (1897) would say, the subject we teach is not music, but the student.

Personal Influences

Although these generalities about what music educators value in teaching are important, it is equally important to look at the particularities of how you have come to be where you are in your life. What has influenced your decision to become a music teacher? As Eunice Boardman (1992) notes, no mind is a blank slate when it comes to what we believe is good music teaching. That is, each of us comes to teaching with a personal perspective—a stage, so to speak, on which we build our understanding of the world. Whether our beliefs remain unexamined or have been explicitly articulated, our personal perspective forms the basis on which we justify, make sense of, and unify our actions and thoughts. In addition, the beliefs, expectations, ideals, and influences of others also inform our perspective. Collectively, our experiences function as filters in building our images of teaching and learning.

There are many stories that deserve telling and many stories that we can share that will help us make sense of learning to teach, especially if we use a framework that allows us to look at the teaching and learning process as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. A personal orientation to music teaching and learning looks at all participants in the educational process from a dynamic perspective. That is, as we continue to deepen and extend our knowledge of self, others, and different contexts, it is always in the service of more and better teaching, and in service for clarifying why we teach and the ethical and moral grounds on which we stand. We are not only present oriented; we are also past and future oriented in our thinking about teaching. Most importantly, a personal orientation framework helps us to understand ourselves; it helps us to understand the music experiences we value, the places and situations that support learning, and the ways we can help others. Think about the influential people in your life who have made an impact on your decision to teach music. Think about influential experiences and events that have occurred in your life that may have contributed to your decision to become a music teacher. Take a few moments to read Erica’s story, which she composed as an introduction to her student teaching supervisor.

AT CLOSE RANGE 1.1
Erica: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

I was a sophomore in high school when I seriously entertained the idea of being a music teacher. Prior to that, I knew I wanted to teach from the moment I stepped into third grade. It was the job I knew I wanted to do and it stuck with me throughout the rest of my education.

I began music at the age of five. For me, reading music came right after I began reading English; it was all second nature. My first instrument was the “mother-mandated” piano. I took private lessons from ages five to eleven, taking from two different teachers. The clarinet, a choice that I made when I was nine, slowly took first place in my heart. After six years of piano, I decided I didn’t have enough time to devote to both instruments so I narrowed my musical interests focusing strictly on the clarinet.

Between fifth and eleventh grades, I slowly honed my clarinet skills. I participated in numerous All-County and Area All-State ensembles, solo festivals, honors youth orchestras and countless musical activities within my school and community. While I was in high school, I also learned to sing and play the saxophone. I joined the choir and jazz band and, by this time, made the decision that I wanted to have music in the rest of my life. I should add that I spend a considerable amount of time listening to music and must confess that I have a fondness for jazz, owning many recordings of Miles Davis and Monk. When the application process came around and it became time to think seriously about going to college and choosing a career, I decided to pursue a degree in Music Education. The School of Music was my first choice, partly because I had gone to camp there as a teenager, and because I had wonderful teacher-mentors who completed their studies there.

In preparing for the application process, I wrote countless essays, explaining who I was and what my fortes were in music. I always mentioned that I was a strong sight-reader, played with strong emotion, worked like a dog in the practice room, aimed to improve my clarinet technique and facility, and had years of experience teaching private lessons. My goals now are to create lessons that capture young children’s attention and make a difference in their lives. I hope to draw upon my strong interpersonal skills and my sense of compassion when I work with them. I want to make sure that I get on their level. What I’m currently lacking is the ability to create a magnificent musical learning environment and the practical skills that you learn from practice teaching, plus the flair and energy to make things challenging for all students, but not so challenging as to go over their heads.

I have had a lot of experience with elementary school students, having taught beginning saxophone lessons and early intermediate clarinet lessons while in high school. I feel I have a good grasp on how children act at certain ages and what they know. From my observations, I know that all children need to be actively engaged to be learning. I look forward to working with children more closely and being more careful in developing an understanding of how they learn. I hope to find out what excites them and then tap into that in order to make learning engaging.

Where I’m afraid I lack the most confidence is in lesson plan design and classroom management—not the kind of management where you control people through rewards, but the kind of classroom interactions you have with students where they are honored, feel empowered to work through problems, and gain a kind of group desire and know how of how to collaborate. These are two areas of teaching where my thinking is tentative, partially because they set the mood of the classroom and they influence what is taken away from the class. If the plans aren’t well constructed, the students aren’t able to pull as much from the lesson as what they could have. Even though I may have all the education and ideas in the world, I still feel unprepared and still won’t be able to assess how good I am until I am out there, presenting my lesson in front of my class. What I do know is that children are excited if you are; they need to be treated as equals and never looked down upon. In addition, I am leery about integrating the national standards for music education, as they still befuddle me at times. All in all, I am ready to take on student teaching. I look forward to trying out “new” ideas on my “students” and seeing how a classroom works.

What does Erica’s story reveal about the different influences on her decision to become a music teacher? One of the primary influences in Erica’s story is the presence of various important people. Her mother and several different music teachers were a strong force in her life and had a powerful impact on her growth as a music maker. Another strong influence in Erica’s story is the music itself. Her story tells us something about the ways in which we interact with music—playing and singing and listening—and the values we attach to their importance (see Woodford, 2005). It also shows how one musical endeavor may lead to another, developing skills and constructing new knowledge across different but related musical contexts. Clearly Erica’s involvement in playing and learning to play new instruments creates a sense of the intensity she attaches to music involvement. Erica’s story reveals much about her thinking in relation to teaching and learning music. Her prior work with students, her observations of classrooms, and her knowledge of lesson planning have led her to believe in certain ways of working with learners. Her belief that active engagement is an important part of learning will likely influence the ways she judges her success as a teacher, and the manner in which she works with students (see Bergee & Grashel, 2002). We don’t know or can’t tell from Erica’s story, however, what “actively engaged” learning means or even looks like. For example, will creating a positive learning environment where students cooperatively work together be a part of active engagement? So, this part of Erica’s story remains open and ready for further investi...