Envisioning Music Teacher Education 9781475809923, 9781475809916

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Envisioning Music Teacher Education

Envisioning Music Teacher Education Edited by Susan Wharton Conkling

Published in cooperation with the National Association for Music Education ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Susan Wharton Conkling All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. Published in cooperation with the National Association for Music Education, 1806 Robert Fulton Drive, Reston, VA 20191, U.S.A.; nafme.org British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Envisioning music teacher education / [edited by] Susan Wharton Conkling. Selected proceedings from the 2013 Symposium on Music Teacher Education. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4758-0990-9 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4758-0991-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4758-0992-3 (electronic) 1. Music--Instruction and study--Congresses. 2. Music teachers--Training of--Congresses. I. Conkling, Susan Wharton. MT1.E6 2015 780.71--dc23 2015004479 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Lizabeth Bradford Wing (1947-2012) who envisioned each of us in music teacher education being and becoming architects of our own practice.

Contents

Introduction: Creating Vision for Music Teacher Education Douglas C. Orzolek 1 Visions of Good Teaching in Teacher Education Karen Hammerness 2 Mapping New Landscapes for Music Teacher Education Janet R. Barrett 3 Pedagogy and Mission: Vincentian Personalism and Cocreation of Musical Experience Jacqueline Kelly-McHale 4 Aligning Vision with Practice: Redesigning Traditional Music Teacher Education through Immersive Learning John W. Scheib, Karin S. Hendricks, Ryan M. Hourigan, and Kimberly J. Inks 5 Teaching Free Improvisation: Building a Responsive Pedagogy through Core Practices Kimberly Lansinger Ankney and Daniel J. Healy 6 The Shoe That Doesn’t Fit: Contextualizing Music Teacher Evaluation Cara Bernard 7 Metaphor as a Tool for Understanding (and Questioning?) Preservice Music Teachers’ Beliefs Heather Nelson Shouldice 8 Goal-Setting in an Ensemble-Based Field Experience Linda C. Thornton and Jason B. Gossett vii

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9 Envisioning Reflection: Collaborative Self-Study in a Music Education Methods Course Ann Marie Stanley and Lynn Grossman 10 Vision and the Legitimate Order: Theorizing Today to Imagine Tomorrow Brent C. Talbot and Roger Mantie 11 Utopian Thinking, Compliance, and Visions of Wonderful Transformation Susan Wharton Conkling

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Bibliography

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Introduction Creating Vision for Music Teacher Education Douglas C. Orzolek

In the very first issue of the Journal of Music Teacher Education, Charles Leonhard, founding chair of the Society for Music Teacher Education (SMTE), provided a brief history of how SMTE came to be formed. In essence, many music teacher educators felt that there was a need to gather and work on issues facing the profession. Upon its formation, Leonhard articulated the following vision for SMTE: I envisioned [SMTE as] a vital organization that would operate at national, regional, and state levels to bring together the impressive intellectual and professional resources of the nation’s music teacher educators in all specializations to accomplish the following essential functions: • Conduct and disseminate research in music teacher education; • Develop innovative programs of music teacher education; • Advise (and monitor) state departments of education, schools and department of music, and accrediting agencies (NASM and NCATE) on the content of and standards for music teacher education programs and the musical preparation of elementary classroom teachers; • Develop high-level personal and professional bonding and professional identity among music teacher educators; and • Exert political and social pressure on the conference, state departments of education, and collegiate institutions to deal intelligently with music teacher education programs. 1

Today, as in the past, SMTE maintains its vitality and relevance by bringing together music teacher educators to share our research, theories, and best practices; discuss issues of great concern to our profession; and, most imporix

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tant, create a sense of unity and collegiality within our profession. We continue to monitor and comment on licensure and music teacher educator standards, and we are called on regularly by the broader professional community to comment and investigate any number of issues or concerns facing music education. I believe that we have met Leonhard’s vision well, and, frankly, I think he and his peers would be quite proud of the organization that they founded so many years ago. While it is important to pause and recognize good work, we all know that the world of music teacher education is always changing, evolving, and shifting as a result of myriad factors—for example, the very real “accountability movement” in teacher education that is deeply impacting our curricula, methods, approaches, and assessments. If we accept that truth, we must then acknowledge that our vision for our profession and organization must also change, expand, and grow in order to meet these new challenges. With a very strong sense of our new reality, the 2013 Symposium on Music Teacher Education was titled “Navigating Crossroads.” And, without ever truly defining it this plainly, “vision” for music teacher education and SMTE was very much a part of the board’s discussion as we planned the symposium. I believe we have all come to know and understand that a unified vision for music teacher education is the means to advancing our work and meeting all of the challenges that we are facing. As the SMTE Board began its planning for the 2013 Symposium, we discussed a number of people who could address these ideas and serve as our keynote speaker. In our search, Karen Hammerness of Bard College emerged as the perfect fit. Hammerness has been researching vision in the field of education and teacher education for many years and has published widely on the topic. In addition, she has collaborated with Linda Darling-Hammond and the team of educator/researchers at Stanford University. Hammerness turned out to be the ideal presenter. She outlined a clear definition of vision, outlined its characteristics, and explained the various roles vision might play in the development of future and practicing educators. Ultimately, she challenged us to reconsider our vision of music teacher education by providing us with more thought-provoking questions and examples of how vision has shaped policies and programs. I believe this is where we find our organization and our profession today. In each of my “From the Chair” columns published in the Journal of Music Teacher Education, I outlined and built the case that SMTE and our profession have “built every facet of capacity to confidently say that we are in the very position that SMTE has always desired and carefully developed over the past thirty years.” 2 Frankly, I have no trouble declaring that SMTE and our profession have the structural foundation, the research base, keen sense of effective practice, deep knowledge of our subject matter, strong insights into

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what music learning can be, and ability to articulate and sustain what, how, and why we do what we do. In other words, I believe that we are in a position to move forward with exploring and creating a vision for the future of music teacher education and music education as a whole. Then, why is a common vision needed? Why should SMTE and the profession consider developing its own vision? Hammerness has thought about this and comes to some conclusions based on her own research into effective teacher education programs. She writes: “In order to be powerful and effective, teacher education programs need to have a vision, be coherent and provide opportunities that are grounded in teaching and practice.” Furthermore, she suggests that “vision can offer a means to broaden policy discussions and research efforts beyond outcomes to include values, beliefs, and the broader purposes of education.” 3 Linda Darling-Hammond has also given the importance of vision in teacher education a great deal of consideration. In her research she found that “seven exemplary teacher education programs . . . had common features, including: a common, clear vision of good teaching that permeates all course work and clinical experiences in a coherent set of learning experiences.” 4 Based on all this, Hammerness concludes: When teacher educators have clearly articulated their overall purposes, they can better develop courses and experiences for new teachers that are consistent with the practices and purposes identified by the teacher education program. Furthermore, conceptions of good teaching that are embodied in a concrete vision can promote continued dialogue and reflection about good teaching and learning among a community of faculty, teachers and teacher candidates.” 5

The “type” of vision also seems important to an organization like SMTE. While each of the statements above alludes to it, Hammerness has given this type of vision additional thought. Hammerness writes that “organizational visions might also have a broader range—encompassing a set of overarching aims for teaching and learning—while individual visions might tend to be more narrowly focused.” 6 She also believes that an organizational vision might be one that “emphasizes not just any set of practices, but the particular research-based practices that are emerging within the content areas, may also have the potential to help prospective teachers understand and identify more clearly the linkages between theory and practice and subject matter and pedagogy.” 7 Finally, Hammerness concludes that “no matter what vision a program may have … institutional members need opportunities to reflect on whether and how the vision is enacted in the program, how widely shared it is, how coherent the program is, and how the vision is (or is not) reflected in the work and lives of teachers beyond the program.” 8

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The remaining question is “Why now?” Why is it important that SMTE consider its vision at this point in time? Again, I think Hammerness addresses this well: In the United States, this focus on research tied to evidence and outcomes in teacher education and education has quickly grown into demands and policies to evaluate teachers, teacher educators and teacher education programs. Critics both inside and outside the U.S. are raising concerns about this direction; in particular, regarding the ways in which it could narrow the curriculum, undermine efforts to support the development of teaching as a profession, and overlook potentially critical aspects of schooling and education that cannot be captured by standardized measures. 9

All of this points to the development of a clear vision as a means to meet the multitude of challenges we face as a profession as something to be accomplished right now. Darling-Hammond agrees and suggests, “improving teaching and teacher education in the United States depends on not only strengthening individual programs but also addressing the policies needed to strengthen the education enterprise as a whole.” 10 Cuttieta goes a step further by positing that music teacher education might be “a decade behind other professions . . . in our conceptualization of what we do.” 11 Furthermore, he writes that “for change to occur, two things are necessary: a critical mass of professionals in agreement with regard to the direction of change and an outside body that leads the charge toward change. Only then would there be the force required to effect change.” 12 So how does SMTE proceed with developing its vision for music teacher education? In a previous article I suggested the following: I believe, however, that SMTE has the structure in place to develop our vision of good music teaching through a variety of lenses. Our ASPAs [Areas for Strategic Planning and Action] were specifically designed to look at many of the issues and concerns that face our profession. In my image of a potential visioning process, the members of each ASPA would consider this problem from its unique perspective, develop its own definitions which would in turn be developed into an overall vision for the entire society. Furthermore, a plan for the implementation of that vision as well as its regular review and revision would also need to be developed. I believe that this experience would educate all of us and inform our practice in nothing but the most positive of ways. 13

What should be included in this new vision that SMTE would create for itself and the profession of music teacher education? That might be the most difficult piece of this entire process. Again, I turn to Hammerness, who suggests that “visions [should] connect important values and goals to concrete classroom practices. They help teachers construct a normative basis for developing and assessing their teaching and their students’ learning.” 14 In other

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words, we should begin by doing our best to explore the relationship of theory and practice in music teacher education. Hammerness and DarlingHammond would concur, as they believe that “teacher educators have struggled for years to connect theory and practice, to place student teachers in classrooms that reflect state-of-the-art practice and to construct program coursework that illuminates research on effective teaching in ways that are practice-relevant.” 15 Perhaps a discussion about this concern might lead us to the discovery of a vision that would not only afford us the chance to reflect but also provide clear direction as we navigate the myriad of challenges and changes we face now and in the future. As I think about the role of vision in my teaching and professional work, I realize that it has been vital to my personal growth as well as the goals that I establish for my students and the program of learning we have established for them. In addition, my vision for music teacher education also influences the work that I do in tandem with my colleagues at the departmental, college, university, state, and national levels. I find myself reflecting and thinking about a number of questions as I contemplate my vision(s). How do I share my visions in a way that will be meaningful to others? How to I chart or map a course of action that helps these visions become a reality? Or, at the very least, how can I contemplate visions in a way that allows me to reflect on them more deeply? How can I align my overall vision with the coursework, field experiences, and other facets of our program? How can I collaborate with others to imagine these visions more deeply and make them come to life? I am confident that many of you think about the same things. This book was designed to help us further our thinking about all of these questions. In the following chapters you will learn that many of our colleagues have not only been considering these questions, but also that they have sought answers through research, collaboration, and thoughtful work that provokes us to reflect on them. Ultimately, the authors remind us of how important a personal vision is in our work. It is healthy to have and examine a variety of visions; it is imperative to have a vision of what effective music teaching is and can be. Visions for music teaching and music teacher education should be shared and discussed, as our beliefs about many things can deeply impact our visions for our classroom and the entire profession. I want to thank the authors for their thoughtful contributions to this publication. Their insights will nourish our profession and provoke many conversations among those engaged in music teacher preparation. This book is the direct result of the hard work and dedication of Susan Wharton Conkling. As we planned for the 2013 Greensboro Symposium, it was Susan’s vision that made this publication come to reality. I believe that Susan sensed we were “on to something” even in the earliest stages of preparing for the event. Her foresight and initiative coupled with the many hours she spent developing this book have provided us with a resource that we will all come to treasure

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for many years to come. On behalf of the entire profession, I thank Susan not only for her vision but also for her ability to make this book a reality. Finally, we are quite hopeful that this publication will help to advance SMTE and the profession further down that path of discovery, and we hope you find it useful in your own reflection about vision in your teaching. Leonhard wrote, “Music teacher educators are the elite in the profession and bear ultimate responsibility for progress in education.” 16 I could not agree more, and I think it is time to let our visions lead our actions and our actions change the world. NOTES 1. Charles Leonhard, “Full Speed Ahead,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 1, no. 3 (1991): 3–4. 2. Douglas Orzolek, “Building Capacity,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 23, no. 1 (2013): 3–6. 3. Karen Hammerness, “Examining Features of Teacher Education in Norway,” Scandinavian Journal of Education Research 57, no. 4 (2013): 404. 4. Linda Darling-Hammond, “Constructing 21st-Century Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 57, no. 3: (2006) 300–314. 5. Hammerness, “Teacher Education in Norway,” 402. 6. Karen Hammerness, “To Seek, To Strive, To Find, and Not to Yield: A Look at Current Conceptions of Vision in Education,” in Second International Handbook of Educational Change, Vol. 2, ed. Andy Hargreaves (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2010): 1044. 7. Hammerness, “Teacher Education in Norway,” 415. 8. Ibid., 401. 9. Ibid., 400. 10. Darling-Hammond, “Constructing 21st-Century Teacher Education,” 312. 11. Robert Cutietta, “Content for Music Teacher Education in this Century,” Arts Education Policy Review 108, no. 6 (2007): 12. 12. Ibid., 15. 13. Douglas Orzolek, “Our Vision as a Call for Action,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 23, no. 2 (2014): NP-4. 14. Hammerness, “Teacher Education in Norway,” 402. 15. Karen Hammerness and Linda Darling-Hammond, “Meeting Old Challenges and New Demands: The Redesign of the Stanford Teacher Education Program, Issues in Teacher Education 11, no. 1 (2002): 17. 16. Leonhard, “Full Speed Ahead,” 4.

Chapter One

Visions of Good Teaching in Teacher Education Karen Hammerness

WHY STUDY VISION? I started studying vision as part of my dissertation work while working on a larger project that involved a dramatic re-imagining of classroom practice with pupils and teachers. Through that work, I realized that many teachers were using the word vision to describe the kind of classroom for which they were aiming. It seemed to me that what teachers were able to envision was deeply connected to their motivation to invest in shifting their classroom practice and curriculum, and in some cases, to develop their conception of how children learn. At the same time, as I began to investigate this connection between imagination, commitment, and understanding, I began to recognize that it was quite rare that teachers would be asked about their visions. Yet, as a teacher myself, I knew that I had a vision, and the teachers I worked with had visions—and so did many of the student teachers I was teaching. However, there were few opportunities to talk about or share our visions, and—in many cases—it was quite rare that anybody would ask us about our vision of good teaching. Lack of attention to vision may be particularly problematic in an environment today where more demands are being made on teachers and there are far fewer opportunities to be visionary, to take chances, to develop new ways of working with children, and to be innovative and creative. In some ways in this era of accountability, we face a more challenging context in which to imagine different possibilities for classrooms and children. Yet at times like these, because of the potential for a more narrowed conception of teaching

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and education, I contend that we really have to pay increasing attention to vision. In this chapter, I draw upon my earlier work that suggests that teachers’ visions shape development; their visions help contribute to how they feel about their teaching, their students, and their schools. This work also suggests that visions can help shape not only teachers’ career choices and curricular choices but also their identities as professionals and how successful they feel in their work. 1 I build on this work to shed light on the important relationship between teachers’ visions and program visions. I argue that the relationship between program vision and teacher vision matters—it can either support or impede new teachers’ development, particularly in terms of their future commitments to teaching as well as their ability to specifically envision the kinds of practices they could be enacting that fit with their own commitments and conceptions of teaching and learning. Finally, I argue that vision is not just an ambiguous idea and something student teachers should have opportunities to read and talk about—rather, they need opportunities to enact it. To do that, student teachers need to have opportunities to practice elements of that vision—experiences that enable them to deconstruct and rehearse approximate aspects of that vision of good teaching—so that they have some early experiences actually doing the kinds of teaching we hope they will accomplish in their own classrooms as full-time teachers. 2 VISION IN TEACHER EDUCATION Discussions about aims and purposes are central to program design and implementation in teacher education. Questions of vision may enhance the work of teacher education; however, vision is rarely explored or discussed, especially in broader policy debates about teacher education. And even though research in teacher education consistently points to vision as a central feature of strong programs, very few studies have focused upon vision in teacher education. 3 Somewhat surprisingly, none have examined the nature of different kinds of visions in teacher education programs or have fully explored the role such visions play. The Choosing to Teach study, a longitudinal study of three distinct teacher education programs—each with clear aims and purposes—provided a unique opportunity to examine questions of vision. 4 Because of their clear aims and goals, these programs offered possibilities for exploration of both the nature and the potential role of strong program visions of teaching. Furthermore, they represent useful sites to examine two core aspects of teacher education programs that many have argued are related to vision: coherence and relationship to teaching practice. These features are also related to program impact. Presumably, teachers are more likely to learn the kind of teach-

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ing advocated by a teacher education program if the guiding vision of good teaching informs the program as a whole and if students have opportunities to learn to enact this kind of teaching in practice. I start with a brief overview of what we know about teachers’ visions and about vision in teacher education. In light of these ideas, I then describe the visions of the three programs, and I finally turn to the relationship of vision to program coherence and opportunities to learn. Throughout the chapter, I address three questions: 1. What are the guiding visions of good teaching in these teacher education programs, and how do those visions contribute to program coherence? 2. What opportunities to learn about these visions are available in these programs, and to what degree are these learning opportunities grounded in practice? 3. To what degree are the program visions coherent with their graduates’ own visions of good teaching, descriptions of classroom teaching practices, and with their future plans? Teachers’ Visions My approach to program vision draws on my research on teachers’ visions. In my research I found that many teachers have visions of their ideal classroom that are substantial, vivid, and consistent over time. 5 For these teachers, vision was more than a teaching philosophy. It represented their hopes and dreams for what they could accomplish in their teaching. For most of the teachers, vision was far from unrealistic or fanciful. One teacher I interviewed put it this way: “My vision is something tangible in a way that I can picture how my classroom will look and how my students will be and how I will be in my classroom.” [She distinguished her vision from a teaching philosophy by explaining, “I don't think that my philosophy is something I could reach and describe exactly but] vision . . . it’s definitely something I . . . imagine in my mind.” Another teacher also reinforced the notion that vision provides a way of seeing or imagining, which goals and expectations do not provide. As he explained, his vision “turns [my ideas and teaching philosophy] into something real. . . . You can look at it, you can point to it.” While teachers’ visions were tangible and realistic, for many teachers they also captured what Maxine Greene described as a “consciousness of possibility.” 6 Vision was not really about ordinary teaching practice. It represented a “reach,” capturing the essence of the classroom teaching toward which teachers were striving. Teachers’ visions also varied in a number of ways across different dimensions—content, range, specificity, and distance. For instance, some teachers’

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visions focused on their subject matter or central intellectual ideas, and the kind of experiences they wanted students to have in a particular discipline— like learning about universal themes in literature that could have an impact on their lives, or learning about the nature of scientific inquiry in a manner that is authentic and meaningful. Other teachers’ visions focused on the social or relational aspects of teaching, such as the kind of community they wanted to create in their classroom, the kind of working relationships they wanted to have with students, or the kind of life to which they wanted to help their students have access. Visions also varied in their range. Some teachers’ visions focused in upon the kind of classroom they envisioned creating— they imagined providing powerful experiences for students that were deeply related to ideas, experiences, or learning within their particular discipline. For other teachers, visions included the kind of impact they hoped to have upon a school or a community. And for others, vision encompassed societal changes they thought they could help accomplish—or participate in— through teaching. Teachers’ visions also varied in terms of their specificity: some teachers described elaborated and detailed visions, while others described visions in more general terms without particularities. Finally, some teachers felt that their vision remained at a productive distance, while others described visions that were far from their daily practice. Although many of the teachers I interviewed described visions that were substantial and concrete, they reported few opportunities to share their visions or discuss them in their teacher education programs. As one teacher explained, “In [my teacher education] program, that word had never been used, never introduced and never, ever discussed. There were always ‘goals and expectations’ but never the idea of vision . . . I’ve seen in my head what I imagine the class would be for so long, and I always knew it was there, but I never labeled it as ‘vision.’” Sharon Feiman-Nemser has argued that such visions of the possible are critical for new teacher learning, pointing to the potential for vision to be explored, challenged, and further developed within teacher preparation: Teacher candidates must . . . form visions of what is possible and desirable in teaching to inspire and guide their professional learning and practice. Such visions connect important values and goals to concrete classroom practices. They help teachers construct a normative basis for developing and assessing their teaching and their students’ learning. 7

Program Vision Over the past decade, teacher educators in the United States have begun to argue that a critical part of a strong teacher preparation program is a clearly articulated and shared vision. 8 The synthesis of research on teaching, learning, and teacher education of the National Academy of Education’s Commit-

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tee on Teacher Education placed “vision” at the heart of a strong teacher education program and linked that vision to the understandings, tools, and practices that teachers need to learn in order to enact such a vision in their work. 9 They imply that vision needs to be elaborated so that programs can then articulate the specific understandings, practices, tools, and dispositions required to enact the vision. Policy around the accreditation of teacher education also reflects these developments: the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) requires teacher education programs to include in their program materials a statement articulating the program’s conceptual framework that establishes the programs’ “shared vision.” 10 Yet while a conceptual framework may provide some undergirding for a program vision of good teaching, the two are distinctly different, with vision encompassing images of good teaching and conceptual framework capturing the research base for such a vision. Indeed, despite arguments about the central role of vision in teaching and teacher education, we do not have a clear definition of what program vision entails. Neither do we have empirical research about the nature of program visions or the ways in which visions may (or may not) be reflected in program design and curriculum. We also know little about how program visions interact with the individual visions and conceptions of teacher candidates. To begin to address these gaps, I conceptualize program visions using dimensions drawn from my research on individual teachers’ visions. The characteristics of teachers’ visions—content, range, specificity, and distance—can also be used to characterize and understand teacher education program visions. For instance, the content of program visions may vary. In many teacher education programs, the range of program vision may be broad, capturing a program’s larger purposes and goals in preparing teachers. A vision might include, for instance, the kind of teachers that faculty hope their graduates will be in the future. It may represent the kind of role faculty hope their graduates might play in the educational system and the kind of difference they hope graduates might make in society. In this way, program vision may embody the kind of “consciousness of possibility” that individual teachers also felt was critical to their vision. As teacher educators, we often talk about our hopes to help new teachers imagine teaching, classrooms, and schools that run counter to current conceptions of “quality teaching” that are overly technical or regimented, that push against the inertia of uninspiring schooling, that challenge societal patterns, or that enable new teachers to envision teaching in ways that break the boundaries of the ordinary. This breadth of vision may be particularly important as teacher educators confront the dilemma of preparing new teachers for “schools as they are, or schools as they could be.” Yet specificity is also an important feature of vision. In teacher education, a vision might include not only aims for the societal impact their graduates

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might have, but also a specific vision of the kinds of classroom practices faculty hope their graduates will enact. In its specificity, a vision captures an understanding of good teaching—with elaboration and detail. 11 A specific teacher education program vision might include elaborated images of how teachers work in productive relationships with children, what sorts of classrooms teachers might set up, what strategies teachers can use, and what tools, dispositions, and practices they need as part of their beginning repertoire. Other students of educational visions have argued that both range of vision and specificity matter. Vision’s range may capture moral purpose and ideological goals, but a useful vision also elaborates how those goals and purposes may be enacted. Simply having a vision is not enough. Vision needs to inform program design, curriculum, and pedagogy, and shape what and how new teachers learn. Case studies of individual programs and comparative studies of multiple programs have pointed to this important role of coherence. In coherent programs, core ideas and learning opportunities—both course work and clinical experiences—are aligned. 12 Coherent programs are purposefully designed to provide a well-structured set of learning opportunities that guide teachers toward a clear vision of teaching. Research suggesting that students learn more when they encounter mutually reinforcing ideas and practices across learning experiences supports the importance of coherence in a vision of teaching. 13 When students have repeated experiences with a set of ideas along with opportunities to practice skills and strategies related to those ideas, they learn more deeply and develop greater expertise. 14 The Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) study, a comparative investigation of eleven different teacher education programs conducted by the National Center for Research on Teacher Education at Michigan State University, found that the more a program cohered around a set of consistent ideas about learning, schooling, and teaching, the more powerful the influence of the program was on candidates’ learning to teaching. 15 Coherence also has limits: An overly coherent program may become too regimented and technical, ultimately masking some of the persistent dilemmas and inherent contradictions of teaching. 16 A program that is too closely focused and organized around a particular vision may deter candidates from expressing or developing alternative perspectives or exploring their own personal visions. This may help explain why some teachers have expressed skepticism about the value of basing external program review on the presence of an elaborated conceptual framework that may lead to programs that are too neatly packaged or standardized, potentially masking any challenges, differences, or variations.

