Jon Helge Sætre: Educating Generalist Music Teachers

Field of study: Music Education

Summary

The project sets out to investigate the subject of music in undergraduate generalist teacher education programmes in Norway.

Aim

The overall aim is to describe the actual content of the music classes in generalist teacher education (GTE) and the teacher educators involved in the teaching of these music courses. Through this we can hopefully gain a greater understanding of how (and if) music courses are preparing student teachers for the task of teaching music in compulsory schooling (Grunnskolen, age 6 to 16).

Further, by viewing the above from the viewpoint of the sociology of education, Sætre aims to contribute to the understanding of how the agents, structures and discourses of the social field of teacher education are regulating and recontextualising music as part of generalist teacher education.

Theoretical framework

Theoretically, GTE is seen as a social and discursive field, in which agents, structures and forms of knowledge structures play vital parts (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990; Bernstein, 2000). Bourdieu’s notions of the 'game' and 'illusio', and Bernstein’s notion of the 'recontextualising field' and 'hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures' are central analytical tools. A second perspective, which is both theoretically and empirically grounded, is the distinction between two main bodies of educational content in teacher education: a) content focusing on the subject matter of music, and b) content focusing on how to make the subject matter meaningful and understandable to others (Shulman, 1986, 1987; Klafki, 1956/2000; Alexander, 2001). These perspectives steer the gaze of the study and inform the construction of research instruments.

Methods and design

The study employs a mixed methods design, and the main research methods are a national survey and a series of qualitative interviews. Respondents (population) are academic staff members at generalist teacher education institutions, teaching music (or music-related courses) to one or more generalist student teachers in the period between August 2010 and February 2013.

The dissertation

Title: Preparing generalist student teachers to teach music. A mixed-methods study of teacher educators and educational content in generalist teacher education music courses.

The dissertation is a monograph, and it is written in English.

The dissertation is available in NMH's digital archive.