Educational quality in music teacher education: components of a foundation for research

Abstract

Increasing demands for educational quality in higher education affect both higher music education and music teacher education. A theoretical framework is needed if we are to question what is meant by ‘educational quality’ in the latter. To establish programmes for quality development and assessment requires basic subject-specific research on the quality of teaching and learning. The theoretical foundation for this research, which should proceed by the use of case studies, must involve distinguishing between basic and teaching subjects, and a consideration of student learning and identity.

Notes

1. Such as The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in Great Britain (QAA); the Danish Evaluation Institute (EVA); the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council (FINHEEC); the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT); the National Agency for Higher Education in Sweden, Högskoleverket; and the Association of Accrediting Agencies of Canada (AAAC). Corresponding agencies are established in, for example, Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Hong Kong (see Dill, 2000). Further, various quality assurance systems and programme review processes are established in US states (ibid).

2. Not to be confused with the traditional Anglo-American understanding of didactic (see Hamilton, 1999).

3. The most profiled differences include the fact that musikdidaktik is traditionally more oriented towards teaching and educational content, whilst categories such as objectives/goals and evaluation/assessment are less emphasised.

4. Audits focus on those processes by which academic institutions exercise their responsibility to ensure academic standards, and to improve the quality of their teaching and learning (Dill, 2000, p. 188).

5. Such evidence is clearly in line with results from implementation research in other fields (see e.g., Snyder et al., 1992; Hargreaves et al., 1998; Johansen, 2002).

6. I choose not to go into philosophical discussions about bracketing of pre-understanding, the impact of a preconceived framework on the relevance of the data, or of the data's theory-loadenness. Though very important, this would have exceeded the frames and blurred the focus of the article.

7. Musikdidaktik originate from the classical didaktik thinking of Rathke (http://www.didaktik.uni-jena.de/did_02/ratke.htm) and Comenius (1658/1999), and, traditionally, has been strongly connected to the German Bildung tradition (see Westbury et al. (2000) for a comparison of didaktik with the Anglo-Saxon curriculum tradition). It relates the ‘what's, why's and how's’ of music teaching to the planned and experienced learning of pupils. In other words, it concerns the intentions, objectives, contents, methods and evaluation procedures of the field, and, to some degree, the preconditions for those actions. As such, it is taught as a subject within music teacher education, wherein it is divided into subcategories, such as general musikdidaktik, instrumental and vocal didaktik and classroom music didaktik. A more thorough presentation is made by Kertz-Welzel (2004) who compares musikdidaktik to US-American music pedagogy.

8. An example of a US textbook with great similarity to German and Nordic textbooks on musikdidaktik can be found in Tait and Haack (1984).

9. This is what Beck (1994, p. 25) calls ‘self application’, as a methodological approach.

10. Schulman's (1987, p. 8) ‘knowledge base for teaching’ seems related to this.

11. Ruud (1987) makes this distinction. Functional music education concerns music learning within contexts where the values and objectives behind the selection of the subject content are controlled by the music industry and other economic interests. This distinguishes it from concepts of non-formal music education that may very well be based upon musical values and objectives.

12. Pettersen's presentation is based upon the students approaches to learning (SAL)-tradition, referring to Ference Marton's theory of phenomenography, and to Webb (1997).

13. This theme, which might extend the perspectives of this article, exceeds the framework of the text.

14. The quotation is from Richardson (1990, p. 165). The full quotation reads: ‘approaches to learning [ … ] are adopted by students in response to the manner in which particular courses and curricular programs are delivered, and it may therefore constitute a valuable adjunct to more conventional forms of student evaluation’.

15. See note 10.

16. I use the term ‘performance of teaching’ to refer to teachers’ total performance and their background, the latter comprising both dynamic factors (planning—carrying out—evaluating), and structural factors (prerequisite level—decision level—result level) (see Heimann et al., 1965, also Jank & Meyer, 2002), including markings of teacher identity (Johansen, 2005), and signs of a basic philosophy of music education (see e.g., Reimer, 2003, p. 4, who holds that ‘everything we music educators do in our jobs carries out in practice our beliefs about our subject’).