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Opportunities to Enact the Vision in Practice Yet teachers need opportunities not only to learn about visions of good teaching in practice but to actually enact the vision of good teaching in practice. 17 For instance, Mark Windschitl and his colleagues at the University of Washington emphasize a vision of good teaching that centers on intellectual engagement in scientific ideas and educational equity at the center. In their work with novice science teachers, they have identified a set of core teaching practices central to that vision that they help new teachers rehearse and enact—such as identifying “big ideas” in science, eliciting students’ ideas, and pressing for evidence-based explanations. Unfortunately, providing opportunities to enact visions of good teaching has been a long-standing weakness in teacher education: Kennedy contended that teacher educators often promote a general vision of good teaching, but these visions are often not specified in terms of particular classroom practices. This has contributed to the “problem of enactment”—learning to put one’s intentions and vision into practice. A vision of good teaching that is not translated into practice “fails to give teachers the tools they need to develop a sustainable practice.” 18 Such a shift toward practice requires a number of changes in teacher education curriculum and pedagogy. A number of teacher education scholars are pioneering this work, in methods courses. 19 This includes grounding the study of theory in the materials and artifacts of practice and providing opportunities for prospective teachers to see and rehearse teaching practices aligned with specific visions of good teaching. 20 A larger qualitative study of teacher preparation, the Choosing to Teach project, provided a unique opportunity to examine the role and nature of program vision. This project has been investigating questions about the ways in which teacher education programs, school contexts, and identity-formation processes shape new teachers’ identity, practice, and career commitments through a study of three programs. These three programs, the Day School Leadership Through Teaching (DeLeT), the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program (UChicago UTEP), and the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE), are designed around preparing teachers to teach in a particular type of schools (urban public, urban Catholic, and Jewish) with a focus on particular (not generic) students. 21 In the section that follows, I examine the visions of good teaching that undergird the three programs in our study. First, I consider the content of three program visions and their range and specificity. Next, I look at the relationship of vision to program coherence and to opportunities to learn in practice. I conclude with a discussion of how program visions relate to the visions of program graduates.

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CONTENT OF THREE PROGRAM VISIONS A review of written documents from the programs (e.g., handbooks, course syllabi, websites) and interviews with program directors and faculty suggested four key findings about the nature of the program visions. 22 First, each program had a clearly articulated, overarching vision of good teaching that was elaborated in different materials, consistent across documents, and easily identified. The continual presence of such statements suggested that for these programs, vision served as a key motivating force in the program. Interviews with faculty also revealed a strong sense of purpose and a shared understanding of the program vision, suggesting conceptual coherence around the program visions. The interviews also suggested that faculty and staff in these three programs did not feel that their vision was simply produced for external review. Rather, the vision was an expression of their personal and programmatic commitments, integral to the program and the reason for their work. Second, perhaps not surprisingly, the content of the program visions differed, reflecting variation in conceptions of good teaching across teacher preparation programs in the United States. 23 The programs reflected three foci related to quite different conceptions of good teaching: • A vision of teaching as service that conceives of teaching as only one of many opportunities to “give back” or contribute to society; • A vision of teaching as social justice that conceives of teaching as a direct means of addressing social inequities; and • A vision of teaching as a practice that focuses on teaching as a profession that has a knowledge base and set of practices that can be learned and developed over time. Third, the data suggested that the content of the visions of these programs represented either one focus or a mix of these three foci to a greater or lesser extent. For each program, the emphasis was distinctive and seemed to have a consistent relationship with the visions, career plans, and even the classroom practices of their graduates. The data also suggested that these programs offered very different opportunities to learn: opportunities that were clearly consistent with the program visions, suggesting the presence of coherence in these programs as well. Finally, the data revealed that programs varied in the extent to which they linked vision and practice, and the degree to which they provided opportunities to enact aspects of the program visions of good teaching.

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Three Distinct Visions What visions of good teaching did the three programs emphasize? What aims and goals did program materials and literature, and program leaders, express? Alliance for Catholic Education: A vision of teaching as service. The program vision of Alliance for Catholic Education focuses clearly on a vision of teaching as service. The program director emphasized that faculty want students to think about the program not exclusively as a “teacher formation” program, but more broadly as contributing to the Catholic community through education. ACE conceives of teaching as an important way to serve the Catholic community, in particular to work with under-resourced Catholic schools. ACE promotes a vision of candidates developing a long-term commitment to the Catholic community with an understanding that students will either aim for eventual leadership in education or become advocates of Catholic education in other fields. Day School Leadership Through Teaching: A vision of teaching as service and a vision of teaching as a professional practice. Brandeis University’s Day School Leadership Through Teaching Program (DeLeT) program focuses upon a vision of teaching as a professional practice that should improve student learning, as well as upon a vision of teaching as service to the Jewish community. The DeLeT program is designed to help support pupils in Jewish Day Schools “form integrated identities as they study and experience their dual heritage and responsibilities as Americans and Jews.” The program promotes a vision of good teaching as shaped by knowledge of one’s students and a nuanced understanding of development promoted by careful observation and assessment of children. Finally, good teaching is represented here by a classroom learning community infused with Jewish experiences and values as both a means and an end. Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program: A vision of teaching as social justice and a vision of teaching as a professional practice. UChicago UTEP was created to prepare teachers specifically for urban schools and promotes a vision of teaching that can foster greater equity and opportunity for all students, especially those in Chicago public schools. The quote attributed to Ghandi and viewed on the website of the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program (UChicago UTEP) captures the program’s emphasis on a vision of social justice: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Interviews with faculty and program directors reveal a conception of good teaching in urban schools as culturally relevant and informed by specific, practical teaching strategies such as learning to ask thoughtful questions. In terms of the dimensions of the visions of good teaching, all three of the program visions have a fairly broad range that emphasizes graduates’ impact on society, but good teaching is imagined in very different ways. The speci-

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ficity of the visions of good teaching varies across the three programs. For instance, the vision of teaching as a professional practice in the DeLeT program and UTEP is quite specific and clear (indeed, the UChicago UTEP website lists a set of teaching strategies that form their program vision of good teaching). In ACE, the program has less specificity around the vision of good teaching. COHERENCE OF TEACHERS’ VISIONS AND PROGRAM VISIONS Perhaps not surprisingly, I found that the personal visions of graduates were consistent with the content of the visions of their programs. While this finding could be seen as evidence for conceptual coherence within these programs, it might also be reflective of programs’ selection processes. For instance, in keeping with the aims and goals of the ACE program, virtually all ACE teachers emphasized their commitment to serve the Catholic community as a central element of their work in schools. One teacher remarked that she had gone into teaching as a way to help advance the Catholic community: “It advances our community, it advances our society, and those are all things that are really important to me.” When asked about their overall aims and goals, ACE teachers in this sample often spoke about influencing the spiritual and personal lives of their students: I felt like I was going to be someone in these kids’ lives who they could learn from, that they could see was trying to be a good Catholic, trying to make moral decisions, and trying to do the best that she could and that they could learn from that.

The ACE teachers in our sample, consistent with the program vision, described good teaching as a process by which one influences and molds children—helping young people lead moral, spiritually guided lives. They envisioned good teachers as models for children in the process of leading lives as good Catholics. Similarly, consistent with the program vision of teaching as service, all but one of the DeLeT teachers in our sample described having goals related to serving the Jewish community. For example, one DeLeT teacher said: I partly want to do this [for] the Jewish community . . . it is where I want to put my effort and where I hope that a lot of the benefit will accrue to the Jewish community.

Relatedly, some DeLeT teachers talked about being “role models” in the Jewish community: “I think that kids need strong role models in order to

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grow up into the kind of human beings that we want them to be, and . . . as a teacher you can have incredible influence. . . . So it’s pretty fulfilling.” The findings were consistent across UChicago UTEP teachers as well. Reflective of UChicago UTEP’s vision of teaching as a form of social justice, all of the UChicago UTEP teachers in this sample described visions of social justice and social change. For instance, this graduate explained: I recognized the need and the inequality that existed in not just urban schools, but rural schools too. As the type of person I am, I just can’t sit back and let it happen.

Another graduate maintained that “I think my commitment is to change the school system as it is right now, at least the Chicago public school system, and you can’t really do that unless you understand the situation of the teachers, of the students.” Of course, it is likely that students in programs such as these select them because the programs reflect and are consistent with their own conceptions of teaching, and their own personal aims and goals for education. 24 I also found a subset of teachers in these programs that just “fell into” these programs without choosing them in an intentional way. However, I want to underscore the strong differences in the content of visions of teaching across programs and in their graduates. Through examining the visions of good teaching of these three programs and the visions of program graduates, we see substantial variation in the content of the visions, including underlying views about the purposes of teaching and the role of teachers. Could such differences in visions of teaching matter? To what extent do these visions of teaching and the role of the teacher shape the learning opportunities provided to students in these programs? How might differences play out? To address these questions, I turn to the opportunities to learn related to the program visions—not only learning about the content of the vision but also learning how to enact the vision in practice. I discuss the degree to which the opportunities to learn are grounded in practice. I also discuss how graduates describe their own teaching and their visions of good classroom practice. Program visions of teaching also align in interesting ways with graduates’ teaching practices and future plans. Opportunities to Learn Analyzing program syllabus documents and interviews with faculty revealed that the three programs offered very different kinds of opportunities to learn. These opportunities to learn were, in many ways, consistent with the program visions of good teaching, suggesting some structural coherence within each program. For instance, ACE student teachers had substantial opportu-

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nities to explore the concept of the teacher as moral agent and to reflect on and pursue their own spiritual growth. They were required to take a strand of courses and experiences that supported them in thinking about their development as Catholics and their role in helping form and develop future Catholics. Almost every syllabus reviewed addressed the formative and spiritual role of the teacher in a number of ways, suggesting that this topic received strong emphasis in the program. However, ACE offered students fewer opportunities to think about the development of learning on the part of students. Even the course on child development focused heavily upon the role of the teacher. For instance, the first topic for a writing assignment in the course was “How is the teacher a moral agent in the classroom?” The course syllabi stated that the purpose was to help students learn the importance of developmental theory and research for effective teaching as well as to integrate moral issues into classroom planning. While the course placed some emphasis on learners, no assignments required ACE teachers to follow a student throughout the course of a day, to write a case study about a student, to interview a student, or to use pedagogical strategies that may help prospective teachers understand the perspectives and lives of children. 25 Few assignments appeared to be “grounded in practice” or in concrete teaching experiences. On the other hand, opportunities to learn were consistent with the vision of the program of teaching as service, which focused squarely on the role of the teacher and the opportunity for teachers to provide a service for their community. Thus, the analysis of the ACE syllabi reflected structural coherence around a clear vision, but it also revealed fewer opportunities for ACE teachers to learn in practice in the context of university coursework. While candidates were plunged into teaching after their first summer in the program, course assignments rarely drew on their classroom experiences. In fact, all three programs exhibited coherence, meaning a consistency of learning opportunities with the program vision of good teaching. Each program offered a set of courses designed to address and “form” teacher identity in relationship to the program vision. For instance, the director of the DeLeT program included a course called the “Jewish Journey” in which novice teachers had opportunities to explore and reflect about their growth as Jews and as Jewish teachers. In the “soul strand” of the UChicago UTEP program, students were asked to focus on their cultural identities in relation to the culture of their students. In terms of the vision of social justice, the UChicago UTEP students have multiple opportunities to consider what it means to be an urban teacher as well as to affirm their commitment to urban schooling. Both DeLeT and UChicago UTEP offered students substantial opportunities to learn about learners and their development—which fit the two programs’ vision of teaching as a practice. Reviewing the syllabi in both pro-

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grams revealed repeated opportunities to learn about particular classroom strategies and practices. For example, in DeLeT’s Language Arts methods course, students were asked to use a number of assessments of students’ reading and writing abilities, such as spelling inventories and running records. Although this course took place during the first summer, it had a practicum requirement in which student teachers worked with small groups of elementary school pupils in a summer school program for three hours a week. In this context, they had opportunities to try out these strategies. Then, in the class, they were asked to reflect on the use of the strategies and write progress reports for children. These activities were very close to the kinds of work they would be doing in their classrooms as full-time teachers, and the opportunities to learn were consistent with the program’s vision of good teaching as a professional practice. 26 Similarly, in their course on human development and learning, UChicago UTEP students write a child case study. They spend the first part of the course preparing to conduct observations, learning about how to look at student work in nonjudgmental ways and how to capitalize on student strengths. Sessions in the course address specifically how such observations can feed into their teaching practice: The syllabus notes that student teachers “will make use of observations and understandings of child development and student learning to brainstorm about effective practices for students.” As these kinds of assignments suggest, the teacher candidates in both the DeLeT program and the UChicago UTEP program have opportunities to try out the kinds of practices and strategies they will eventually use as full-time teachers. 27 UChicago UTEP also provides opportunities for students to reflect upon teaching practice in order to develop an understanding of what it means to teach for social justice. Similarly, DeLeT provides opportunities to reflect on teaching practice in order to develop commitment to the Jewish community. This cross-program examination suggests that the three programs offered very different kinds of learning opportunities that reflected their respective program visions. Program visions could be traced into program learning opportunities and assignments—indicating the coherence of these programs. Yet, data analysis highlighted substantial variation in the degree to which program opportunities were (and were not) grounded in the actual practices of classroom teaching—revealing that while two of the programs provided opportunities to enact the vision of good teaching, one program provided fewer such opportunities. Furthermore, analysis revealed the specificity of the UChicago UTEP and DeLeT program visions with regards to the practice of teaching. A well-elaborated vision of good teaching, therefore, may enable faculty to identify and target specific classroom practices that novices need to learn—and in turn, offer opportunities in coursework to do what Grossman et

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al. have termed deconstruction, rehearsal, and approximation of those practices. 28 Graduates’ Teaching Visions Graduates of the three programs, who were actively engaged in the classroom, were asked to describe their teaching and to talk about their goals and ideal classroom practices. Clear differences emerged, which seemed to reflect differences in learning opportunities and program visions. While ACE teachers were very articulate about their visions of teaching as service and their role in the Catholic community, some struggled to describe their goals for classroom teaching. This surprised us because the ACE teachers provided thoughtful and specific responses to questions about their commitment and work. Yet some seemed unsure about what to say in response to our question about their aims as teachers, as did one teacher who said: “Oh, boy. I don’t know. I guess, I hope to, like, make a difference for these kids somehow.” The ACE teachers in this sample, consistent with the program vision, described clear goals for children that focused on shaping their personal growth and development and providing support and guidance. At the same time, also consistent with the program vision, they did not emphasize particular curricular, intellectual, or learning goals. In contrast, the visions of teaching practice articulated by graduates of both DeLeT and UChicago UTEP were very specific, concrete, and detailed with regard to their goals for classroom teaching and learning. For instance, one DeLeT teacher described her vision of good teaching as informed by careful observation of children paired with purposeful curriculum planning: [My vision of good teaching involves] listening to the children, watching the children, and comparing my observations of the children with my co-teacher. . . . To try to really understand what’s going on with each individual child, and then thinking about what needs to be done to meet their needs and challenge their interests. And then I think also in terms of planning teaching around goals. . . . I think it’s also important for the children to know [the goals as well].

UChicago UTEP graduates talked about visions of teaching in ways that were consistent with the program’s vision of teaching as a professional practice, emphasizing practical strategies for teaching urban children. For instance, they provided detailed descriptions of the teaching they envisioned being most effective in supporting children’s literacy development. This UChicago UTEP teacher’s description of a typical day suggests multiple strategies to help children learn to read:

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You would see many lessons. . . lessons that are about 20 minutes . . . where there is a concept that’s taught and modeled. So I would show the students what they needed to do or the elements of the skill or the concept and then they would practice it with partners or in groups. And as they would be doing that I would be going around and sort of checking in with the groups. . . . “Can you two work together to see if you can explain it to one another?”

Considerable variation across the graduates by program was also evident when they were asked about plans for the future. Many ACE teachers in our sample described roles in educational leadership in a Catholic school as their ultimate aim. Six of the ten ACE teachers planned to stay in teaching less than five years, and almost all mentioned plans to remain in education but pursue some administrative role. It was not surprising that the ACE students hoped to go on and become administrators, because they did not have many opportunities to develop or learn about a vision of teaching practice. In contrast, a majority of DeLeT and UChicago UTEP teachers planned to stay in teaching. Of the DeLeT teachers, the majority in our sample planned to remain in the classroom long-term, and also talked about eventually becoming teacher leaders in their schools. Most UChicago UTEP teachers planned to stay in teaching more than five years, and two of them said they saw teaching as their “career.” UChicago UTEP and DeLeT teachers in this sample provided ample evidence that their aims and goals for teaching and their descriptions of their classroom practices were consistent with their program visions of teaching as social change (UChicago UTEP) and service (DeLeT). Their aims and descriptions also reflected an understanding of particular pedagogies embodied in the programs’ vision of practice. In both the DeLeT and UChicago UTEP program, student teachers had opportunities to learn about a vision of social justice or service as well as a vision of teaching practice. ACE graduates’ descriptions of their plans for the future—in which they did not see themselves as continuing as teachers long-term—were also consistent with their opportunities to learn about the program vision of service. VARIATIONS IN PROGRAM VISION AND TEACHER VISIONS This chapter points to three key features of teacher education programs that may differ considerably and may help account for variation in teachers’ visions of good teaching as well as their career commitments and classroom practices. Far from being empty statements, we found that the visions of teaching that undergird teacher education programs can in fact have substantial impact and import. Program visions are evident on multiple levels—in the shape and design of the curricula and learning opportunities, in descriptions of classroom practice on the part of graduates, and in their plans for the

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future. For these three programs, visions of teaching are embedded in the programs, influencing them in deeply meaningful ways. Second, the ways in which these visions were emphasized by faculty and embodied in learning opportunities contributed to program coherence. The faculty appeared to have a shared vision that came through in their discussions of their aims and goals—suggesting a kind of conceptual coherence around a set of clear ideas about good teaching. Because the visions could also be traced into the courses, assignments, and learning opportunities in each program, the findings point to structural coherence as well. Even when programs are coherent, however, the type of vision also matters. All the ACE teachers had strong visions of themselves as moral and spiritual guides in the classroom, consistent with the program vision of teaching as service. At the same time, a number of the teachers were much less detailed and specific about their classroom practices with urban children. Yet ACE teachers’ plans to leave classroom teaching and go into administration are quite consistent with the ACE vision—a vision of service can in fact be enacted in a number of settings, not simply in classrooms. Furthermore, if a vision of good teaching is not specific and elaborated, faculty may not provide specific opportunities to practice or rehearse elements of that vision, and, in turn, novices may not be able to learn to enact it. The DeLeT and UChicago UTEP teachers expressed strong visions of teaching as a professional practice, consistent with the visions of their respective programs. More of these graduates had a well-articulated sense of their classroom teaching practice and what they were aiming for, and, in turn, many imagined themselves remaining in teaching long-term. Having prepared to teach in programs with a strong vision of practice and regular opportunities to learn that practice, these new teachers could envision the kinds of practices they wanted to enact, based on their own emerging vision of good teaching. Their ability to translate vision into practice—because of the experiences rehearsing and enacting—may help explain why they could imagine a long-term teaching career. Indeed, the degree to which learning opportunities are grounded in practice seems to matter. DeLeT and UChicago UTEP teachers had consistent learning opportunities grounded in real teaching practice. They also had opportunities to rehearse aspects of real classroom teaching in their coursework—consistent with their programs’ vision of teaching as a professional practice. These teachers could describe in detail the kinds of classroom practices they were using as teachers and the impact those practices could have on pupils.

