How musical are primary generalist student teachers?

ABSTRACT

Current inclusive pedagogical thinking advocates that learning should begin with what the learner can already do. As children bring rich musical experiences with them into school, primary generalist student teachers also bring rich experiences of music and music-making into their initial teacher education programmes. Yet debate still continues as to whether primary generalists can teach music. The research reported in this paper originated from the reflective practice of a primary generalist teacher educator. Through anecdotal evidence in her teaching, she found that the musical profiles of students undertaking a one-year postgraduate primary teacher education programme were changing. Younger students were beginning to discuss experiences of widening participation opportunities when reflecting on their own musical learning journeys. Moreover, the richness of musical experiences reported by the primary generalist student teachers each year was consistent. The current research resulted from a desire to document these experiences, and also to find a way to gather this information prior to the students starting their course in order to improve teaching; by finding out what the students could already do, teaching could be planned so as to practise and model effective inclusive pedagogy and use the allocated time for music in the best possible way. The paper opens with a review of recent research, raising new research questions as a result of a potentially changing student musical profile. The integration of reflective practice and research to form a research methodology is discussed, and a theoretical framework of what is meant by musical is given. The initial findings of the research are presented and discussed; the paper closes with an overview of the next stages of the research project and the implications for initial teacher education are identified.

KEYWORDS:

• Primary music
• generalist teacher
• teacher education
• student teacher
• primary generalist confidence

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Helen Coll for proof reading this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jennie Henley is Area Leader for Music Education at the Royal College of Music, London. Jennie has worked in music education as a teacher, musical director and choir leader across primary, secondary and higher education. Jennie's doctoral research focused on learning within community ensembles. In her doctoral work she encountered primary generalist teachers learning in community settings in order to develop their own music teaching, and worked with a prison music program. Stemming from this, her research interests surround the development of musicianship in adulthood, with particular interests in music learning in criminal justice and the musical development of generalist primary teachers. Jennie joined the UCL Institute of Education in 2011 as Program Leader for the MA Music Education and Primary Music Subject Lead. She joined the Royal College of Music in 2015.

Notes

1 The English National Curriculum classifies subjects as either core or foundation subjects. The core subjects are English, Mathematics and Science. The foundation subjects are Art and Design, Computing, Citizenship, Design and Technology, Languages, Geography, History, Music and Physical Education.

2 The grade range for GCSE is currently A*–G with A being the highest and G begin the lowest. An A* is awarded for exceptional performance. Grades A*–C are usually accepted as the required standard to progress to further study. For qualifications taken from 2018 onward, the A*–G grade range is being replaced with a numeric grade range where 9 will be the highest level of achievement and 1 will be the lowest level of achievement.