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IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAM DESIGN This chapter provides some initial empirical support that the focus and specificity of a program’s vision of good teaching and the extent to which that vision informs program structure, content, and learning opportunities affect the program’s impact on new teachers. What are the implications for program design? First, examination of these three programs suggests paying greater attention to the role that vision may play in contributing to program coherence and guiding program design. While these programs may be unique in terms of the clarity and focus of their visions, they point to the potential value in articulating program visions as part of general program design and structure. This investigation also suggests that program visions may contribute to program coherence—both structural and conceptual. 29 These three programs each had a clear vision of good teaching, which was reflected in the aims and goals stated by faculty and graduates as well as the learning opportunities available to student teachers. Because research suggests that students learn better and develop more expertise when learning experiences cohere, this study suggests paying greater attention to the ways that programs are (or are not) coherent around a set of shared ideas and practices. Of course, the vision has to be not only compelling but also defensible and robust. Second, because the type of vision promoted seemed to either contribute to or impede a growing sense of identity as a classroom teacher in these programs, it suggests that teacher education programs may not only need to have a clear vision and be coherent. Program faculty also need to consider the type of vision they wish to promote. In this chapter, we saw three very different visions of teaching underlying the programs. If programs have a strong vision of service, graduates may conclude that they can fulfill that vision in a variety of ways—not all of which involve teaching. One can have a vision of service and still accomplish that vision even if one switches careers. These findings affirm the need for programs to articulate—and for new teachers to develop—a vision of practice as part of developing an identity as a classroom teacher. 30 Graduates of programs with well-specified visions of practice could imagine themselves enacting their visions as classroom teachers for the long term. Finally, this chapter reveals that variation in opportunities to learn in practice also correlated with graduates’ plans to stay in teaching. It follows that programs must address what Mary Kennedy has called the “problem of enactment” and consider how to help student teachers learn to enact teaching practice. 31 Having a vision of teaching as a professional practice may be an important aspect of a strong teacher education program, but student teachers also need opportunities to learn to enact the vision. These learning opportunities must be deeply grounded in real classroom practice so that prospective

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teachers will be not only be able to envision but also to enact such practices in their future classrooms. 32 At the same time, being grounded in practice does not need to be literally “in the field.” Both UChicago UTEP and DeLeT offered a number of the key practice-centered learning opportunities at the university in their program courses. For instance, at UChicago UTEP, when students learn a “read-aloud” for the purposes of balanced literacy, they design and rehearse a read-aloud, in the context of their methods class, practicing pre-reading and post-reading interactions with their peers before actually enacting the read-aloud with real elementary school children. In sum, the key features of vision, coherence and opportunities to learn in practice, represent powerful features to take into account in teacher education program design. Yet it seems especially critical that program faculty be clear about the kind of vision they wish to promote as well as the kinds of practices that undergird the vision. A vision of good teaching as service may ultimately help support and reflect one aspect of teaching: the outreach and hard work of caring for other people’s development and learning. However, it is possible that a vision of good teaching as service may not fully capture the complex, challenging intellectual work of teaching nor perhaps adequately embody the depth and richness of the professional knowledge one needs to be a strong teacher. On the other hand, a vision of teaching as a professional practice may more accurately reflect the integrity and range of the intellectual knowledge base of the profession and perhaps be more consistent with the kind of vision of teaching that provides novices with the specificity and detail they need to imagine remaining in the classroom. However, a vision of teaching as a practice, one that lacks a broader view of societal purposes, change, and moral goals, may also not fully connect to the personal values or broader goals that drive many educators. It may be that programs could most powerfully promote both a vision of teaching as a professional practice as well as teaching as a means of making a difference. Careful and explicit attention to the kind of vision of teaching a program wishes to promote that encompasses both practices and a broader set of meaningful purposes, coupled with opportunities to learn to enact practices, which are carefully scaffolded throughout a program, may be some of the most critical program elements that help new teachers learn to be committed and reflective professionals. NOTES 1. Karen Hammerness, Seeing Through Teachers’ Eyes: Professional Ideals and Classroom Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006). 2. Pam Grossman, Karen Hammerness, and Morva McDonald, “Redefining Teaching: ReImagining Teacher Education,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 15, no. 2 (2009): 273–89.

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3. Linda Darling-Hammond, John Bransford, Pamela LePage, Karen Hammerness, and Helen Duffy, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). 4. For the full study see Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Eran Tamir, and Karen Hammerness, Inspiring Teaching: Context-Specific Teacher Preparation for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2014). 5. Hammerness, Seeing Through Teachers’ Eyes. 6. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1995), 43. 7. Sharon Feiman-Nemser, “From Preparation to Practice: Designing a Continuum to Strengthen and Sustain Teaching,” Teachers College Record 103, no. 6 (2001): 1017. 8. See Darling-Hammond et al., Preparing Teachers; Karen Hammerness, “Examining Features of Teacher Education in Norway,” Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 57, no. 4 (2013): 400–419; Mary M. Kennedy, “Knowledge and Vision in Teaching,” Journal of Teacher Education 57, no. 3 (2006): 205–11; National Research Council, Preparing Teachers: Building Evidence for Sound Policy . (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2010); Kenneth Zeichner and Hillary G. Conklin, “Teacher Education Programs as Sites for Teacher Preparation” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, ed. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, D. John McIntyre and Kelly E. Demers (New York: Routledge, 2008), 269–89. 9. Karen Hammerness, Linda Darling-Hammond, John Bransford, David Berliner, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Morva McDonald, and Kenneth Zeichner, “How Teachers Learn and Develop,” in Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do, ed. Linda Darling-Hammond et al. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), 358–89. 10. NCATE “Unit Standards in Effect 2008,” http://www.ncate.org/Standards/UnitStandards/UnitStandardsinEffect2008/tabid/476/Default.aspx. NCATE describes the conceptual framework in this way: “A conceptual framework establishes the shared vision for a unit’s efforts in preparing educators to work in P–12 schools. It provides direction for programs, courses, teaching, candidate performance, scholarship, service, and unit accountability. The conceptual framework is knowledge-based, articulated, shared, coherent, consistent with the unit and/or institutional mission, and continuously evaluated. The conceptual framework provides the bases that describe the unit’s intellectual philosophy and institutional standards, which distinguish graduates of one institution from those of another.” 11. Darling-Hammond et al., Preparing Teachers. 12. See Linda Darling-Hammond, Studies of Excellence in Teacher Education: Preparation at the Graduate Level. (New York, Washington, DC: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future and American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 1999); Linda Darling-Hammond, Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Pam Grossman, Karen M. Hammerness, Morva McDonald, and Matt Ronfeldt, “Constructing Coherence: Structural Predictors of Perceptions of Coherence in NYC Teacher Education Programs,” Journal of Teacher Education 59, no. 4 (2008): 273–87. 13. NRC, Sound Policy . 14. K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406. 15. National Center for Research on Teacher Education, “Teacher Education and Learning to Teach: A Research Agenda,” Journal of Teacher Education 32, no. 6 (1988): 27–32. 16. Margaret Buchmann and Robert E. Floden, “Coherence, the Rebel Angel,” Educational Researcher 21, no. 9 (December 1992): 4–9. 17. Grossman et al., “Redefining Teaching.” 18. Kennedy, “Knowledge and Vision in Teaching,” 211. 19. See Deborah Loewenberg Ball and Francesca M. Forzani, “The Work of Teaching and the Challenge for Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 60, no. 5 (2009): 497–511; Magdalene Lampert, Megan Loef Franke, Elham Kazemi, Hala Ghousseini, Angela Chan Turrou, Heather Beasley, Adrian Cunard, and Kathleen Crowe, “Keeping it Complex: Using Rehearsals to Support Novice Teacher Learning of Ambitious Teaching,” Journal of Teacher Education 64, no. 3 (2013): 226–43.

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20. Jessica Thompson, Mark Windschitl, and Melissa Braaten, “Developing a Theory of Ambitious Early-Career Teacher Practice,” American Educational Research Journal 50, no. 3 (2013): 574–615. 21. I use the term “context specific” to describe this type of focused teacher preparation. (See Kavita Kapedia Masko, and Karen Hammerness, “Unpacking the ‘Urban’ in Urban Teacher Education: Making a Case for Context-Specific Preparation,” Journal of Teacher Education 65, no. 2 (April 2014): 128–44.) 22. A note about methods: First, to identify the program vision, I analyzed interviews with program directors and faculty and reviewed program materials for statements about the purposes of teachers and teaching, and statements about the program’s intended role in the community. Using methods developed in prior research examining teachers’ visions, I coded and analyzed discussions in ATLAS.ti regarding ideal images of teaching, practice, and career plans from all thirty interviews. In addition, to examine the degree of coherence or alignment (if any) between program visions and teachers’ visions, I looked for key features of program visions in teachers’ discussions. I also identified distinctive features of the program vision and then looked at program syllabi for opportunities to learn about these aspects of the vision. Finally, in order to determine the degree that opportunities to learn were grounded in practice, I examined the syllabi for opportunities to learn about concrete practices the students would actually use in real K–12 classroom teaching. 23. NRC, Sound Policy . 24. Mary M. Kennedy, Learning to Teach Writing: Does Teacher Education Make a Difference? (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998). 25. Darling-Hammond et al. Preparing Teachers. 26. Recently, some teacher educators have begun to argue that these kinds of practices and strategies should be at the center of teacher preparation curriculum and, in fact, should be the basis of all coursework and clinical work. See Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Laurie Sleep, Timothy A. Boerst, and Hyman Bass, “Combining the Development of Practice and the Practice of Development in Teacher Education,” The Elementary School Journal 109, no. 5 (2009): 458–74; and Grossman et al., “Redefining Teaching.” 27. Grossman et al. “Redefining Teaching.” 28. Ibid. 29. Sharon Feiman-Nemser, “Teacher Preparation: Structural and Conceptual Analysis,” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, ed. W. Robert Houston, Martin Haberman, and John Sikula (New York: Macmillan, 1990): 212–33. 30. Feiman-Nemser, “Designing a Continuum”; and Kennedy, “Knowledge and Vision in Teaching.” 31. Kennedy, Mary. “The Role of Preservice Teacher Education,” in Teaching as the Learning Profession: Handbook of Policy and Practice, ed. Linda Darling-Hammond and Gary Sykes (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999): 54–85. 32. Grossman et al., “Redefining Teaching.”

Chapter Two

Mapping New Landscapes for Music Teacher Education Janet R. Barrett

The metaphor of navigating, selected as the organizing theme of the SMTE Symposium, sends me immediately to cartography, since how can one embark upon a journey without a map? Commenting on the growing trend of contemporary artists who use maps for conceptual inspiration rather than geographical fidelity, Katharine Harmon asks, Is there any motif so malleable, so ripe for appropriation, as maps? They can act as shorthand for ready metaphors: seeking location and experiencing dislocation, bringing order to chaos, charting new terrains. Maps act as backdrops for statements about politically imposed boundaries, territoriality, and other notions of power and projection. 1

Peter Turchi, using maps as metaphors for understanding the writing process, explains that they have been used throughout human history to represent knowledge, while at the same time emphasizing the unknown: “maps suggest explanations; and while explanations reassure us, they also inspire us to ask more questions, consider other possibilities.” 2 Collaborating with colleagues in the ongoing design and revision of a music teacher education program is akin to the process of drawing a map. As curriculum deliberation proceeds, the path through a program toward teacherdom emerges, particularly as we ask ourselves: What are the features of the journey the preservice teacher is likely to encounter along the way? What are the starting points, the midpoints, the hoped-for destinations? Where will the teacher land for a moment on familiar and secure spots that feel like home? Are there pitfalls and quagmires to be avoided at all costs? Are there some pitfalls that may be formative in gaining confidence to analyze and resolve 21

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dilemmas likely to be encountered later on? Where are the turning points that give the teacher a glimpse of new horizons, new arenas for professional growth and change? In this chapter, I argue that in this particular milieu, envisioning the landscape of music teacher education opens up only limited space for imaginative and constructive thinking because we are seldom afforded the grace of a blank page at the outset. Instead, our visions are constrained because we must fit the features of our desired teacher education landscape into already defined contours of educational policy and generalized claims about teachers’ work. The challenge of our time is to reconcile our visions of the possible within the politically prescribed borders of teacher accountability requirements, state licensure standards, and systems for teacher evaluation without reducing these visions to mere compliance. How does it feel, then, to move in and out of the multiple and often conflicting demands that attend the preparation of music teachers for their future roles? For just a moment longer with this opening metaphor, I turn to imaginary maps from literature. I think of one of the first maps to capture our imagination as children—a place of adventure where each character in A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh has his or her own territory of the Hundred Acre Wood. I am drawn to Eeyore’s gloomy place “in a thistly corner of the forest.” Eeyore, who thinks far too much, and often to no avail: “Why?” and sometimes “Wherefore?” and sometimes “Inasmuch as which?” and “Sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.” 3 As teacher educators, we find ourselves in thistly corners asking Eeyore-like questions as we strive to interpret confusing and often conflicting requirements. Another map beckons, this time from Norman Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth. Milo, the reluctant protagonist, suffers from a lack of imagination. He has seen it all before, and is quite disaffected, until one afternoon, a curious package appears in his room, containing directions for a tollbooth, some precautionary signs, and a map drawn by master cartographers. He assembles the tollbooth, steps into his small electric car, and finds himself whisked along a motorway through the doldrums past Dictionopolis, through the Foothills of Confusion, the Forest of Sight, the curiously silent Valley of Sound to Digitopolis, all on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason. Along the way, Milo meets the oddest assortment of characters and requirements, becoming progressively weary and worn from the journey as he soldiers on. 4 Like Milo, we may feel that we have seen this all before, with echoes of the 1980s “age of accountability,” through the standards movement of the 1990s, through the neoliberal turn of the past decade. 5 One last image comes to mind, this time from fine art instead of children’s literature. I search online for the work of Lordy Rodriguez, who, in a series called New States, creates a visual mash-up of states, cities, and landforms in odd juxtapositions and relationships. 6 Studying these paintings makes me dizzy: How did Ohio, Nebraska, and Arizona end up in the Carolinas? How can Minnesota possibly be adjacent to Death Valley?

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Capturing virtual states of mind as well, the artist also includes Hollywood, Disneyland, Territory, Monopoly, and the Internet as places we frequently inhabit. Rodriguez’s ironic juxtapositions of familiar locations encourage the viewer to leave old ways of thinking behind, caught up in the kaleidoscopic sensibilities of a new age. Bridging again to teacher education, I am fascinated by the prospect of rearranging the features to create what appears to be a new landscape. What if the resultant reconfiguration is an incoherent jumble of worn parts, though? If a revision is merely a reordering, then what has really changed? MAPPING LANDSCAPES AROUND THE CONFERENCE TABLE Many hours are spent seated around a conference table with our colleagues in serious conversation about the present status of our music teacher education programs and, more importantly, what we envision becoming. This dialogue depends upon our willingness to lift ourselves out of the disgruntlement, disaffection, or concerns about the incoherence of external mandates to consider how music teacher preparation might be otherwise, to echo Maxine Greene. 7 The conversation requires a sense of history closely tied to the apparent strengths and sources of pride for the program. It requires discernment about the current state of the program and field, available resources, and good fit with what is already in place. It requires keen imagination to consider where our graduates may be headed and how well we can predict new roles they will be asked to play. Ultimately, we aim for this dialogue to be well informed, revealing, collaborative, and imbued with moral purpose. If we imagine well, the features of the landscape and their interrelations will lead to a more fulfilling journey for our preservice teachers and their longevity in the field. As logical as this sounds, my new colleagues and I are finding that our conversation has been compromised, derailed, hijacked, perhaps. We are having trouble articulating our vision, not because of a lack of desire or capability, urgency or purpose, but because we must first respond to the queries and pressing tasks of state requirements, such as exercises in syllabus alignment with the Illinois Professional Teaching Standards. A non random sample of seven of the 159 knowledge and performance indicators is reproduced here: The competent teacher: • knows strategies to implement behavior management and behavior intervention planning to ensure a safe and productive learning environment;

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• understands when and how to adapt or modify instruction based on outcome data, as well as student needs, goals, and responses; • uses assessment data, student work samples, and observations from continuous monitoring of student progress to plan and evaluate effective content area reading, writing, and oral communication instruction; • understands how to make data-driven decisions using assessment results to adjust practices to meet the needs of each student; • collaborates with others in the use of data to design and implement effective school interventions that benefit all students; • evaluates best practices and research-based materials against benchmarks within the disciplines; • understands the roles of an advocate, the process of advocacy, and its place in combating or promoting certain school district practices affecting students. 8 Like collegial conversations around the conference table, state teaching standards are also based on particular visions of teaching. The language of the Illinois Professional Teaching Standards, which I assume bears some resemblance to the language of standards in other states, reveals an image of teaching that is managerial, technicist, concerned with control of persons, information, processes, and school communities in its focus on data, student monitoring, prescribed interventions, and benchmarks. As I read these standards (and others in the list), I feel like an outsider to schools and universities. They mirror the “outcomes discourse” described by Cochran-Smith, Piazza, and Power who claim that the “discourses of neoliberalism and outcomes are so ubiquitous in teacher education that they are no longer perceptible.” 9 My personal conceptions of teaching seem to be at peril and at odds with these lists. Sometimes the statements in the standards are so opaque or compound that I am left wondering what they mean by the time I reach the full stop. A pattern emerges as we work our way around the table for each “indicator” in the grid: Where does this fit in our curriculum? Where can it be appended to a syllabus? Do we have all of these covered somewhere? Even though we are trying to be professional and as expeditious as possible with the task, we seem to be headed straight to Eeyore’s gloomy bog, deep into the doldrums, or sometimes left to wander in alternate states of mind. For the most part, teacher education colleagues and certification officers in our respective Colleges of Education have been charged with this oversight in order to demonstrate to the state how the curriculum reflects and incorporates these standards. Although this exercise has high-stakes consequences (such as losing one’s capacity to prepare teachers for state licensure), we are not always sure how our efforts will be received or evaluated. A disclaimer is probably appropriate here. My point is not to suggest that little value will come to teachers and teacher education programs via state licensure stan-

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dards, the performance assessment edTPA, the Charlotte Danielson model, and other systems of externally imposed reform. The long-term impact of large-scale initiatives on teachers’ work, school communities, teacher education programs, and education at large remains to be seen. However, we cannot let these mandates define us; we must hold fast to our professional judgment. As we grapple with this onerous task, I wax nostalgic for an imagined past, reminded of a document I have carried with me from university to university, no longer sure of its provenance. This simple page lists what was required to qualify to teach music in 1933 in the state of Iowa: State of Iowa High School Normal Training Examination Thursday a. m., May 18, 1933 Music (Answer but five questions and number each answer to correspond to the question answered.) 1. (a) Make a staff, naming the lines and spaces. (b) Make five kinds of notes and their corresponding rests. 2. Tell what must be accomplished before the children are ready to sing the words with a new tune. 3. (a) Explain how music may be correlated with physical education. (b) Explain how music may be correlated with penmanship. (c) Explain how music may be correlated with art. 4. (a) Define a scale. (b) Tell how the major scale is formed. 5. Write the major scale in the following keys: G, A, E flat, and D flat, using quarter notes. 6. (a) Explain Iowa’s plan for the rural school choir. (b) Name five choir songs that you will have your pupils know. 10

Iowa’s exam of 1933 might now appear simple and naïve, but even in its limited scope, it can be seen as a harbinger of the requirements teachers must meet to earn the privilege of teaching music in school settings. As I was preparing this talk, I was also browsing through Al Gore’s The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change and thought that, although he is speaking about scientific and technological change instead of teacher education, he brings attention to the same reductionist mentality: The cultural legacy that still influences the scientific method is reductionist— that is, by dividing and endlessly subdividing the objects of our research and analysis, we separate interconnected phenomena and processes to develop specialized expertise. But the focusing of our attention on ever narrower slices

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of the whole often comes at the expense of attention to the whole, which can cause us to miss the significance of emergent phenomena that spring unpredictably from the interconnections and interactions among multiple processes and networks. That is one reason why linear projects of the future are so often wrong. 11

As teacher educators, we must put these narrow prescriptions aside to focus on the whole, sadly omitted in much of the discourse of accountability. So many admirable ideals and aims seem to be missing altogether: imagination, artistry, expressiveness, invention, professional judgment, discernment, improvisation, serendipity, perception, sensitivity, caring, moral purpose, social justice, equity, democratic visions. I cannot reconcile managerial, reductionist views of teaching with the ideas that inspire us as well as the preservice teachers in our programs. We would like to begin in a different place on the map altogether. In fact, we would much rather be trusted to create our own maps. The vitality of music teacher education rests on our personal and professional conceptions of good music teaching. Hammerness addresses how personal visions mesh with institutional, organizational, or program visions, reminding us that “vision building becomes a process in which the vision is regularly negotiated and examined rather than being a static mantra to which everyone adheres.” 12 What are alternate starting places for envisioning music teacher education programs as we map out a landscape by choosing our own coordinates and setting our preservice teachers out on their own quest of mapmaking? How do programs articulate visions we hold for music teaching? Do these visions align with the real work of teachers? How do these visions drive our interactions with preservice teachers and the educative experiences we create? The remainder of this chapter will provide three productive routes for prompting deeper answers to these questions through philosophical insight, strategies for curricular deliberation, and consideration of program orientations. Philosophical Routes Our philosophers are needed more than ever in these times for their capacity to address conceptions of music teaching and learning systematically and for elevating discourse through insightful questions. For example, with only one word inserted, a passage from Jorgensen’s Transforming Music Education becomes germane to the issues at hand: “What should music [teacher] education be like?” and “What should be its effects on the people it comprises, the communities in which it takes place, and the general education and wider society of which it is a part?” Within these two probing and capacious questions, Jorgensen challenges us that “a prescriptive plan is out of the question” as an answer because of our inherent human yearning to “[transcend] past

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practice.” 13 Music teacher education is a shared enterprise, not only on behalf of our immediate programs, but on behalf of the network of interrelated communities and contexts it seeks to serve. Just as we often start a journey with our students by gathering around us the texts that challenge and provoke us, so does the shared reading and discussion of luminary voices animate our collegial conversations. Here is a list that is nearly thirty years old but, for me, still holds so much promise, especially in the focus on the inventive power of teachers. In his chapter for the 84th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing, Vincent Rogers provided a list of characteristics that opens up the dialogue around the conference table. To what extent might our programs provide the following avenues for growth and teachers’ initiative? Characteristics of Teacher Education Programs that Foster Intellectual Growth 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

The opportunity to create, invent, and improvise. The opportunity to practice the art of perception. The opportunity for reflection. The opportunity to represent ideas and experience. The opportunity to collaborate. The opportunity to engage in genuine inquiry. The opportunity to experience. The opportunity to study ideas and settings holistically so that relationships and connections may be explored. 9. Opportunities to participate in mentoring, modeling, and apprenticeship activities. 10. An emphasis on growth, on learning “in process.” 14 Rogers seeks to elevate intellectual engagement in preparing to teach; this list is broad in scope to invite more sophisticated thinking. What if we were to add more characteristics that reflect contemporary concerns for persons and communities, such as 11) The opportunity to awaken sensitivity to and respect for diversity, and 12) The opportunity to discuss the moral purposes of music teachers’ work? For me, Rogers’s simple statements inspire in a way that more closed standards do not. I am reminded of Elliot Eisner’s discussion of the constructive power of standards, when they are viewed as “meaningful and non-rigid . . . aids, or heuristics for debate and for planning.” In this open-ended view, a list like this, as Eisner might suggest, would form a “practical hub” around which dialogue, deliberation, and clarification of aims might ensue. 15 Perhaps, as we gather around the conference table, we might also gather up wise and provocative examples such as these

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to inform and inspire capacious and contemporary program visions. They provide direction—a compass point, to build on the metaphor—for creative program development. Strategies for Deliberation and Question Sets For the past several years, I have been fortunate to participate in an initiative sponsored by NASM, the Working Group on Music Teacher Education, consisting of a small panel of music teacher educators engaged in a multiyear discussion of aims and processes. This initiative has felt very different in scope, alignment, and purpose from the strictures of licensure we face. In a series of meetings, we produced sets of questions to be used by music education programs, the purpose of which is to “prompt imaginative alternatives and careful deliberation as faculty members revise and restructure curricula.” 16 The preface for the first set emphasizes the role of curriculum deliberations in expanding the scope of the breadth of the dialogue: Our first purpose is to help individuals become musicians and teachers who have the basis for entering the field and also for working and maturing in a dynamically evolving educational environment for 40–50 years. This means preparing students to work in conditions we cannot fully predict, with things we don’t fully understand, and with challenges we cannot fully anticipate. Our goals for our art form and thus the artistic goals for our programs have significant influence on goals in other areas.

This, to me, suggests that we let go of prescription, while still embracing proleptic moments of hopefulness. The paradox of preparation is to move forward in productive ways even as we cast aside formulaic solutions. This requires professional discernment and imagination in equal measure. An initial multipart question helps collegial groups to articulate key priorities: 1) Based on our goals for music, teaching, and music teaching, what content and levels of knowledge and skills are: a) essential no matter what the future brings? Why? b) important, especially short-term—the period we can reasonably predict? Why? c) desirable? Why? The next set counters the “one size fits all” myth of universal prescriptions, allowing programs to balance distinctive foci with the particularities of diverse contexts and settings. 2) To what extent do our answers change depending on a) teaching specialization?

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b) location? c) how general or specialized our preparation goals are? d) cultural contexts and expertise in our institution? e) realities in our institution? Programmatic vision emerges from these discussions, and from the reflective opportunity of juxtaposing vision with present circumstances. 3) What do our answers reveal about content priorities? 4) What challenges emerge when we compare our answers to questions 1, 2, and 3 with what we are doing? These initial questions are followed by others that address action plans for change and movement toward implementation, useful in anticipating what may happen as plans are put into place. Prompted by these questions, faculty exercise imagination by generating new possibilities; inform and deepen the conversation by drawing on insightful analysis; prioritize courses of action to guide revision and refinement of the curriculum; contextualize the process in order to seek “good fit” with the character of the institution, the community, and the expertise of the faculty; revisit models and program components in reflective cycles of deliberation; and evaluate the coherence and integrity of the program and the experiences it creates for the preservice teachers for whom it is intended. Referring back to cartography, these question sets bring the features of the landscape into sharper relief and allow mapmakers to choose the ones they will include from among these features. Program Orientations A third powerful notion has to do with distinctive approaches to music teacher education and the variety of approaches we find in the field. We might be curious to ask whether there are discernable differences across programs in light of the outcomes-based, externally driven policy mandates. I am reminded of an essay of Liz Wing’s, “Music Teacher Education as Victory Garden,” in which she set out to locate particular themes that reflected the academic traditions of the conservatory, the normal school, and the liberal arts college. Wing traced various historical eras and emphases in music teacher education from the 1950s onward before attempting to identify robust patterns in four well-known programs of music teacher education. She noted that, although there were similarities related to national and state variants of policy initiatives, program differences were evident as a result of “nourishing, observing, experimenting, and, occasionally, weeding” our local and well-tended plots. 17 These distinctions may also reflect what Feiman-Nemser calls conceptual orientations, reflecting emphases or weighting of priorities

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in the preparation of teachers. “An orientation refers to a set of ideas about the goals of teacher preparation and the means for achieving them.” 18 Feiman-Nemser’s typology provides descriptive rather than prescriptive categories, which do not exist in watertight compartments and can overlap and coexist within the same program. She explains that they should “give direction to the practical activities of teacher preparation, such as program planning, course development, instruction, supervision, evaluation” but they are “not tied to particular forms of teacher preparation. They can shape a single component or an entire professional sequence, apply to undergraduate as well as graduate-level programs.” 19 She derived the five orientations— academic, practical, technological, personal, and critical/social—from analyzing multiple conceptual variants of teacher education. Evidence of these five orientations can be seen in many guises, including texts for introductionto-teaching-music courses, conference presentations, course descriptions, mission statements, and other representations of what it means to be prepared to teach music. Even the matchmaking effort of choosing cooperating teachers for student teacher placement can be seen as an exercise of aligning orientations. 20 The academic orientation is “concerned with the transmission of knowledge and the development of understanding,” especially as a subject matter specialist. Deep knowledge of the content area is sought. Feiman-Nemser remarks that in general teacher education, this subject matter preparation has received relatively little stress or significance when compared to pedagogical preparation, leading her to call this a “missing paradigm” among the orientations. 21 This is certainly not the case in music, where undergraduate programs prioritize studies in music theory, music history, and music performance. This orientation is evident when individuals argue that music teachers should be prepared first and foremost as strong musicians, leaving the pedagogical aspects of teaching for later in the degree program, or even until induction. The work of the Holmes Group reflected this emphasis. A practical orientation forwards “aspects of craft, technique, and artistry that skillful practitioners reveal in their work.” 22 Associated with the apprenticeship system, this approach stresses learning from experience and learning from master teachers in the field. The wisdom of practice is highlighted. When the practical orientation becomes a caricature, I think of conference presentations or publications that promise to address “everything you didn’t learn in methods class”—a compilation of tips and advice about getting along with school personnel, navigating school procedures, and so on. The technological orientation “focuses on the knowledge and skills of teaching” 23 with an emphasis on proficiency. Competency-based programs of the 1980s come to mind as “learning to teach involves the acquisition of principles and practices derived from the scientific study of teaching.” 24 I recall vividly the assumptions and schemes of the teacher effectiveness era,

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having taught for one year early in my career as a staff development “trainer” in a school district that promoted the Madeleine Hunter approach. The observable behaviors associated with teaching were the focus and were similar in many ways to the categorical schemes of teacher knowledge and skills included in current standards-based systems. A personal orientation “places the teacher-learner at the center of the educational process,” in which “learning to teach is construed as a process of learning to understand, develop and use oneself effectively.” 25 An emphasis is placed on self-directed exploration and inquiry processes. Personal agency is addressed through the integration of strategies or methodologies that are embedded in the program and encountered frequently, such as studies of self (sense making, autobiography, values); school context (shadow studies and classroom study); and music teaching and learning (through cases, analysis of curricular models, collaborative ventures). Within a personal orientation, teachers study their own beliefs and practices, students’ understanding, the influence of school communities, and deep commitments to subject matter, in integrative and synthetic ways for the purpose of lifelong learning. The critical/social orientation “combines a progressive social vision with a radical critique of schooling,” concerned with challenging inequities based on class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and dis/ability. 26 This approach is associated with progressive education, critical pedagogy, emancipatory teaching, and student empowerment. In my own doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I first encountered this critical/social orientation as we confronted persistent social issues, using teacher education as an ameliorative force. The value in considering these orientations immediately becomes apparent while we are making curricular decisions on behalf of the music teacher education program. Consider, for example, the selection of texts for an Introduction to Teaching Music course, or more broadly, texts that might be used across the curriculum in order to integrate powerful ideas. The selection process is likely to be infused with underlying assumptions about what it means to teach and how distinctive sets of claims and concepts about teaching are forwarded in the texts. In general teacher education, one might examine Ayers or Bullough and Gitlin as contrasts in orientation. 27 In music education, personal and program alignments come into play when we are examining the conceptual orientations, both implicit and explicit, such as those represented in Erwin, Edwards, Kerchner, and Knight; Campbell, Demorest, and Morrison; or Campbell, Thompson and Barrett, among others. 28 This is but one example of the ways that program orientations may come into focus for faculty deliberation and crystallization of program goals. To my knowledge, no large-scale analysis of program orientations in music education has been conducted, nor has there been an attempt to articulate qualitative distinctions between and among philosophical stances. An

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illustrative and ambitious parallel, though, is represented by Linda DarlingHammond’s study of multiple teacher education programs, which began in part as a way to examine why certain graduates of distinctive programs become known for their commitment to certain ideals and approaches. These “endorsements” of programs through the characteristics of program graduates formed the basis for a mixed methods study of seven exemplary teacher education programs, involving an impressive array of quantitative and qualitative data sources. Pertinent to this chapter is Darling-Hammond’s finding that in these exemplary programs, “a common, clear vision of good teaching [permeated] all coursework and clinical experiences.” The programs used explicit strategies that led students to “confront their own deep-seated beliefs and assumptions about learning and students,” and to “learn about the experiences of people different from themselves.” 29 Program components included case study methods, teacher research, performance assessments and portfolio evaluation, clearly fostering a disposition toward inquiry and close alignment with school contexts. Research on program orientation and design suggests that program coherence through shared values and visions is critical in deciding upon key features, components, and pathways through preservice teacher preparation. It is as if the compass points and the features of the landscape come together in clearer images of teacher learning and development. Large-scale projects such as Darling-Hammond’s could inform the study of distinctive programs in music education, which is a field ripe for our scholarship, but until such an ambitious study could be mounted, we can still strive for clarity of values and structures at the local level. The purpose of organizing a music teacher education program around conceptual orientations or strong shared vision is not to inculcate, to promote uniformity, to “color” experience with a particular ideology about music teaching and learning. Ultimately, the clarification of program values must foster or facilitate the sense that the preservice teacher makes of the journey through the program and her launching into the field. I was reminded powerfully of this notion when reading Margaret Schmidt’s study of six preservice teachers’ sense making from within a teacher education program. She traversed the frequently unexamined gap between course work and field experiences, using Dewey’s theory of experience to examine what these teachers drew from their peer teaching, early field experiences, student teaching, and self-arranged teaching. Her theoretical framework focused on principles of interaction, in which “individuals create meaning from an experience as they interact with its physical and social settings” and continuity, in which “the effect of experience is cumulative, with each experience shaped by prior experiences and in turn shaping future experiences.” 30 In this study, Schmidt focused on what is carried across from the university to the school setting, what insight is formed “between” these sites, and what is discovered anew

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once it is encountered in a school context. Through attending to experience, she was able to document how program elements of the learning community enabled continuity and support. Launching into the Journey Recently, I attended a presentation where participants were asked several times to respond to conceptions of “good teaching” by using our cell phones to transmit data, a technique that quickly gauged the collective responses of those in attendance. Imagine extended discussions of those quick reactions. The way we frame our conceptions by articulating sets of ideas and determining their interrelations in the structure, sequence, and emphasis of the music teacher education curriculum deserves long, slow, deliberate, and reflective dialogue as one of the truly productive “wicked” problems attending our work, essential to music teacher educators’ reform-mindedness. 31 Ultimately, we seek a coherence of principle and practice as we map the terrain, even given the presence of politically drawn boundaries of licensing requirements and externally imposed mandates. On a professional level, the Society for Music Teacher Education serves as forum for deliberating and debating our conceptions of good teaching and for probing the emotional, moral, and ethical dimensions of music teachers’ work. The society gives us space from which to reconsider our roles as guides for our own mapmaking and the mapmaking of others. NOTES 1. Katharine Harmon, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 10. 2. Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2004). 3. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 2009), 45. 4. Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (New York: Random House, 1961). 5. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Peter Piazza, and Christine Power. “The Politics of Accountability: Assessing Teacher Education in the United States.” The Educational Forum 77, no. 1 (2013): 6–27. 6. The reader is encouraged to search online to find reproductions of Lordy Rodriguez’s series of paintings, “New States,” before proceeding. 7. Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995). 8. Illinois State Board of Education, “Illinois Professional Teaching Standards,” from http:/ /www.isbe.state.il.us/profprep/CASCDvr/pdfs/24100_ipts.pdf. 9. Cochran-Smith et al., “Politics of Accountability,” 13. 10. Source unknown. 11. Al Gore. The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (New York: Random House, 2013), xxi. 12. Karen Hammerness, “To Seek, to Strive, to Find, and Not to Yield: A Look at Current Conceptions of Vision in Education,” in Second International Handbook of Educational

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Change, ed. Andy Hargreaves, Ann Lieberman, Michael Fullan, and David Hopkins (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 1044. 13. Estelle R. Jorgensen, Transforming Music Education (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 118. 14. Vincent Rogers, “Ways of Knowing: Their Meaning for Teacher Education,” in Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing: Eighty-Fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, ed. Elliot Eisner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 251–53. 15. Elliot Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 173. 16. NASM Working Group on Music Teacher Education, “Local Reviews of Undergraduate Teacher Education Programs: Question Set 1 Curriculum,” http://nasm.arts-ccredit.org/site/ docs/Resources:%20UG%20Curricula/Music_Teacher_Prep-QSet1.pdf, 5. The NASM Working Group on Music Teacher Education included Rob Cutietta, chair; Janet R. Barrett, Andre de Quadros, William Fredrickson, Leila Heil, Linda Thompson, and Betty Anne Younker. 17. Lizabeth Wing, “Music Teacher Education as a Victory Garden,” College Music Symposium 49/50 (2009/2010): 217–38. 18. Sharon Feiman-Nemser, Teachers as Learners (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 74. 19. Ibid. 20. Feiman-Nemser’s typology has been developed in the context of music teacher education in Mark Robin Campbell, Linda K. Thompson, and Janet R. Barrett, “Supporting and Sustaining a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching: Implications for Music Teacher Education,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 22, no. 1 (2012): 75–90; and Mark Robin Campbell, Linda K. Thompson, and Janet R. Barrett Constructing a Personal Orientation to Music Teaching (New York: Routledge, 2010). 21. Feiman-Nemser, Teachers as Learners, 76. 22. Ibid., 79. 23. Ibid., 82. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 85. 26. Ibid., 88. 27. See William Ayers, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); and Robert V. Bullough and Andrew D. Gitlin, Becoming a Student of Teaching: Linking Knowledge Production and Practice (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001). 28. See Joanne Erwin, Kay Edwards, Jody Kerchner, and John Knight. Prelude to Music Education. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003); Patricia Shehan Campbell, Steven M. Demorest, and Steven J. Morrison, Musician and Teacher: An Orientation to Music Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); or Mark Robin Campbell, Linda K. Thompson, and Janet R. Barrett, Constructing a Personal Orientation. 29. Linda Darling-Hammond, Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 41. 30. Margaret Schmidt, “Learning from Teaching Experience: Dewey’s Theory and Preservice Teachers' Learning,” Journal of Research in Music Education 58, no. 2 (2010): 132. 31. See Janet R. Barrett, “Wicked Problems and Good Work in Music Teacher Education,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 21, no. 2 (2012): 3–9; Dennis Thiessen, and Janet Revell Barrett, “Reform-Minded Music Teachers: A More Comprehensive Image of Teaching for Music Teacher Education,” in New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning, ed. Richard Colwell and Carol Richardson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 759–85.

Chapter Three

Pedagogy and Mission Vincentian Personalism and Cocreation of Musical Experience Jacqueline Kelly-McHale

Every Thursday around 11:30 a.m., a group of music teacher candidates walks out of the School of Music at DePaul University in Chicago and heads to their cars with arms full of classroom instruments, hand drums, and rhythm sticks. Often carrying portable speakers for their iPods and iPads, they pile into their cars and head out to a Chicago public school to teach a thirty-minute music lesson. One afternoon, upon arrival at the school, a kindergarten student runs up to one of the teacher candidates, flying by a construction sawhorse that he is not supposed to pass. A playground monitor runs, trying to stop him. As the kindergartener wraps his arms around the teacher candidate, the playground monitor realizes who we are and smiles, “Oh, yes, the music teachers.” Each week, the teacher candidates leave the university as students and arrive at the public school as music teachers, in the eyes of their students. Each school and college on my campus is encouraged to explore how they can fulfill the university’s Vincentian mission to address “urgent human needs” and “ennoble the God-given dignity of each person.” 1 For the music education program, providing music instruction in urban schools, where children might not otherwise receive an arts education, helps fulfill the university mission. The university supports the efforts of the music education program by allowing the program to run as a zero-credit experience that is directed by full-time and adjunct faculty members. However, the music teaching experience is organized as a practicum, which is intended to provide all music education students with a comprehensive teaching experience in general mu35

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sic prior to their student teaching internship. In this chapter, I explore the challenges of merging the practicum experience with the university’s call to social justice through its Vincentian mission. PRACTICUM AND THE MISSION—PRACTICUM AS THE MISSION According to Donald Schön, “a student cannot at first understand what he needs to learn, can learn it only by educating himself, and can educate himself only by beginning to do what he does not understand.” 2 The practicum program is structured to provide teacher candidates with experiences that guide them to discover what they need to learn and to learn through the acts of teaching. Teacher candidates in their third year are instructed to schedule themselves as if they have a class every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. On Tuesdays, the teacher candidates meet with me to review strategies for exploring and presenting musical concepts, discuss nonmusical issues such as behavior and management, and review situations that have arisen during teaching. On Thursdays, the teacher candidates and I travel to the practicum school together, where each teacher candidate is responsible for a thirtyminute general music lesson. In the fall, the practicum is tied to the general music methods class, which allows teacher candidates to practice teaching all of their lessons to peers before presenting them to children at the practicum site. Even with this extra opportunity to practice, learning to teach by being immersed in a public school classroom is a transformative experience for most teacher candidates. As this program grew, the teacher candidates became more focused on the mechanics of effective management and teaching; our sessions together were dominated by discussions and problem solving. I found that shaping novice teachers’ instruction and assisting teacher candidates in their processes of becoming teachers frequently overshadowed the underlying call to service that had initially grounded the program. As I reflect, I can see that my experiences as a general music teacher had influenced the direction of the practicum. I taught for ten years in a school that was very similar to our practicum site. In both settings, the students were primarily Hispanic and from low-income families. My music teaching was deeply influenced by the Kodály approach and was sequential, reliant on a predetermined set of concepts and skills from which materials and repertoire were chosen and instruction planned. 3 My students could sing in tune, read traditional notation, perform, and take rhythmic and melodic dictation, and I felt that I had created a successful general music program. So, when teacher candidates wanted to know which musical concepts should be taught in which order, as well as how they could get the students to listen and behave during music class, I

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answered their questions with examples from my past experiences, sharing techniques and the sequence that I had found most effective. But I did not situate my examples within the practicum context—the school or its students. An important aspect of the university’s Vincentian mission, personalism, which is the idea that service should honor the human dignity and value of the individual person, was not apparent in our practicum. 4 The dignity and value of the young music students in the public school we were supposed to be serving had gotten lost. Pedagogy with a Mission We must examine ourselves to discover our bonds in order to break them. 5 Addressing a perceived divide between foundations and methods courses as well as the segregation between the academy and K–12 schools, Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald propose a reconceptualization of teaching. 6 At the root of their proposal is the establishment of core practices that elucidate the mission of the teacher education program. The dynamic coalescing of pedagogy with mission is not an easy task, as it requires that teacher educators not only demonstrate competencies and understandings about practice as it relates to the students whom our teacher education candidates will teach, but it also requires an understanding of what goals the mission specifically seeks to accomplish via the teacher education candidates’ practice: In programs in which a fundamental aim is to address issues of social justice, teacher educators will need to decide what core practices will best leverage that broader purpose while also focusing pre-service teachers’ learning around more specific conceptual and practical tools. 7

In retrospect, this was my concern about our practicum program. How were we going to establish a program where the students could gain the skills and competencies as they built identities as teachers, while they also learned about issues of diversity and equity? FALL QUARTER: CULTURALLY RELEVANT PEDAGOGY I remember the teachers who said, “You don’t look Puerto Rican,” expecting to hear me say thank you very much. 8 “I remember” are two words that often begin conversations about teaching and learning. We remember specific situations, people, or ideas that affected us in a profound way as well as the moments when the feeling of a

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negative blow seems so much more powerful than positive support. Lydia Cortés beautifully articulates both the negative and the positive in her poem “I Remember.” 9 The poem opens as a Puerto Rican girl goes to kindergarten in a Brooklyn elementary school, and it portrays both overt and subtle ways that the girl’s ethnic identity becomes marginalized. Some teachers, probably intending to compliment this student, tell her “You don’t look Puerto Rican,” while other teachers’ racism is more overt. As the girl becomes the only Puerto Rican in the academic track at her high school, the guidance counselor suggests that she should become a secretary because there is a “need for bilingual secretaries.” 10 Along the way, Cortés points toward some school experiences that made the girl feel successful and important: being cast for a lead role in the elementary school play and working hard to earn good grades from two high school teachers in political science and economics, who showed the girl how wonderful learning could be. The poem ends with a quotation in Spanish from the girl’s father: “tu puedes hacer lo que quieres” (you can do what you desire). 11 I read this poem at the beginning of the fall quarter to my elementary general music class. We discuss the teachers mentioned in the poem and the poet’s impression of each. We seek to understand emotional attachments, both positive and negative, that were formed and why each attachment was profound enough to become a part of a poem—something everlasting. Last year, one of the teacher candidates remarked that it was easy to see in the poem who the good teachers were and who the bad teachers were, to which I countered “why?” The teacher candidate responded, “The good teachers cared. The bad teachers didn’t.” The poem illustrates how experiences of schooling are deeply rooted in race and ethnicity. But predominantly white, middle-class suburban students, like those enrolled in my class, may never have experiences of schooling that the poem describes. For them, “you can do what you desire” may be a takenfor-granted assumption, rather than a question. Our class discussion of the poem provided necessary space to embark on what I hoped to be a reimagined practicum experience. The teacher candidates became aware that the poem expressed feelings of being judged and marginalized but also feelings of being noticed and understood. The poem thus became an effective starting point for our discussions. In addition, before we entered the elementary school, I decided to focus our class readings and discussions on culturally relevant pedagogy. As defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally relevant pedagogy has three important facets: maintaining high academic standards and appropriately scaffolded support for students, encouraging students’ cultural competence, and developing students’ capacity to understand and critique power relationships that contribute to social inequity. 12 The teacher candidates found the process of unpacking culturally relevant pedagogy to be very challenging. Because

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the practicum was tied to their elementary music methods class, the teacher candidates expected to study techniques of teaching. Culturally relevant pedagogy felt like an add-on to them instead of the foundation for teaching. I realized that I needed to better ground the experience and to help the students begin to construct a useful definition of culture. As a group, we settled on Delgado-Gaitan and Trueba’s definition of culture as, “the dynamic system of social values, cognitive codes, behavioral standards, worldviews, and beliefs used to give order and meaning to our own lives as well as the lives of others.” 13 This was followed by each student’s inventory of personal culture, as well as norms, activities, symbols, and rituals that marked or defined their cultural groups. To do this, we began with a simple exercise. Each teacher candidate wrote answers to the following questions on sticky notes and then placed their answers on corresponding poster boards positioned throughout the university classroom. • • • • • • •

Where are you from? How do you describe yourself physically? How do you describe yourself spiritually? How do you describe yourself financially? How do you describe yourself musically? What do you listen to? How do you describe yourself in terms of work? How do you describe yourself in terms of free or social time?

Despite the homogeneity of background among the teacher candidates, their answers varied. We discussed commonalities and differences. We also started to examine which of our responses were shaped by religious beliefs, family, friendships, and sexual orientation. This exercise helped the teacher candidates acknowledge that they did have a culture, and even though they were members of the “dominant culture,” there were still differences among them. Once this exercise was completed, we took a walk. Getting out into the Neighborhood Villegas and Lucas discuss the importance of teachers getting out into the neighborhoods in which they teach. 14 The purpose is to help teacher candidates and teachers better understand the places where children and their families reside. It can also broaden teacher candidates’ perspectives on difference and diversity. Knowledge of the community can translate into knowledge of the students, leading toward building community in the classroom. 15 So, the teacher candidates were instructed to prepare as if they had a job interview, to find out about the school in which they would be teaching via the school’s website and its state report card. They were then asked to get to the school via public transportation, which forced them to walk around the

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neighborhood and ensured that they arrived at the school during outdoor recess. I felt that it was important for them to see the students in the school at their most social and free part of the day. When the teacher candidates returned from their walk, they reported that the school’s demographics did not reflect the neighborhood they saw. The neighborhood was filled with beautifully gentrified homes and manicured, albeit small, yards The teacher candidates had walked past a Whole Foods, an organic restaurant, a Gymboree store, and several boutique-type shops. One of them brought in a flyer from a five-bedroom single-family home on a city lot of 25 by 108 feet that was being sold for about a million dollars. Where were the neighborhood children attending school? They weren’t attending at our practicum site! The students at the school where the practicum was held were predominantly low-income (83.7 percent) and Hispanic (83.2 percent). Although 23.4 percent had been designated Limited English Proficient (LEP) students, according to the assistant principal, the majority of the Hispanic students spoke both Spanish and English. 16 These students were bused in from nearby housing projects because the schools that formerly served those projects had been closed. The students who lived in the neighborhood, in contrast, attended select-enrollment magnet schools, lottery magnet schools, or private schools, all of which had music programs. 17 The families who lived in the neighborhood had more choices for educating their children by virtue of their economic and social capital. This walk around the neighborhood represented the teacher candidates’ first step toward recognizing social inequities as they are reproduced in schools, a fundamental aspect of cultural critique, according to Ladson-Billings. As Villegas and Lucas commented, teachers must “come to recognize the intricate connection between schools and society. They must come to see that, as traditionally organized, schools help to reproduce existing social inequalities while giving the illusion that such inequalities are natural and fair.” 18 The information that teacher candidates gathered, followed by our discussions, led to what would become our essential question for the year: Did they, the teacher candidates, want to reproduce their own music education experiences, or did they want to create a relevant music education through understanding and ennobling their students? Readings To help my students better understand the three facets of culturally relevant pedagogy, I also assigned readings and then used our meetings as a time when we could discuss the readings and how various concepts might apply to teaching at the practicum site. We read Gloria Ladson-Billings’s article “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” excerpts from Educating Esme, Carlos Abril’s article “Responding to Culture

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in an Instrumental Music Program,” Angela Valenzuela’s chapter “Subtractive Schooling, Caring Relations, and Social Capital in the Schooling of USMexican Youth,” and Sonia Nieto’s “Profoundly Multicultural Questions.” 19 During the fall quarter, students seemed confused about how the readings and our discussions could apply to their lessons, and at times they seemed to ignore our discussions altogether. It was my hope that, as the academic year progressed, the power of comparison between what we read and discussed and what was happening in their classes would push them along and help them make connections. WINTER QUARTER: MOVING FROM CONTROL AND OBEDIENCE TO MUTUALITY The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not . . . but no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. 20

Early conversations in our class and in practicum meetings involved exploring the teacher candidates’ past experiences as students. As they reflected, I began to gain some understanding of the teacher candidates’ visions. 21 I started recording their questions, such as “How do I discipline students?” “What do I do if the students won’t listen to me?” “Is someone going to be there to help me handle the class?” Because the college students were novices, some fear of teaching for the first time was understandable. Nevertheless, their questions made me uneasy. The teacher candidates were concerned with how they could control students and make the students obedient. This stood in stark contrast to the readings I had selected to guide teacher candidates’ thinking about culturally relevant pedagogy. I had hoped that the teacher candidates would be focused on understanding the musical and cultural assets that the students brought into the classroom. Lana’s Story One day, one of the teacher candidates, Lana, came out of her primary classroom in tears: “The kids wouldn’t listen to me, and the classroom teacher just keeps yelling at them,” she cried. As I helped calm Lana, I realized that she had never experienced the harshness that was occurring in the classroom. When I asked her about her memories of elementary school, she simply replied that she did not remember any teacher screaming at her or her classmates.

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I felt that this specific situation was one that could provide insight into our understanding of being culturally relevant, so during our next class meeting I asked Lana to share what had happened. Lana explained to her peers that the students in her elementary class didn’t listen and could not sit still for any amount of time. She described them as being out of control and difficult. The classroom teacher, Mrs. Mark, had warned Lana that the students were tough to manage. Mrs. Mark spent a lot of time screaming at the students as a means to control the classroom, but Lana felt the strategy was inappropriate, and further, the strategy wasn’t working. The teacher candidates first asked Lana questions about her lesson plans, transitions, and pacing, and I started to feel that they were not absorbing any part of our readings or discussions of culturally relevant pedagogy. Finally Amy, who was also teaching in a primary classroom, asked if the students ever tried to hug Lana. Lana looked shocked by the question, but she answered that she tried to discourage hugging because it might be viewed as inappropriate. Amy countered with the question of whether, in light of the screaming, students might be looking for a little bit of compassion from an adult. Owen, another member of the group, commented that screaming is common in situations when people want to control others, but in classrooms sometimes students block out the screaming and disengage. Amy referenced the idea that effective teachers foster relationships with their students and worked to be fair, an idea she took from a reading by Ladson-Billings. 22 Amy then asked, “If you are trying to control, can you really build a healthy relationship?” The teacher candidates had been thinking about the readings. Lana’s situation gave them an opportunity to begin to contextualize and apply what they were learning. As a group, we discussed how Valenzuela applied Noddings’s construct of authentic caring. 23 I had the teacher candidates read a vignette about a high school band teacher who recognized that his students were not learning because they were hungry. To resolve that situation, he began cooking tamales for his students and bringing them to band. The band teacher did not reach the students because of the tamales; rather, he demonstrated through his actions that he understood his students and had compassion for their circumstances. Lana needed to show similar understanding and compassion. As a group we came up with a plan for Lana. When she entered the classroom she was to make eye contact with every student, smile, and say “I am so happy to be here with you today—now let’s make some music!” The next step was to use a piece of music that the students liked, in this case “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz, for a steady-beat activity in the guise of freeze dance. Lana added the dimension of asking a few students to lead the steady-beat activity, thus drawing in students as co-creators. I observed Lana the day she tried this. After the students danced, froze, and laughed, Lana looked at them with the biggest smile I had ever seen. Lana then asked the students if they had fun and explained that music could be a lot of fun when everyone

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worked together and tried their best. Lana then asked the students to rate their own behavior during the freeze-dance activity. She told them to show her a thumbs-up in front of their heart if they felt that they behaved well and a pinky up if they felt they could do better. She and I were both surprised at the students’ honesty, but by giving the students opportunity to evaluate, Lana had begun to shift the power structure of the music classroom. After that lesson, Lana smiled more, accepted hugs, complimented the students on new hairstyles and shoes, and made a point to acknowledge when they were working well. But most important, she made students partners in the process. She invited the students to share their favorite songs, gave them opportunities to lead activities, employed thinking buddies for quick assessments, and started to plan with the students in the forefront instead of herself. Returning to the quote from Baldwin, I wanted Lana and the other teacher candidates to recognize that sometimes the expectation of obedience is used to strip a person of their dignity and to keep them from questioning the status quo. Although Lana’s teaching was not perfect, her desire to understand the students and her invitation for students to share leadership in the music classroom were keys to her success. But understanding must be mutual. Using a bridge as a metaphor, we discussed the educational spaces that students in elementary schools and teacher candidates occupy. On one side of a river is the world of the student, and on the other side is the world of the teacher—sometimes the opposite side of the bridge seems so distant. I explained to the teacher candidates that we needed to learn to move across the bridge in two directions not just one. The goal is not a unidirectional crossing of the bridge where teacher candidates get to know the students. The students must have the opportunity to know their teachers as well. Once we establish a flow that does not restrict directionality, then we can start to build a classroom that recognizes the dignity and value of each individual. As a class, the teacher candidates brainstormed ways that they could get to know the students better—everything from name tags, more small group work, listening activities that incorporated drawing or writing, meeting with the classroom teacher, surveying the students about favorite music and the things that they wanted to do in music as well as outside of music, and hanging out at lunch/recess (we taught immediately after lunch/recess) were suggested and implemented. I noticed a slight shift a few weeks later. The teacher candidates were happier and were more confident. The students looked excited and happy to see their music teachers. Our weekly conversations became more fluid and less fixed. The teacher candidates stopped requesting solutions and started brainstorming ways to present concepts and engage students. I noticed that as their language changed, so did their lessons. The teacher candidates were using more music that was suggested by the students. They were also incorporating more socio-cultural information

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about the songs that they were using in the classrooms and making connections between the songs and students’ experiences. But the bridge was more challenging to cross in the other direction. The white, middle-class teacher candidates often struggled with how to share something of themselves with the students—and whether it was appropriate to share. Ladson-Billings gave one explanation of how this difficulty arises: In almost every place I’ve been, most of the preservice and inservice people that I’ve worked with have been European American monolingual women, whose culture, to them, is invisible. They tend to believe that culture is that thing “all you other nice people have.” But if you were to turn around and say to those people, “Tell me something about your culture,” they’re likely to say, “Well, you know, I don’t have any culture. I’m just an American.” 24

For teacher candidates who were just beginning a journey toward recognition and critique of social inequity, racism and classism stood out as major issues, and understanding students’ cultures became an overriding pedagogical concern. Owen, however, found a way to share some of his values by focusing on sexism. Owen’s Story “I’ve Been to Haarlem” is a song that has been reported to be a drinking song from England but is often taught as being about the trials of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. Owen chose this song for his fourth-grade class from standard folk repertoire that was musically appropriate for children, but he acknowledged that it was not as culturally relevant as some of the repertoire taught by other teacher candidates. Owen was focused on the line “You better watch out when the boat begins to rock, or you’ll lose your girl in the ocean.” Even with his understanding of the song’s origins, Owen thought it seemed unfair to assume that a girl would be the one to fall overboard. So, Owen asked his fourth graders about whether a girl is a possession and whether the wording of the song seemed to be sexist. As his conversation with the fourth graders evolved, the students began referring to misogynist lyrics common in many current hip-hop and other popular songs. A discussion of how those lyrics reflected society occurred. Owen reported that he was shocked at the level of understanding the students demonstrated. In the next lesson, Owen challenged the students to come up with a new lyric that would give them the opportunity to lose something that they really would like to see go away. The responses included “homework,” “school lunches,” “being poor,” and “guns.” In the class, and for the final performance, Owen incorporated the students’ revised lyrics.

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SPRING QUARTER: CO-CREATING A MUSIC EXPERIENCE The practicum year ended with a performance where each classroom performed a few pieces for each other. It was a noisy and chaotic celebration of the year because we could not make arrangements for the teacher candidates to rehearse with their students in the auditorium prior to the performance. I sat back and watched as the teacher candidates worked harder than I had ever seen to guide the students to a successful performance. Success no longer meant a perfect performance or students who obediently stood and sat with a single cue. It meant a performance that came from the students and for the students. As the teacher candidates scurried around organizing classroom instruments, arranging students on the stage, and searching for lost tuning forks, I recognized that something else had occurred over the course of the school year. The teacher candidates entered the practicum viewing the teacher’s role in the classroom as one of leader and musical guru. However, they learned to let go of the formalized vision of leader and became co-creators in a musical experience. This was evidenced by the sounds and the smiles. Yes, there were mistakes and missed cues, but everyone smiled. The joy was clear and music sounded especially satisfying. It also became clear that the issues of power, as evidenced by the original desire of the teacher candidates to control their classrooms, evolved into an understanding of the importance of mutuality. After the performance, one of the teacher candidates shared with me that it was not until he started focusing on his students’ perspective that management became easier. He had begun incorporating music that the students had expressed an interest in, began asking students questions about their outside interests, and, most importantly, started talking about the music beyond the traditional view of musical elements as concepts. ALIGNING PERSONAL AND PROGRAM VISION I remember being amazed when they made learning a wonder-filled adventure. 25

The purposeful shift in the focus of the practicum had enabled teacher candidates to be more open to the students in their classrooms. The shift also articulated a vision of a music education program that was more clearly aligned with the university’s Vincentian mission. In previous years, the practicum was situated as an experience that was required and “good for” for the students. It had been a pedagogical space where the teacher candidates could practice the basics of music teaching while working toward the development of their music teacher identity. Incorporation of service and social justice had

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been haphazard. Redesigning the practicum to focus on culturally relevant pedagogy allowed for both the teacher candidates and me to consider how personalism, the ennobling of each person’s dignity, could be rooted in music education practice. Instead of working on providing a service to a public school, we became stakeholders and partners in that school. We were able to explore the inequities of schooling as they were manifested in our classrooms each week. Conversations about race and language moved beyond the physical manifestations of these concepts and started to include what impact they had on music, both the music that was being taught and the music with which the students identified. The mission of the program became clear to the teacher candidates because they were enacting that mission every week. FINAL THOUGHTS For me, taking time to discuss and explore the teacher candidates’ views of teaching and learning in light of the university’s Vincentian mission has muddied the waters of music teacher education. In principle, it seems that a practicum experience such as this one would prepare the teacher candidates for student teaching in many valuable ways. A full year of teaching, albeit thirty minutes per week, under supervision and receiving continual feedback, should enable a teacher candidate to develop the planning, management, and pacing skills required for success in a classroom. However, the continual discussions on cultural relevance and issues of control and obedience also created a space for questions about what we had experienced, or about what we had been taught previously. This space for questioning was primarily located at the edges of the experience. I saw it and heard it in the video recordings of the teacher candidates and in our weekly meeting. It was not constant, but it was there. As a former elementary general music teacher with ten years of experience and mastery completion of Kodály levels, I came into higher education with skills, but also with questions. I was not sure that the approach that I took in my classroom was the most beneficial or relevant to preservice teachers. The re-envisioned practicum has reinforced my questions and brought me to a point where I am wondering if we are justified in teaching predetermined skills and concepts that all musicians ought to know. Teacher candidates frequently ask me, “How can we use popular music to teach quarter notes and eighth notes?” Embedded in the question, on the one hand, is a desire to connect with elementary students and the musical culture in which such students are already immersed. But on the other hand, the question also demonstrates the hegemonies of Western, European art music and approaches to music education such as Orff or Kodály. Why do we find it necessary to teach quarter and eighth notes in a particular sequence? The

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process of privileging particular musics—and particular music pedagogies— is invisible to the teacher candidates, based on the teacher candidates’ previous experiences as music students, and through observations of master teachers in the field. Music teacher education has given the illusion that privileging particular music and pedagogy is natural and fair, a view similar to the one in the comment made by Villegas and Lucas about schools. This is how the waters become further muddied: I have begun to question my methods class and have started to reconstruct the process through which I teach the teacher candidates. However, I am also required to place my students in P–12 classrooms for student teaching, and I often hear from cooperating teachers that they want, or will only take, student teachers who have experiences with the specific approaches, usually Kodály or Orff, that they use in their classrooms. The cooperating teachers view the university practicum as the perfect setting for teacher candidates to become acquainted with such approaches to elementary general music. I have found that similar circumstances surround the hiring prospects of new music teachers; many job postings explicitly require experience with particular pedagogies. Considering these expectations, I often question whether the re-envisioned practicum is the right preparation for preservice teachers. Still, I have not found reason to give up. Blind reliance upon a prescriptive practice in order to achieve success does not always permit space for true reflection and growth. Although reflection may occur, it will be a kind of technical reflection on the prescription, but not on the students. Hanley contends that creativity and imagination are the tools through which social justice is realized. 26 But if we keep telling the students what they need to know, and in the process marginalize what they already know or experience, then how are we fostering creative or imaginative acts? Through practicum, we began to challenge the paradigm that placed an emphasis on the typical, and we started to accept the fact that muddy water was much more rich, complex, and potentially exciting that its crystal-clear counterpart. As I have shared, the students slowly came to understand that the repertoire wasn’t what made the classroom responsive—it was a part of it, but the relationships that were forged, the caring, the community that was built, the expectations that they learned not to compromise, the deepening understanding of the students’ culture as more than food and costume, and the learning to value each student and treat each one with dignity were the foundations. These were the things that made a difference in their classrooms and became critical to their development as teachers. This past fall, all the teacher candidates did their student teaching. During a student-teaching observation in a Chicago public elementary school, the music teacher came up to me and said that the student teacher was very responsive. This comment was not as an answer to any questions that I had asked. It was the first thing that the cooperating teacher shared. Her comment helped me realize that we had

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started to move in a direction that could be very positive for all music education stakeholders. The goals of a program are only as strong as the enacted mission of that program. It is one thing to articulate a mission through words; it is another thing entirely to actually make the mission something that provides teacher candidates with the opportunity to act on it and through it. NOTES 1. “University Mission Statement,” DePaul University, accessed December 2, 2013, https://mission.depaul.edu/AboutUs/Pages/MissionStatement.aspx. 2. Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 93. 3. Jacqueline Kelly-McHale, “The Influence of Music Teacher Beliefs and Practices on the Expression of Musical Identity in an Elementary General Music Classroom,” Journal of Research in Music Education 61, no. 2 (2013): 195–216. 4. Ed Udovic, e-mail message to author, March 6, 2014. 5. St. Vincent de Paul archives, Volume 12, letter 205, May 15, 1659. 6. Pam Grossman, Karen Hammerness, and Morva McDonald, “Redefining Teacher: Reimagining Teacher Education” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 15 no. 2 (2009): 273–89. 7. Ibid., 294. 8. Lydia Cortés, “I Remember,” in Teaching with Fire, ed. Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 39. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” American Educational Research Journal 32, no. 3 (1995): 465–91. 13. Concha Delgado-Gaitan and Henry T. Trueba, Crossing Cultural Borders: Education for Immigrant Families in America (London: Falmer Press, 1991), 8. 14. Ana Maria Villegas and Tamara Lucas, Educating Culturally Responsive Teachers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 15. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, “Color Blindness and Basket Making Are Not the Answers: Confronting the Dilemmas of Race, Culture, and Language Diversity in Teacher Education” American Educational Research Journal 32, no. 3 (1995): 493–522. 16. Illinois State Board of Education. “Illinois School Report Card” (Springfield, IL, 2012). 17. Griselda Flores, Personal communication with author, January 17, 2013. 18. Villegas and Lucas, Culturally Responsive Teachers, 23. 19. See Gloria Ladson-Billings, “But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” Theory into Practice 34, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 159–65; Esme Raji Codell, Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1999); Carlos R. Abril, “Responding to Culture in the Instrumental Music Programme: A Teacher’s Journey.” Music Education Research 11, no. 1 (2009): 77–91; Angela Valenzuela, “Subtractive Schooling, Caring Relations, and Social Capital in the Schooling of US-Mexican Youth,” in Beyond Silenced Voices: Class, Race, and Tender in United States Schools, ed. Lois Weis and Michelle Fine (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2005), 83–94; Sonia M. Nieto, “Profoundly Multicultural Questions,” Educational Leadership 60, no. 4 (2002): 6–10. 20. James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, 42. 21. Karen Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn? The Role of Vision in the Early Professional Lives of Teachers,” Journal of Teacher Education 54, no. 1 (2003). 22. Ladson-Billings, “Good Teaching.” 23. Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992).

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24. Arlette Ingram Willis and Karla C. Lewis, “A Conversation with Gloria Ladson-Billings,” Language Arts 75, no. 1 (1998): 63. 25. Cortés, “I Remember.” 26. Mary Stone Hanley, “Introduction: Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice,” in Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way out of No Way, ed. Mary Stone Hanley et al. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–12.

Chapter Four

Aligning Vision with Practice Redesigning Traditional Music Teacher Education through Immersive Learning John W. Scheib, Karin S. Hendricks, Ryan M. Hourigan, and Kimberly J. Inks

At the center of Ball State University’s vision, mission, and strategic plan is an ongoing initiative that focuses on transforming traditional approaches to teaching/learning to a more constructivist, Deweyan experiential learning model, coined Immersive Learning: The immersive learning experience is the signature element of Ball State’s “Education Redefined.” Immersive learning is an intense learning and developmental activity that requires a student to progress well beyond merely learning to realize the intention and goal of education. The immersive learning experience is designed to bridge content knowledge, skill of application, societal need, and lifelong learning. The citizen of the 21st century needs qualities and competencies not easily developed in a traditional teacher-centered classroom: the ability to work in multidisciplinary teams; an appreciation for an array of cultures; an understanding of diverse and changing societies. At Ball State, we create an educational experience that engages the whole person and fosters professional competence relevant for a lifetime of careers. Ball State’s immersive learning experiences shift much of the responsibility of learning to the student. Stretching students through creative rather than directed inquiry, these experiences develop the ability to synthesize and problem solve. Students are required to work collaboratively in teams that are both multifunctional and multidisciplinary. Immersive learning experiences require students to manifest their learning in a tangible outcome that lives on and has utility beyond the duration of the experience itself. Through such transformative

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John W. Scheib, Karin S. Hendricks, Ryan M. Hourigan, and Kimberly J. Inks experiences, students should better understand societal issues in global, local, economic, or environmental contexts. 1

The institution developed guidelines to help define and operationalize these immersive learning projects and distinguish them from other forms of experiential learning. In order for a project to hold the designation of immersive, it must adhere to seven criteria: • The project must carry academic credit; • The project must engage participants in an active learning process that is student-driven but guided by a faculty mentor; • The project must produce a tangible outcome or project; • The project must involve at least one group of students from a given unit, working on a project that is interdisciplinary in nature; • A community partner must be involved in the project, and the results should positively impact the larger community as well the student participants; • The experience needs to focus on student learning outcomes; and • In the end, an immersive learning project should help students define a career path or make connections to a profession or industry. 2 Toward helping faculty develop and implement new immersive learning projects, funding is made available for equipment, materials, travel, and instructor overloads or buyouts; however, faculty must show that their project meets additional requirements in order for a project to receive this support. Projects must demonstrate most of the seven distinctive characteristics of immersive learning (with particular attention to those that are interdisciplinary and community partnered) and also should demonstrate potential to become self-sustaining, not needing additional funding to be offered again in the future. As well, supported projects should involve undergraduate students primarily, contribute to the department’s curricula, not impede the department’s ability to meet its curricular obligations, be an appropriate scholarly or creative endeavor for the faculty member, and be strongly endorsed by the department chair. Faculty members who receive funding are also required to provide assessment data and make a public presentation at project conclusion. Departments and colleges within the institution are held accountable through reporting annually their involvement in developing and offering immersive learning projects for students, with a goal of all students, campuswide, being able to participate in an immersive learning experience both inside and outside their major. The School of Music at Ball State has developed nearly a dozen new immersive learning courses or projects—all interdisciplinary, student-driven, community partnered, addressing real-world issues, and resulting in tangible

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outcomes. What was once viewed as a heavy-handed initiative from upper administration has yielded several exciting and rewarding experiences for students, faculty, and community partners. For example, one recently approved project brings music-performance students together with a nearby city’s mayor, chamber of commerce, preservation society, and arts council to develop an arts festival. Another project provides ongoing opportunity for our music media production and telecommunications students to collaborate, plan, capture, and post-produce a weekly radio show for Indiana Public Radio. In the area of music teacher education, we have developed projects centered on revitalizing and expanding a local youth symphony orchestra program (the Youth Symphony Revitalization Project—Karin Hendricks); providing music, theater, and dance experiences for students with special needs (The Prism Project Immersive Learning Experience—Ryan Hourigan); and supplying weekly music instruction to preschool children and staff members in an at-risk day care center (Young Children as Music Makers project—Kimberly J. Inks). In this chapter, we further describe and deconstruct each of these three music teacher education immersive learning projects to provide the reader with examples of how one music unit transformed traditional music education course curricula into these interdisciplinary, studentled, community-partnered, dynamic learning experiences. YOUTH SYMPHONY REVITALIZATION PROJECT In the Youth Symphony Revitalization Project, Ball State University instrumental methods students partner with the Youth Symphony Orchestras of East Central Indiana (YSOECI), Ball State’s Burris Laboratory School, and other area schools to provide: (a) more practical teaching and administrative opportunities for instrumental methods students, (b) musical and administrative assistance for a youth symphony in need of consistent leadership, and (c) opportunities for community middle and high school instrumentalists to expand upon music performance skills. Ball State University instrumental methods students develop educational expertise through teaching, side-by-side playing and mentoring, observing the professor work with younger students, and performing with music learners in the community. The students play in the orchestra on secondary and primary instruments, teach in small and large groups, and complete administrative committee assignments with real-life youth symphony issues such as recruiting, fundraising, public relations, repertoire management, technology, and creative approaches that are relevant to twenty-first-century youth. The professor acts as methods instructor, director of the orchestra, and facilitator of instrumental methods practicum experiences with the symphony.

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On one day each week, instrumental methods students meet alone for planning and discussion as well as with youth symphony students in rehearsal. By meeting before, during, and after rehearsal, university students can prepare, share committee reports, engage in practicum teaching with youth, and participate in closure and feedback discussions. Students also meet one hour a week in self-selected administrative committees, interact with members of other committees through a private Facebook group, and complete homework assignments online through Blackboard discussion. Immersive Learning Criteria One of two sections of instrumental methods was redesigned to fit the specific criteria for an “immersive learning course” in the following ways: Academic credit. In order to maintain the curricular integrity of the instrumental methods course and keep it aligned with the more traditional (i.e., lecture-based) section, students are required to complete curriculum projects outside of class time, which include (but are not limited to) course readings, teaching reflections, method book evaluation, curriculum unit design, and score analysis. These assignments are completed collaboratively via Blackboard discussion, in which students are required to post weekly reflections/ assignments and then reply with feedback to at least two posts of classmates. Student-driven. One feature of this program that sets it apart from other string projects is the level of student-driven activity that takes place. 3 University students participate in a number of individual, small-group, and full-class projects that involve teaching, performing, and administrative duties. Students are responsible for designing their own lessons, selecting repertoire, recruiting, and interacting with community members. One student representative acts as a liaison between the students and the YSOECI board by attending monthly board meetings. The course professor and graduate assistants oversee all activities by meeting weekly with the students, presenting current YSOECI needs for student committee discussion, and responding to student committee reports. The student-driven approach places a high level of responsibility on the students. Nevertheless, perhaps because of the experiential and student-driven nature of the course, students demonstrate eagerness to participate in ways that continue to surprise the professor. Graduate student intern Irina observed: “I’ve been very impressed how quickly the students take charge and are willing to contribute—likely a reflection of [the immersive learning] approach, from which I’m learning tremendously by watching!” Tangible outcome. This immersive learning project has restored, revitalized, and expanded the YSOECI so that it has again become a functioning, thriving, and growing youth symphony program in Delaware County. This project is regenerating student enrollment, assisting with fundraising, im-

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proving musical quality, and revitalizing public interest in the symphony by offering regular performances for the community and providing enhanced music-learning experiences for young musicians. In addition to regular fall and spring concerts, Ball State University students have further enhanced the image and reach of the YSOECI through local, state, and international outreach. Locally, the YSOECI has collaborated with the East Central Indiana Chamber Orchestra (an adult amateur ensemble), and the group has performed in the local mall, farmer’s market, and retirement home. University students have recently made arrangements for YSO students to travel across the state to participate in a music festival and a field trip to see the Indianapolis Symphony. International outreach has included a web conference with teachers and members of the Escuela Municpal de Música of Guatemala (modeled after the El Sistema de Orquestas program of Venezuela) and assisting the Advocacy Standing Committee of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) with the creation of advocacy video clips. Another tangible product is a documentary video about the youth symphony, created in cooperation with a Ball State telecommunications student. 4 Interdisciplinary. Over the past several semesters, students in the course have worked together as a team, in subcommittees, and in cross-university collaboration with Burris School, other area schools, and the Ball State Telecommunications Department to expand the image and reputation of the YSOECI. Through full-team work as well as through self-selected administrative committee service, students focus on such issues as expansion and growth (recruiting, public relations, and marketing); repertoire enhancement (repertoire selection, library management, score transposition and arranging); public outreach (fundraising, community service, and travel planning); and other student-initiated activities. Students also work together as a team to enhance the musical quality of the orchestra by providing individualized attention to youth symphony members, through side-by-side performing and leading the symphony in warmups and small- and large-group rehearsals. Finally, they enhance the image of the YSOECI among youth and adults in the community through additional outreach performing, teaching, and recruiting in other schools throughout Indiana. Ball State student Kelsey described the demanding yet practical workload the course requires: This class has exposed me to the amount of work required to administer a topnotch ensemble. Even splitting the load . . . we are all doing an incredible amount of work. As an immersive experience, I feel like we are having great opportunities to practice professional situations.

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Community partners. This project was created as a synergistic solution to address distinct needs of each partner. Before the project’s inception, university faculty discussed a need to further help instrumental preservice teachers enhance existing practical skills (e.g., conducting, working with youth, and playing on secondary instruments) that were critical for their future career success. Student evaluations had similarly demonstrated that instrumental methods students were eager for additional hands-on, practical experiences. In the three semesters since the course was developed, Ball State students have expressed appreciation for this opportunity through their course evaluations, recommendations to other students, and, in some cases, by continuing to attend the course in subsequent semesters as volunteers. Ball State student Ian suggested that the practical experiences helped prepare him as a future teacher: “This class has given me an excellent chance to work on practicing for an actual rehearsal with students. I’ve been told that nothing prepares you for teaching except teaching itself. I’ve found this to be quite true.” At the time of the project’s inception, the YSOECI had a history of more than fifty years in the Muncie community. For many years, the Youth Symphony Board provided the School of Music with funds for a graduate assistantship to aid with the direction of the youth symphony. The director position, however, was not funded, and the group had no consistent leadership. With only a graduate assistant running the program, the YSOECI was losing membership, and its board was deliberating closure of the symphony. Now, after seeing the immersive learning project in action, board members have recognized the musical improvement of the ensemble as well as the meaningful interaction between university and younger students. One board member stated: I think that is as good as I have ever heard our orchestra sound in all of these many years. All of the credit goes to the professor and her students. They were fabulous! Please pass this on to all of the students who helped make this a successful semester and year. The board thanks you from the bottom of their hearts.

At the time the project was developed, Burris Lab School string students started as early as the first grade and continued through middle school, but the school did not support a high school orchestra. The Youth Symphony Revitalization Project aimed to provide Burris high school students with a place to continue in orchestral performance, while also offering further performance opportunities for other band and orchestra students in the area (including homeschooled musicians). According to one YSOECI parent, her daughter has enjoyed the social experiences as well as the musical challenges:

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We really want to thank you and the YSOECI for all of the opportunities this experience has afforded [my daughter]. Even more than tonight’s concert and the [field trip] in Indy, we are excited about how this experience has engaged and challenged her.

Student learning outcomes. The Youth Symphony Revitalization Project was created out of a pre-established university course that was already focused on student learning outcomes, which included developing knowledge and experience with (a) rehearsal and diagnostic techniques, (b) administrative tasks, and (c) literacy and performance skills. This immersive learning project expands upon those outcomes by providing real-life experiences that make learning experiences more practical and meaningful. Connections to profession. The goal of the course is to help students apply principles of music performing and teaching to real-world contexts so that students will enter the instrumental music teaching job market already suited with experience-based knowledge about their profession. The handson, student-initiated approach to this course allows graduates to enter the job force with practical experience to inform their decisions and actions. For those students entering music teaching professions, this course provides practical experiences prior to their student teaching that help to ease the transition from classroom to fieldwork. Furthermore, all students, regardless of chosen profession, are able to offer tangible examples of prior success in job interviews, rather than merely offering hypothetical ideas. Ball State student David expressed how the course has helped prepare him for his future career: In this class, I have been presented with organizational, social, musical, and educational opportunities that no other class I have been enrolled in has been able to offer. . . . This class continues to give me practical, real life experience on what it takes to run and direct an educational organization of this caliber.

The Youth Symphony Revitalization Project is a continuing work in progress. Each semester brings a different set of students with new ideas and strategies. Because of the student-driven nature of the course, the course is never the same from semester to semester. While the course professor is a consistent presence for the youth symphony students, the nature of the immersive learning experience provides a great amount of opportunity for the younger students to experience diverse activities, musics, and educational approaches. The YSOECI students have responded to this by offering their own unique and innovative ideas as well—creating an intergenerational community of engaged and enthusiastic learners.

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THE PRISM PROJECT IMMERSIVE LEARNING EXPERIENCE The Prism Project is one of the oldest, self-sustaining immersive learning projects at Ball State University. Since 2009, this program has provided arts experiences for children with special needs, while offering training for preservice music, theater, and dance teachers as well as other university students in majors such as speech pathology and psychology. Each spring semester, this twelve-week program prepares Ball State University students to include exceptional students in their future classrooms and clinical settings while exploring appropriate theater, dance, and music content with children who are challenged with a variety of special needs. A similar program exists in New Orleans, Louisiana, and at the University of Northern Iowa (The Spectrum Project). 5 Immersive Learning Criteria The Prism Project at Ball State University adheres to the seven immersive learning criteria as follows: Academic credit. The Ball State students receive credit in many different ways, such as clinical or observation licensure or elective credit. Students sign in each week; faculty oversee their hours and sign or substantiate credit when needed. An elective course was offered in the spring of 2013 that gave students a chance to travel to New Orleans to start a second Prism Project in partnership with a not-for-profit organization (Families Helping Families of Southeast Louisiana), Tulane University, and the University of New Orleans. Student-driven. Ball State students choose, arrange, implement, and capture music, theater, and dance scenes that are appropriate for students with special needs. Three faculty members from the College of Fine Arts, along with a licensed special educator and a speech pathologist, assist students not only in the implementation of content but also in teaching strategies that are specific to special education, the arts, and students with disabilities. Weekly pre-rehearsal and post-rehearsal briefings are a regular part of the process and are used to mentor BSU students. Typically a theme for the show is chosen. Student leaders in each area are then required to find material that would be suitable for all involved. Faculty mentors assist in adapting material for time, length, and accessibility to the performers. For example, in 2012, the theme of the show was “Ish” based on a children’s book of the same title by Peter Reynolds. 6 The basic theme of the book is that children can pursue their interests with enthusiasm, even when the products of their work are not flawless. The Ball State University Theatre, Music, and Dance students were then charged with coming up with scenes that would fit this theme and the interests of the students. Examples included “ballroom dance-ish,” “rock band-ish,” and other segments that

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allowed the performers to experience an activity without worrying about perfection. At the end of the semester, the entire company offers a capstone performance of the scenes created by the Ball State students and Prism performers. At this time, Ball State students focus on an added layer of outcomes for the performers, such as getting on and off stage, responding to bright lights and loud sounds, and making the performance seamless. This performance also raises awareness, because the audience is typically full of additional Ball State students and members of the East Central Indiana community, many of whom have never seen students with exceptionalities perform. Tangible outcome. The Prism Project has three tangible products or outcomes. First is the capstone performance. Second, each performance is captured in a high-resolution DVD. These same videos are broken down into segments and posted on our third tangible product, our website. 7 This website is designed as a tool for use by other groups who wish to start a Prism Project. Show segments, lesson plans, organizational checklists, and forms are available on this website for use with future projects. It is hoped that this website can also be used as a tool for K–12 teachers who are looking for ideas when working with students who have special needs. Interdisciplinary. We encourage music, theater, and dance majors to become involved with the program because of the need for their diverse backgrounds in a blended arts program. In addition to student participants from those disciplines, we also recruit students from special education, speech pathology, early childhood education, and elementary education because of their backgrounds in special education. We start the recruiting process with returning students who have had at least limited experience volunteering with the existing Prism Project and then target other relevant professional student organizations as needed to spread the word. Since we usually have around thirty performers with special needs, fifty Ball State students can get involved and are needed. Not only are Ball State students needed to direct and supervise weekly rehearsals, but the project often also requires technical assistance from student video, audio, and stage technicians who assist with production needs. Community partners. Like many not-for-profit organizations that serve people with disabilities, the community partners in both Louisiana and Muncie were in a search for programming for their clients. There were many athletic and arts programs for young students with disabilities; however, as the students grew older, opportunities for them to participate in such activities declined, especially in the arts. Such programming deficits caused community partners in each area to reach out to Prism. Additionally, in New Orleans, the location of our second site, there has been a growing problem with programming for students with special needs within charter schools. Many students with special needs are being denied access to programming

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because of their disabilities. This is how the Prism Project fills a muchneeded void within each community. It is well-known throughout the special education community that many students with special needs struggle to develop and maintain social relationships with peers. Often because of their challenges, students with disabilities become isolated from their communities and have a higher incidence of depression and as well as other mental health challenges. The Prism Project, both in Muncie and in New Orleans, has provided a unique opportunity for students with disabilities to learn appropriate social skills, including how to develop and maintain relationships, and learn about the performing arts through direct engagement. Potentially, students with disabilities gain a peer group that understands their challenges. Student learning outcomes. For Ball State students, the Prism Project is centered around the following student learning outcomes. It is hoped that by the end of the process, students will be able to: (a) adapt, accommodate, and modify arts-integrated lessons for students with special needs; (b) understand behavior modifications that are essential to successful classroom management with students with disabilities; (c) develop mentoring and collaborative planning skills for students with special needs; and (d) make connections and form relationships to the profession connected to their major or emphasis. Evaluations take place at several strategic places during the semester to measure progress. Connections to profession. Throughout the past six years, the Ball State students involved with the Prism Project have gained valuable firsthand experience and therefore have many of the tools necessary to include children with disabilities in their future classroom teaching and clinical practices. All of the Ball State preservice teachers involved in the Prism Project will undoubtedly teach students with disabilities within the public schools. This project adds to their professional competence relevant for lifetime careers in arts education. Additionally, other Ball State students involved in the Prism Project are prepared with skills relevant to special education, music or drama therapy, or work in environments with large populations of children and youth who have special needs. YOUNG CHILDREN AS MUSIC MAKERS: CONSONANCE IN CONTEXT Now more than ever, the saying “music for every child” is interpreted in the most robust sense because educators are being called upon to teach in new contexts, with more diverse age groups, using innovative tools and techniques, and with increased consideration to learners’ social and cultural contexts. One population often neglected in music teacher preparation is the

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community preschool or day care learner, particularly in environments where such learners are labeled as “at risk” because of language barriers, family income, special needs, or child protective service interventions. In these environments, music can be particularly helpful to maximize young children’s potential; consequently, the environments hold great potential for preservice teachers to enact musical practices. Against this backdrop, a sixteen-week immersive learning project was designed to involve preservice music education students and sociology students working in tandem to develop a music curriculum for a local community preschool/day care facility. The project was implemented through two existing courses: a field-based course in the music education curriculum and a sociology internship course. The community facility was identified as an at-risk environment through socioeconomic classifications of clientele and factors in child care subsidies. Students were immersed in all facets of curriculum development for the facility. These included: researching the setting from a sociological perspective; examining the musical development and capabilities of the preschool age group; investigating research-based methods and pedagogy for teaching preschool music; observing models of preschool music teaching and music making; purchasing equipment and materials for teaching; establishing program and instructional goals; and implementing the instruction, twice weekly, over a period of twelve weeks. As part of the sociology portion of this project, students were also asked to reflect on social behavioral outcomes to determine their awareness for how a child’s background and identity influences their approach to learning and behaviors. Students also addressed their attitudes, beliefs, and perceived skills for teaching music in the preschool setting. This project called for students to be both immersive and interdisciplinary in their approach to learning. The faculty member served as a facilitator and guide throughout the project, but all discoveries and decisions were made by the students in a shared partnership across the two disciplines. Sociology students studied problems of inequality and stratification. They had theoretical understanding of how such problems were perpetuated in society, but they lacked access to real-world settings to see how such processes manifest. In a similar manner, music education students had explored teaching strategies, musical skills, content knowledge, and musical behaviors for a wide range of age groups and settings, including young children, but lacked the knowledge and understanding of how stratification and inequality impact educational environments and young children’s learning. An engaged partnership allowed Ball State music and sociology students to educate one another.

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Immersive Learning Criteria The design of this immersive project carefully addressed the seven criteria for immersive learning as established by the university as follows: Academic credit. The Field Experience in Music course (two credits in the music education curriculum) has engaged music education students in intensive fieldwork in music classrooms at local schools. Students normally have been placed in two different school settings, in which they were required to complete various music-teaching tasks. Missing from the existing course, however, was the opportunity to complete fieldwork in a pre-K environment, which would not be found in local schools but instead would be found in day care facilities. Meanwhile, sociology majors have learned in their coursework how poverty, stratification, and inequality are perpetuated in society, but they have not yet had access to real-world settings to see how these processes manifest in lived experiences. The immersive section of the Music Education Field Experience course and Sociology Internship course engaged students from both disciplines in credit-bearing study designing and implementing a music curriculum for a local day care facility that primarily served an at-risk population, including children from low-income families who received child care subsidies, had language barriers, had special needs and behavioral problems, as well as children who were placed in day care to ensure protection from an unsafe home environment. Student-driven. Students in music education and sociology worked in teams to research the environment at the community day care, design appropriate musical experiences for preschoolers, and implement the instruction in thirty-minute lessons twice a week throughout the semester. Four preschool classes were chosen at the community partnership site, and a total of fortyeight children, ages three to five, received music instruction. The music instruction occurred during the regularly scheduled course hours. The course instructors engaged in collaborative work to design the required projects, establish units of study, and refine logistics for course implementation during the summer months prior to course implementation. Nevertheless, the examination of social metrics such as income stratification and racial and ethnic diversity, as well as the implementation of music instruction, were the sole responsibility of the student teams. Tangible outcome. There were several tangible outcomes that followed, and continue to follow, implementation of the project. First was a musical informance for day care staff, families, and surrounding neighborhood community by the children in the day care site. Guided by college students, the day care children demonstrated facets of their musical growth in this informance, which highlighted the music knowledge and skills that were targeted in lessons throughout the semester. In addition, a resource guide containing songs, activities, and literature with recommended interdisciplinary connec-

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tions was compiled. An example of its content included a thematic unit on insects, where children were engaged in singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” played ostinatos on instruments created from insect names, created a soundscape of buzzing noises using environmental sounds in the classroom, and read the book The Old Black Fly using rhythmic speech. Although the resource guide was intended for the partnership facility, attention was given to how it might be used in similar facilities and in future immersive learning coursework. Students and instructors involved in the project continue to be engaged in presenting lesson materials and project ideas to a local community agency, Child Care Resource and Referral (CCRR), with the intent of educating case workers and caregivers about how music can be integrated into the day care routine. Interdisciplinary. Eight music education students and four sociology students participated in the interdisciplinary project. The students were grouped into teams, with each team consisting of two music education students and one sociology student. Each team was assigned one class of preschoolers at the day care center, so a total of four classes were working with Ball State students. During the first six weeks of the semester, the students prepared for the experience by collaborating in sociology seminars on poverty and social class, as well as instructional sessions involving active music making. Learning about the population they were going to serve was a critical aspect of developing Ball State students’ empathy before they engaged in fieldwork. During the nine weeks of curriculum implementation at the day care facility, each team worked with one assigned class of preschoolers and rotated responsibilities for planning and leading instruction. Community partners. The primary community partner was a local day care facility in the same town as the university. Children and staff at this facility benefited from this program in that the children received weekly music instruction, staff saw music instruction modeled, and the facility received resources for future use, including equipment to further enhance music activities. The impact on the broader community was evident in the ongoing presentations conducted by the students and instructors for the county agency Child Care Resource and Referral. This agency serves ten counties in east central Indiana and is supported by the Indiana Association for Child Care Resource and Referral and the Indiana Family and Social Administration. The agency mission is to educate and train caregivers and day care personnel in all aspects of child care and education. 8 Student learning outcomes. Within the music portion of the course, assessment of Ball State students occurred across three domains of learning. The cognitive domain included assessment of students’ understanding of music as content, social characteristics of children, physical developmental characteristics of children, musical development characteristics of children, and other disciplinary content that was integrated into comprehensive music

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instruction. The psychomotor domain involved assessment of students’ overall musical skills. The affective domain included assessment of the extent to which students were engaged in self-assessment, personal reflection, and other behaviors that exhibited the valuing of the discipline. Within the sociological portion of the course, students were assessed on their mastery of the content area. In this case, they were assessed on knowledge of stratification and inequality within educational and community structures, the social behavioral outcomes of empathy, and their skills of analysis and integration. Assessment procedures were also implemented for day care children involved in the project. These assessments included measurement of growth in music knowledge, authentic performance skills, and attitudes/preferences toward a musical environment. The use of video, approved by the day care center and parents, aided the student instructors in examining musical behaviors of children, both collectively and individually. Each Ball State student instructor collected data on a selected child in order to conduct a case study throughout the project. Case study findings and narratives on the individual children were presented at the final seminar of the semester. Connections to profession. Graduates of music education programs often find themselves in early-childhood classrooms or community organizations, including day care centers, as part of their employment. To be successful, they need a broader view of both musical content and sociological perspectives when planning instruction for these settings. Graduates of sociology programs may find themselves immersed in data that describe and compare characteristics of different populations, but they may lack real-life exposure to the learning environments in communities. This project connected the two disciplines to provide understanding of core concepts in sociology for music education students and real-life applications for the sociology students. Both groups benefited from learning in a context that was aimed at supporting “atrisk” children, and all students increased their confidence and comfort level in leading young children in effective music instruction that was concept centered and skill based. Ideas for the direction and implementation of future projects resulted from this initial offering of the Young Children as Music Makers immersive learning project. Currently, new sites in the local community that serve similar “at-risk” populations are being pursued for music curriculum implementation. Curricular approaches and overall course design are being examined in order to produce a more streamlined, efficient approach to implementation at community sites. In addition, course instructors will expand upon previous exploratory research data that targeted awareness of musical capacities for young learners, perceived abilities for music instruction with preschoolers, and sociological studies of empathy. Participants in the initial Young Children as Music Makers immersive learning course were strengthened in knowledge and skills for their own

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discipline, and they came away from the project having explored content in a completely different discipline. Music education and sociology majors were able to make meaningful connections between two distinct disciplines through real-life collaboration, resulting in new definitions of immersive learning. In the end, all participants identified music making as a universal experience—on many levels of exploration—and witnessed social inequalities, poverty, cultural and language barriers, and learning disabilities disappear when people of all ages engage in artistic expression. SUMMARY In this chapter, we have examined how traditional music education courses were transformed into interdisciplinary, student-led, dynamic learning experiences that connected faculty and students with community partners and had tangible outcomes. These experiences offered students opportunities to engage in self- and group-driven learning with faculty mentors at the same time that they interacted with the broader community and created solutions to problems within the local community. Through these courses, students not only developed requisite skills and understandings for success in their future careers, but they also developed a greater awareness of the profession and its relationship to society at large. In addition, a key component of the institution’s educational mission and vision, identified and outlined in its strategic plan, was deliberately and systematically realized through a campus-wide initiative with clear goals and objectives—both at the micro and macro level—and incentivized through newly developed funding streams that supported faculty engaged in substantively redesigning course curricula. Faculty, students, local communities, and the institution itself were all empowered toward effecting substantive change, impacting these stakeholders’ previously held beliefs about the acts of effective teaching, learning, and service. NOTES 1. Ball State University, Education Redefined Strategic Plan: 2007–2012. 2. See “Characteristics of Immersive Learning,” http://cms.bsu.edu/academics/undergraduatestudy/beyondtheclassroom/immersivelearning/characteristics. 3. See for example, James L. Byo and Jane W. Cassidy, “The Role of the String Project in Teacher Training and Community Music Education,” Journal of Research in Music Education 53, no. 4 (2005): 332–47; Susan A. Davis, “Acts of Hospitality: A Case Study of the University of South Carolina String Project,” PhD dissertation, New York University, 2011; Kaye Ferguson, “Becoming a String Teacher,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 157 (2003): 38–48; Margaret Schmidt, “Preservice String Teachers’ Lesson-Planning Processes: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Research in Music Education 53, no. 1 (2005): 6–25. 4. This documentary can be viewed at the following URL: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ dlfmckwfdslfsf7/YKcdIFz_ir.

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5. The Prism Project of Greater NOLA, http://www.fhfsela.org/#!the-prism-project-ofgreater-nola/c11o3. 6. Peter Reynolds, Ish (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2004). 7. The Prism Project website: http://prismproject.iweb.bsu. 8. Child Care Resource and Referral, http://huffermcc.org/ccrr.

Chapter Five

Teaching Free Improvisation Building a Responsive Pedagogy through Core Practices Kimberly Lansinger Ankney and Daniel J. Healy

In this chapter, we first address a case study of teaching free improvisation at the collegiate level. As Bailey comments, “improvisation enjoys the curious distinction of being the most widely practiced of musical activities, and the least acknowledged and understood.” 1 Borgo recommends free improvisation as a potent, but often overlooked, activity for the music classroom. Criticizing the notion of education as transmitted information and favoring situated improvisation activities, Borgo argues that “a small revolution is currently well underway in several different academic circles, involving a conceptual shift from knowledge as stored artifact to knowledge as constructed capability in action.” 2 The target of Borgo’s criticism is a divide between “inscribed and incorporated forms of knowledge.” He writes: Although jazz musicians certainly benefit from the use of musical inscription as a mnemonic or as an occasional performance aid, to use it as a starting point and as a continual centerpiece of the learning experience, as many institutionalized jazz programs do, tends to devalue the embodied and experiential qualities of improvisation. 3

Although Borgo writes for an audience of jazz educators, he implies that free improvisation is a practice that highlights interactive aspects of musicianship, and thus the practice may have import beyond jazz education. In our case study, we define a responsive pedagogy as the practice of closely monitoring students’ past and emergent understandings of music making and adapting to students’ musical understandings on all levels of musical interaction. And in the second part of the chapter, we situate our 67

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definition of responsive pedagogy and our findings about teaching free improvisation within Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald’s concept of enactment through core practices. 4 Consequently, we suggest that a responsive pedagogy can be encouraged among preservice teachers when they learn to teach free improvisation. Teaching free improvisation requires a set of core practices including monitoring, responding, and asking questions about students’ musical understandings. Although these core practices are particularly relevant in the context of teaching free improvisation, such practices may be applicable to other music education settings as well. Therefore, we conclude with a discussion of how the adoption of a responsive pedagogy through the enactment of core practices can make teachers’ visions for teaching and learning more flexible and adaptable to music students’ needs in all classroom settings. CASE STUDY: A UNIVERSITY FREE IMPROVISATION ENSEMBLE We were assigned as instructors to a free improvisation class designed for non–music major undergraduates at a large Midwestern university. There were twenty undergraduate students enrolled in the course, and we met twice a week for eighty minutes during a ten-week term. The students who were enrolled in the course had had a variety of music experiences prior to the course, including rock theater, school marching band, and beat box hip-hop. One interesting example of cultural diversity in the class was a student from a large university in the Arabian Peninsula who was studying abroad in the United States. This student was more familiar with traditional Middle Eastern rhythms than with Western music. Other students were experienced performers on such instruments as the trumpet, cello, and electric guitar, while still others had no formal training and did not know how to read traditional musical notation. For purposes of this class, we employed a very broad conception of free improvisation. We used the label to address the lack of preplanned musical formats for the improvisation, especially to encourage and include those students with no formal musical training. However, to allow all students to participate in a variety of improvisatory activities, we combined truly openended improvisation activities with slightly more structured improvisation formats such as raga and taqsim and rhythmic structures such as the hocket. Generating data for our case study, we asked the students to participate in five open-ended group improvisations. All five of the improvisations were recorded and posted on the course website, and each student was asked subsequently to submit four written reflections, one reflection for each of the second through fifth group improvisation recordings (students were not asked to write a reflection after the first recording). Written reflections were

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then analyzed and coded using a constant comparative method. 5 In particular, we compared students’ written reflections, and their specific references to the audio recordings, with our own perceptions of their musical growth. Responsive Pedagogy Our decision to describe the experiences of teaching free improvisation as the development of a responsive pedagogy comes out of literature in science education research, where responsive teaching is described as “practices of attending and responding to the substance of student thinking, as it unfolds in a particular class.” 6 Responsive teaching should be differentiated from the more frequent discussions of culturally responsive pedagogy in music education. Music teachers adopting culturally responsive pedagogy carefully consider their cultural identities and understanding of music in relation to their students’ identities. They also consider issues of power, control, and inequity. 7 It is certainly important to consider the cultural backgrounds of students when teaching them free improvisation, particularly their understandings of tonality, time, and musicality; but through our teaching and research, we have come to believe that the temporality of improvisation necessitates a different discussion on responsiveness, one that is focused on students’ inthe-moment original musical utterances and teachers’ ability to quickly access students’ perceptions of their own musical development and their musical interaction with peers. In turn, students’ improvisations as well as their reflections on their playing inform teachers’ next pedagogical moves with improvisation activities. Some might describe this type of teaching as student directed or student centered. However, when a music teacher engages in teaching free improvisation, it is not enough to describe the education in terms of the student; doing so would negate teachers’ active role in eliciting and understanding students’ thoughts about their improvisations and the subsequent adaptations they make to their teaching. Hammer et al. describe this process in science education, writing: A responsive approach . . . is to adapt and discover instructional objectives responsively to student thinking. The first part of a lesson elicits students’ generative engagement around some provocative task or situation (or, perhaps, by discovering its spontaneous emergence). From there, the teacher’s role is to support that engagement and attend to it—watch and listen to the students’ thinking, form a sense of what they are doing, and in this way identify productive beginnings of scientific thinking. In this way, the teacher may select and pursue a more specific target, in a way that recognizes and builds on what students have begun. 8

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Thus, to use the term responsive teaching does not mean that a teacher does not initiate musical activity. As free improvisation teachers, we constantly chose opening activities that would engage students in musical problems dealing with a variety of concepts such as time, space, meter, melody, and harmony. The improvisation activities required students to engage in collaborative music making and problem finding. For instance, we had noticed that our students had a tendency to improvise pieces that repeated the same musical ideas to the point of monotony. To challenge our students, we had them improvise pieces with AB sections where the B section was to purposefully have different musical ideas from the A section, yet still have threads that related to the A section. After improvising, students shared what they noticed in the performance and the decisions they made to contribute to new material or the extension of material from the A section. While students could have focused on changing specific melodic or rhythmic patterns, many focused on timbre and mood. Our group subsequently discussed how to change timbre and mood with activities such as nontraditional sound experimentation, narrative-guided improvisations, meterless group improvisation, and pointillistic exploration. Thus, we as teachers worked to find ways to engage students in musical activities that would allow them to experiment with these ideas. Teaching improvisation in this way requires a cycle of action from the teacher, including initiating, listening, discussing, adapting, and once again initiating action based on students’ musical problem finding and problem solving. To some music educators, this approach may seem like rock climbing without a safety harness. First, a teacher engages students in music making without any notated musical material, and second, the teacher allows students’ musical experiences to change the teaching objectives within one lesson or from lesson to lesson. The experience may feel like falling off a cliff! Eisner suggests this is the very type of teaching that may lead to mastery in teaching. He explains, “Artistry in teaching is more likely to occur when the classroom provides a context for improvisation and where unpredictability, rather than predictability of activities and consequences are acknowledged.” 9 This unpredictability is a result of teachers’ openness to negotiating their goals with the lived experiences of students in the classroom. Sawyer has conducted research into the spontaneous emergent phenomena of jazz performance, casual conversation, and improvisatory theater. 10 He has labeled the spontaneous phenomenon collaborative emergence, an event that is triggered by the spontaneous back-and-forth of multiple individuals. Thinking about collaborative emergence as a goal suggests that improvisation may be best supported in those classrooms where spontaneity and interaction are expected. Similar to Eisner, Sawyer writes:

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When we realize that creative teaching is improvisational, we see that teachers are creative professionals, requiring not only pedagogical content knowledge but also creative performance skills—the ability to effectively facilitate a group improvisation with students. 11

If we consider Sawyer’s statement in relation to the skills and knowledge needed by music teachers teaching free improvisation, then we ought to infer that teachers of free improvisation need more than knowledge of teaching, music, and improvisation. Sawyer suggests that teachers need the ability to create or “make new” the knowledge and experiences that come out of a group of people. Therefore, teachers of free improvisation must be attuned to the relationships between individuals and the knowledge that comes out of the collective experience as well as be prepared to interpret and reframe musical ideas in ways that align and build on students’ musical ideas and understandings. In the following sections, we discuss the relationships between students and content that were particular crucial in our shaping of free improvisation experiences in the classroom setting, and we connect these experiences to core practices that help teachers be creative in eliciting students’ musical thinking and music making. Responding to Individual and Collective Understandings To capture the collective understanding that comes out of the free improvisation experience, it is helpful to consider some of the challenges we encountered in teaching our free improvisation class. As the term progressed, we found that we had to adjust, change, and even replace planned activities in response to unexpected musical and social reactions and interactions among the students. The necessity for shifts in our teaching was especially apparent as we contended with: (a) some students’ frustration, which may have been culturally based, and (b) monitoring students’ improvisation performance simultaneously with monitoring their awareness, or metacognition, of improvisatory interaction. One phenomenon is represented in figure 5.1 by three spheres of musical understanding. We saw that a student’s musical-cultural background, including past performance and listening experience, was the overarching influence on improvisation. The performance format and the musical/improvisatory interactions of the students in the ensemble were another influence at a group level. At the individual level, a student improviser reacted on a second-tosecond basis to his or her own notes, rhythms, and phrases. 12 As our students developed melodies, many were influenced by a Western understanding of symmetrical form, major tonality, and common cadences; yet, as the group performed, individual students became frustrated by these constraints. We noticed that those who were most frustrated often had ideas of melody influenced by genres such as psychedelic rock, straight-ahead jazz, and Middle

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Eastern music. As educators, we had to hear these concerns, adapt our practice, and then design activities that would build everyone’s understandings of melodic development.

Figure 5.1. Spheres of Musical Understanding

The second phenomenon is represented in figure 5.2, which shows a listening flow necessary for productive improvisation. Performers must be aware of their own sound production (as aural feedback), listen to the other musicians in the ensemble, and listen to the gestalt of the full ensemble. As teachers, it was our role not only to monitor the performance itself but to also monitor students’ metacognition of all interaction levels. For instance, during group improvisations, the majority of the group often would latch onto the performance of one student. More specifically, they would play a game of “follow the leader,” where they would accompany or harmonize with the student rather than create a musical gesture that would complement and develop the entire improvisation. As teachers, we had to recognize these types of musical interactions as habitual; however, subsequent post-performance discussions and written reflections helped us identify students’ metacognitive awareness of these issues. Subsequently, we had to decide which learning activities or questions would help students hear more broadly.

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We constantly had to monitor and understand students’ spheres of musical understanding while monitoring their interactional understandings of music. It was an immediate (in music) and ongoing (through class discussion and written reflections) process in which we responded to students and adapted our teaching practice. Due to these experiences, we defined responsive pedagogy as the practice of uncovering students’ past experience, monitoring emergent understandings of music making, and adapting class activities to students’ musical understandings on all levels of musical interaction. More specifically, we characterized responsive pedagogy, as enacted through free improvisation, as requiring teachers to be flexible in their approach to repertoire, activities, students’ individual creative goals, and large-group end goals.

Figure 5.2. Flow of interactive listening

The critical element of responsive pedagogy is a cyclical feedback loop between student music making, student reflections, teacher reflections, and subsequent class activities where each step in the process informs the next step. (See figure 5.3 for the flow model of our own class.) In the free improvisation setting, this cyclical feedback loop unfurls with particular intensity because improvisation itself is characterized by spontaneous and unwritten musical gestures. Also important in such settings, improvisers should be removed as much as possible from self-conscious evaluation. As part of their influential work documenting fMRI brain scans of jazz improvisers, Limb and Braun inferred that the brain is most amenable to improvisation when the

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prefrontal cortex area of the brain decreases censorship activity. 13 Therefore, another facet of responsive pedagogy is employment of activities that encourage musical risk taking and promote personal self-expression. Music teachers should craft classroom improvisation activities, but they should not attempt to control improvisation performances.

Figure 5.3. Cycle of responsive teaching

TEACHER VISION AND ENACTED PRACTICE According to Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald, a key dilemma of preservice teacher education is a historic gulf between theories and practices of teaching. 14 The authors elaborate that this typically manifests in a divide between foundations and methods coursework. Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald clarify: Foundations courses are meant to provide the “foundational,” which often meant disciplinary knowledge for teaching. Such knowledge would include knowledge of learners and learning from educational psychology; knowledge of the purposes of school, taken from history and philosophy of education, and

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knowledge of school and classroom structures. Methods courses have generally included the courses most related to the teaching of a particular subject matter, classroom management, and assessment. 15

The authors write, “foundational courses are meant to impart ‘conceptual tools’—the principles, frameworks, or guidelines that teachers use to guide their decisions about teaching and learning.” 16 In music teacher education, music theory and music history courses might be considered foundational. The justification for such courses is that music teachers who can summon music concepts on command are better situated to teach students a wide swath of musical fundamentals. Unfortunately, such foundations courses are often not ideal for addressing teaching music creativity, particularly with free improvisation, which has historically occurred across many genres. In contrast, methods courses are described as those that provide preservice teachers with “practical tools.” 17 In music teacher education programs, this often encompasses classes that address specific class types and age groups such as elementary general music methods or secondary instrumental methods. While some music education methods courses embrace the challenge of providing students with an enacted form of teaching music creativity, there is a paucity of literature on either free improvisation pedagogy or engaging preservice music teachers with free improvisation. One reason for this lack of reference materials is that free improvisation activities have only recently made an entry into music teacher preparation. Another reason is the predominance of jazz ensembles in secondary schools, which, prompt many methods-course teachers to use their limited class time to focus on jazz methods. 18 In short, there is not a common practice of teaching free improvisation in schools. Enactment of Core Pedagogies Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald use the term “pedagogies of enactment” to describe teacher education that features activities of a real classroom. Where such pedagogies are emphasized, preservice teachers can rehearse “components of complex practice in settings of reduced complexity.” The authors point out that instructional enactment encompasses activities that are “integral to the work of beginning teachers and have integrity as core components of instruction.” 19 We view a responsive form of pedagogy as a useful strategy of enactment when it comes to addressing free improvisation in a music teacher education program. A benefit of clinical improvisation practice is that the preservice teacher can take on the roles of student, musical participant, and teacher. A responsive approach to free improvisation instruction also allows the preservice teachers who are leading lessons to receive spontaneous and authentic

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feedback. A disadvantage of the traditional methods course sequence is that novice teachers do not experience what Lampert calls “acting back.” 20 One particular advantage of constructing a free improvisation course where preservice music teachers can act back is that they experience the interaction of improvisation and the interaction of responsive pedagogy in the same environment. The latter form of interaction is critical because it has potential to be applied to other music teaching situations. Advantageously, free improvisation is a musical practice in which novices can easily participate, particularly because free improvisation does not need to be grounded in a particular musical genre. It seems fair to state that many preservice music teachers do not have experience in free improvisation, so they will approach learning to improvise as novices. They are likely to act back with many of the same musical intentions, frustrations, and discoveries as younger students. Music education students who have performed music only by reading traditional notation will act back, either consciously or unconsciously, simply from their lack of improvisation experience. Moreover, if there are preservice music teachers with substantial jazz experience, these individuals may act back as they struggle to connect their musical ideas to other student improvisers who are not cognizant of jazz practices. Acting back can materialize in the form of unexpected student interruptions, or it can take a more constructive form, such as a student’s inspired response to a teacher’s prompt. Most important, acting back can take the form of spontaneous collaborative emergence, a positive and productive phenomenon that novice music teachers might not otherwise encounter prior to their student-teaching internships. CORE PRACTICES OF RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald emphasize a need for teacher educators to define a set of core pedagogical practices that preservice teachers ought to enact. The authors claim that high-leverage core practices should be: • practices that occur with high frequency in teaching; • practices that novices can enact in classrooms across different curricula or instructional approaches; • practices that novices can actually begin to master; • practices that allow novices to learn more about students and about teaching; • practices that preserve the integrity and complexity of teaching; and • practices that are research based and have the potential to improve student achievement. 21

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Using the example of elementary education, the authors cite learning to lead guided reading discussions as an example of a high-leverage core practice. The authors write that “focusing on core practices within teacher education provides teacher educators with the opportunity to address teaching as a complex task, while also enabling them to focus on key components with novice teachers.” 22 Many preservice teachers and music teacher educators approach concepts of creativity with some trepidation. Some of their hesitation may lie in a common view of artistic creativity as an elusive spark of originality or invention; they may not see creative improvisation as a practice that can be learned. 23 Outlining a set of core practices for responsive teaching of free improvisation can help to guide music teachers through the confusion associated with teaching musical creativity, yet the core practices extend beyond free improvisation and into most other aspects of music teaching. We focus here on six aspects of responsive pedagogy, arguing that they meet the criteria for high-leverage practices that Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald have outlined. Those core practices are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

discovering students’ past musical experiences; adapting class activities to students’ musical understanding; navigating between individual goals and larger end goals; exercising flexibility in approach to repertoire; monitoring students’ emerging understanding of music making; and encouraging risk taking.

Where Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald’s examples of high-leverage practices rely on verbal exchanges between teacher and students, we take a musical perspective on core practices. Throughout our examples, we imply that novice music teachers can and ought to enact core practices that include both verbal and musical interaction with students. Core Practices in the Free Improvisation Setting At the beginning of the term, we discovered that our free improvisation group would remain static in a key area or mode. Their first two open-ended group improvisation recordings inadvertently resulted in ten-minute minor vamps with little variation. Moreover, we noticed that many of the students were habitually averse to any kind of harmonic dissonance and immediately moved into a main key area when landing on such a dissonance, propagating the harmonic intransigence of the minor vamp. We also noticed similar aversion responses to any rhythmic idea that deviated from a common time (i.e., 4/4, 2/4) format. Conformity seemed to be the norm within the group. Fortunately, the students’ written reflections shed light on the issue.

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As it turned out, our first responsive teaching task was to discover students’ past musical experience. Through students’ written reflections, and through casual conversation with them, we uncovered, first, that most students lacked extensive experience as improvisers, so they had reservations about taking a leadership role in the ensemble. Second, we found that a majority of students had years of enculturation in forms and sounds inspired by Western and European music, so they were fearful of dissonance. In particular, written reflections revealed that the students with the most extensive school ensemble experience (i.e., concert band or orchestra), were the most wary of harmonic dissonance. As part of the discovery approach, we found it critical to triangulate verbal and written feedback within the natural temporality of music. For example, the students reflected on and discussed their difficulties with harmonic dissonance, and some of those students also demonstrated contextually inappropriate use of jazz scales and chord changes (i.e., blues and pentatonic scales). Written reflections, dialogue, and musical observations were usefully triangulated to form a detailed picture of students’ prior experiences. After uncovering this information, our next task was to adapt class activities to students’ musical understanding. It was apparent to us that the students could not be truly expressive group improvisers until they overcame several hurdles. We first encouraged students to embrace a more affirmative leadership role within the ensemble, and many of the students heeded our advice. However, when most of the group simultaneously attempted to take on musical leadership, cacophony resulted. Again, we had to adapt to the students’ musical understanding. The open-ended nature of the free improvisation setting can allow musically extroverted students to thrive in the foreground while other students may withdraw to the background. Unlike in other musical formats, where a composition foregrounds particular instruments, free improvisation ought to be constructed so that all students have opportunities to experience the musical foreground and the musical background. In our class, the acoustical nature of the group resulted in a setting where the louder instruments were mostly in the foreground. Two trumpet players in our course were technically fluid musicians and had experience in traditional school ensembles, such as concert band and jazz ensemble. These two enthusiastic students developed a musical pattern where they would quickly merge on a unison ostinato and then play the ostinato for the entire improvisation. Their invented ostinati were not unmusical or uninspired, but because of the acoustical properties of trumpets, the unison sound was dominant. This problem allowed us to implement the practice of navigating between individual goals and larger end goals. Although we wanted the two trumpet players, like every student in the ensemble, to exercise musical leadership, the larger end goals for the ensemble were focused listening to other performers and engagement in musical

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interaction. So we moved the two trumpeters to opposite ends of the room, and immediately each trumpeter began interacting with the musicians who were in closer proximity. Another example of navigating from our class could be found in the enrollment of several students whose primary instrument was piano. The classroom only had one acoustic piano, but the university was able to provide electric keyboards and synthesizers so that all pianists had a keyboard. The natural end goal that emerged was finding musical textures that allowed all the keyboard players to improvise simultaneously so that no one was left out. At the same time, the individual goals for the keyboardists varied, and often changed from one class to the next. Individual goals included awareness of nontraditional “sound effects” on the synthesizers and explorations of different ranges and articulations. As to our students’ fear of dissonance, we began by encouraging students to explore dissonance as a musical option instead of hearing dissonance as a musical threat. We then exercised flexibility in approach to repertoire by incorporating recordings of Ornette Coleman and Paul Motian, seminal free jazz artists who were renowned for their comfort with dissonance. We tried to design activities that exemplified Coleman’s approach to group texture and dissonance found on recordings such as The Shape of Jazz to Come and Song X, as well as in activities that incorporated the concept of meterless time, a practice exemplified in Paul Motian’s recordings such as I Have the Room Above Her and Sound of Love. 24 We also chose tetrachord pitch set exercises inspired by Middle Eastern Maqam to encourage the students to explore new linear ideas and tonal palettes. Then we monitored our students’ emerging understanding of music making. After several interactions with collaborative musical emergence that arose from exercising musical leadership and increased comfort with dissonance, we recognized that our students were utilizing rests and silence in a limited way. When we acknowledged that the students did not need to play all of the time, and we suggested that students could incorporate silence as well as sound into their musical vocabularies, the ensemble was freed up to engage in what Anthony Davis calls “reacting” and “listening” instead of “following.” 25 In the second half of the semester, our students no longer debated whether to “lead or follow” as improvisers. They demonstrated the ability to listen and react, and they began to function more as an ensemble. Once we had achieved this goal, we pressed the students to parlay their newfound skills into a focus on musical imagery and large musical gestures, removed from a mental focus on narrower musical ideas such as notes, rhythms, and techniques. This was an example of encouraging risk taking. Indeed, almost all of the teaching practices we enacted included some element of risk taking from the students; listening to new, dissonant sounds, exercising leadership, and learning to interact were all new experiences for most of our students. Free improvisation students must be encouraged to take

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musical risks and, at times, flail in a safe environment. Investing emotionally in an ensemble performance might be the biggest risk that musicians take. It means not only depending upon the quality of one’s own musical skill but also on the creative impulses of others. By the end of the semester, students remarked in their reflections that they had performed with greater emotional investment. VISION, DISTANCE, AND FREE IMPROVISATION Hammerness cites teacher vision as a key construct of teacher preparation programs and identifies distance as a key dimension of teacher vision. 26 Distance specifically refers to how near to or far from reality the teacher’s vision is. Hammerness recognizes that, especially for novice teachers, vision can be quite distant from reality. She describes a novice teacher, Angela, who struggles with reality shock. Angela describes her initial “idealistic” vision when she was an undergraduate student, a vision that she later described as “unrealistic.” 27 Similarly to Angela, music teachers may have broad, idealistic visions of creative musicianship, but they may be faced with realities of large class sizes, itinerant positions, and an array of student readiness for music making. Joseph Pignato, for example, describes Angelica Dawson, a music teacher in rural New York, who had formal training in Western, classical music, but eventually found herself liberated through blues, rock, and improvisation. Angelica consistently sought to incorporate free improvisation into her elementary music classroom, but she faced a limited budget and competition for students’ time, especially from sports programs. More importantly, as Pignato describes it, Angelica faced a “conflict with tradition.” Administrators and colleagues expressed concerns about the “controlled cacophony” of students’ jam sessions and thought that students “were simply ‘playing’ rather than learning.” 28 Angelica had few resources to help her bridge the distance between her vision for musical creativity and the realities of her teaching situation. Hammerness writes that teacher educators should assist preservice teachers with creating specific, manageable steps to achieving their vision. Free improvisation performance and core practices of responsive pedagogy can help increase preservice teachers’ awareness of the distance between vision and reality and help reduce perceived gaps. First, the preservice music teacher is likely to experience free improvisation as a novice. Free improvisation, in itself, can be an exhilarating and deeply rewarding musical activity precisely because the musical output changes with each performance and will produce a unique musical dynamic with every different combination of participants. The novice improviser-teacher is thus likely to acquire empathy for other novices in the midst of almost unlimited musical possibilities. Further-

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more, as Thomson notes, in group free improvisation, success is contingent upon the flexible interweaving of “micro-idioms.” 29 This means that successful group free improvisation occurs when individuals temporarily suspend their musical backgrounds and assumptions to engage in spontaneous listening and reacting. Such a “genreless” approach to music making can help a novice teacher feel liberated from accommodating a sometimes dizzying array of music instruments and musical backgrounds. The teacher can base instruction on whatever musical instruments and background students bring to the classroom instead of on what the teacher wishes they would bring to the classroom. At the same time, a responsive approach to free improvisation can allow the teacher to understand and affirm each student’s prior experience, often to the student’s benefit. Jenny, a student in our class, was pleased that she found a form of musical expression where she could use her singer/ songwriter background. In a written reflection, Jenny wrote “I had often felt inadequate in my musical instrument capabilities because of my difficulties sight-reading and, therefore, playing classical music. This class has redefined what it means to excel in music.” Finally, and as previously discussed, both free improvisation and responsive pedagogy require mediation of end goals with spontaneous, in-the-moment goals and reactions. For example, in our final open-ended group free improvisation recording, there was a distinct moment where the use of decreasing dynamics and diminished group participation seemed to signal a cadence or end to the improvisation (which, it should be noted, does not have a designated end). However, a student cellist proceeded to carve out an idea in a new tonal area with a fresh rhythmic groove. The rest of the ensemble almost instantaneously reacted to the cellist’s musical statement, abandoning the perceived denouement and engaging in another three minutes of fresh improvisation. Similarly, in a creative music-making setting, a teacher may choose whether to adjust the end goals of their vision in light of unexpected student contributions and actions. We observed this in our own case study; we did not anticipate that years of Western-music enculturation would produce a paralyzing fear of harmonic dissonance. This unexpected reaction required us to adjust our vision in light of spontaneous responsive teaching needs and then adjust yet again as increased comfort with dissonance produced a lack of group interplay and listening. Subsequently, reevaluation and responsive teaching led us to formats and activities that provided student growth and comfort. Rehearsing core practices of responsive pedagogy in a free improvisation course, then, can assist novice music teachers with their vision for other settings. In a middle school orchestra, for example, the preservice teacher can listen for students’ musical intent, and, although intent might be attached to a notated score, the teacher can quickly hear unexpected responses and be flexible enough to mediate the end goals of the lesson plan (and the musical

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score) with a spontaneous, intermediate goal, perhaps interpreting the overall performance of the orchestra score in fresh ways. Experiences with free improvisation may help the general music teacher monitor student participation more closely and begin to ask questions as to why some students participate fully while others struggle to respond musically. The music theory teacher who has experience with responsive pedagogy in a free improvisation setting may be led to discover students’ dichotomous understanding of consonance and dissonance and adapt class activities so that students listen to and analyze a richer cross section of repertoire. How can music teacher educators help student teachers develop responsive pedagogy? How can they help reduce the distance between preservice teachers’ visions of creative musicianship and the realities of the classroom? First, music teacher educators need not be expert improvisers but must be willing to engage in improvisation for and with preservice teachers and point preservice teachers toward exemplars of improvisation. For instance, if an instrumental methods teacher invites preservice teachers to perform free improvisations based on paintings, then the instrumental methods teacher should be willing to perform a free improvisation based on a visual painting and share listening examples of improvisers such Morton Feldman and Ornette Coleman, who were inspired by Jackson Pollock’s paintings. Building a foundation of knowledge and experiences with free improvisation is particularly important if preservice teachers are to envision themselves teaching free improvisation to their own students. During such activities, music teacher educators have added responsibilities of modeling and embodying core pedagogical practices. For example, as preservice teachers engage in improvisation based on a painting, they may be performing on secondary instruments. An instrumental methods teacher may notice that the preservice teachers are having difficulty expressing varied timbres on their secondary instruments; they may not understand the techniques needed to achieve varied timbres, or they may find it too risky to produce abstract sounds. The music teacher educator would take steps to discover students’ backgrounds with their secondary instruments and adapt the musical activity to address issues with timbre. All the while, the music teacher educator would make explicit these facets of responsive pedagogy, revealing each pedagogical decision to the preservice teachers and modeling the flexibility and encouragement that characterize responsive pedagogy. Preservice teachers need to not only see lessons modeled but also to know how and when decisions are made in the sequence of teaching a creative exercise. Through this process, the role of the teacher in creative practice becomes demystified. As previously discussed, it is paramount that music teacher educators provide a class environment where preservice teachers can enact core practices. These opportunities bridge the divide between theory and practice and

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increase preservice teachers’ awareness of how students may “act back.” As they engage their peers in improvisation activities, preservice teachers experience a myriad of performance issues that reflect individuals’ musical backgrounds, technical facility, conceptual understandings, and social dynamics. Finally, music teacher educators should help preservice teachers reflect on their experiences enacting core practices in leading free improvisation activities. We suggest that video and audio recordings are important to help preserve preservice teachers’ enactments of core practices. The recordings can be prompts for subsequent written reflections or conversation about the rationale underlying teaching strategies and adaptations. Music teacher educators should encourage preservice teachers to carefully consider their enactment of core practices. It is only through such reflection that students will be able to slow down and appreciate the many teaching moves that must be made to in a responsive pedagogy. In closing, we propose that a vision for music teacher education programs involves widespread creative music making and teaching. Engaging preservice teachers in free improvisation offers the opportunity for them to challenge their assumptions about how music should sound and be structured. As demonstrated through our case study, free improvisation may encourage preservice teachers to take musical risks and become more emotionally invested in music making. Coupling free improvisation with opportunities to enact core practices of responsive pedagogy allows preservice teachers to rehearse focused listening, in-the-moment adaptation of activities, navigation between group and individual goals, and encouragement. With such a program vision, not only can preservice teachers imagine possibilities for music education, but they can also reduce the distance between what can be and what is with specific, manageable steps and concrete practices. Such a program vision builds a firm foundation for teaching that extends far beyond the free improvisation course, leading to greater satisfaction and rich musical opportunities for all involved. NOTES 1. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1992), 1. 2. David Borgo, “Free Jazz in the Classroom: An Ecological Approach to Music Education,” Jazz Perspectives 1, no. 1 (2007): 61. 3. Ibid., 65. 4. Pamela Grossman, Karen Hammerness, and Morva McDonald, “Redefining Teaching, Re-Imagining Teacher Education,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 15, no. 2 (2009): 273–89. 5. Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1967).

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6. David Hammer, Fred Goldberg, and Sharon Fargason, “Responsive Teaching and the Beginnings of Energy in a Third Grade Classroom,” Review of Science, Mathematics and ICT Education 6, no. 1 (2012): 54. 7. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal 32, no. 3 (1995): 465–91. 8. Ibid., 55. 9. Elliot W. Eisner, The Arts and the Creation of Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 152. 10. See R. Keith Sawyer, “Improvisational Creativity: An Analysis of Jazz Performance,” Creativity Research Journal 5, no. 3 (1992): 253–63; R. Keith Sawyer, “The Semiotics of Improvisation: The Pragmatics of Musical and Verbal Performance,” Semiotica 108 nos. 3–4 (1996): 269–306; R. Keith Sawyer, “Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation,” Educational Researcher 33 no. 2 (2004): 12–20; R. Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 11. Sawyer, “Creative Teaching,” 17. 12. Edward Sarath, “A New Look at Improvisation,” Journal of Music Theory 40, no. 1 (1996): 1–38. 13. Charles J. Limb and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLoS One 3, no. 2 (2008), accessed December 16, 2013. 14. Grossman et al., “Redefining Teaching,” 274. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. See Borgo, “Free Jazz” and Maud Hickey, “Can Improvisation Be ‘Taught’?: A Call For Free Improvisation In Our Schools,” International Journal of Music Education 27, no. 4 (2009): 285–99. 19. Grossman et al., “Redefining Teaching,” 283. 20. Magdalene Lampert, “Preparing Teachers for Ambitious Instructional Practice: Learning to Listen and to Construct an Appropriate Response” (notes presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada, April 2005), 36. 21. Grossman et al., “Redefining Teaching,” 277. 22. Ibid. 23. R. Keith Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come, compact disc, Atlantic Records Atlantic1317, (1990); Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman. Song X, compact disc, Geffen Records GHS 24096 (1986); Paul Motian. I Have the Room Above Her, compact disc, ECM Records ECM 1902 (2005); Paul Motian, Sound of Love, compact disc, Winter and Winter 910 008-2 (1997). 25. Anthony Davis, interview by David Borgo, March 2, 2005, in Borgo, “Free Jazz.” 26. Karen Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, Or Hoping to Learn?: The Role of Vision in the Early Professional Lives of Teachers,” Journal of Teacher Education, 54, no. 1 (2003): 43–56. 27. Ibid., 46. 28. Joseph Pignato, “Angelica Gets the Spirit Out: Improvisation, Epiphany and Transformation,” Research Studies in Music Education 35, no. 1 (2013): 31. 29. Scott Thomson, “The Pedagogical Imperative of Musical Improvisation,” Critical Studies in Improvisation 3, no. 2 (2007): 5.

Chapter Six

The Shoe That Doesn’t Fit Contextualizing Music Teacher Evaluation Cara Bernard

Value and quality are core concepts that lie at the foundation of our educational system and permeate our (musical) curricula. Based on findings that teacher quality is a major determinant of student growth, policy makers have concluded that teacher evaluation should be a major facet of school improvement. 1 In an era of accountability, value-added measures (VAMs) connect student growth to teacher effectiveness. The claims are that student growth can be measured by gains in standardized test scores from one year to the next and that such growth can be a criterion of teacher effectiveness. In principle, VAMs “capture how much students learn during the school year, thereby putting teachers on a more level playing field as they aim for tenure or additional pay.” 2 Although VAMs may seem objective and standardized, questions have been raised about the reliability and validity of VAM scores and the statistical procedures used for calculation; thus, there are questions about the extent to which VAMs should be used exclusively in high-stakes teacher evaluation. 3 As to the evaluation of music teachers, there is seldom available a standardized measure of achievement by which to calculate student gain scores, which is another factor weighing against use of VAMs. 4 So, VAMs typically are augmented with other evaluation methods, including observations of teacher practice and evidence of student work, also known as standards-based evaluation. Such methods structure teacher evaluation hierarchically, with school administrators in the role of supervisor and teachers in the role of subordinate, 5 which may lead to other problems in teacher evaluation. According to Kimball and Milanowski, the literature suggests that administrators may be motivated to maintain good relationships 85

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with teachers and, therefore, can be more lenient in applying evaluation criteria. Furthermore, an administrator may take the attitude that evaluation is too much work and thus may spend too little time in observation and evaluation of teachers. An administrator might have little training in evaluation procedures, and few administrators have the knowledge base to evaluate teachers in all subject areas, particularly at the secondary level. 6 This might be an acute problem for the evaluation of music teachers. If supervisors do not understand what processes of learning and assessment look like in a middle or high school band, orchestra, or chorus setting, they might try to evaluate with criteria that apply to a middle school or high school social studies or chemistry class. 7 For (music) teachers, evaluation with decontextualized evaluation criteria and procedures may feel similar to the feeling of wearing a shoe that is too small or too big; it is uncomfortable either way. CONTEXT While there are several models for evaluating teachers currently in effect in U.S. public education, Charlotte Danielson’s Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching 8 provided the basis for teacher observation, evaluation, and reflection in the school where I taught. The model is based on four domains of pedagogy and instruction: (1) Planning and Preparation, (2) Classroom Environment, (3) Instruction, and (4) Professional Responsibilities. Within each of these four domains there are twenty-two components that help to define a domain. For example, within the Planning and Preparation domain, components include (a) demonstrating knowledge of content and pedagogy, (b) demonstrating knowledge of students, (c) setting instructional outcomes, and (d) demonstrating knowledge of resources. 9 Detailed rubrics to rate teacher effectiveness as Distinguished/Highly Effective, Proficient/Effective, Basic/Developing and Unsatisfactory/Ineffective are included for each component along with critical attributes of each level. 10 These detailed descriptions may provide a basis for teacher reflection and improvement. In my experience engaging with this evaluation system as a choral and piano teacher in a large, urban high school, I found application of the Danielson model frustrating for several reasons: First, I observed that if teachers were concerned with being rated as “highly effective,” they might be ignoring the pedagogical needs of individual students. Second, there were no descriptors available of what the components looked like when they were applied in a music context, although there were descriptors for other subject areas, such as science and English language arts. Compounding these two problems were school administrators responsible for observation and evaluation who were not informed about content and pedagogy in music. It seemed

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as if my teaching skills and the criteria of the observations were mismatched, and I received conflicting feedback and conflicting ratings of my teaching, depending on who was observing the lesson. Over the course of the 2011–2012 school year, I became dissatisfied with the implementation of the Danielson Framework as an evaluation of my music teaching. I sensed that my attention to the Framework was not improving my teaching but rather forcing me to wear a “shoe that didn’t fit” when a supervisor walked in for an unannounced visit or requested curriculum and lesson plans. I began journaling to better make sense of my situation, and I decided to read Danielson’s Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching in its entirety to test the validity of my thinking. Through my journaling and critical reading of the Danielson Framework, I sought to address the following research questions: 1. What is the Danielson Framework, in theory and practice? 2. How does the Framework look in implementation and application as teacher evaluation in my own teaching and school? 3. Why am I so frustrated with the Framework? METHOD Through an autoethnographic process, I reflected upon my journals from the 2011 school year, in which I wrote much about the problematics of my evaluations and experiences. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner state that autoethnography “seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).” 11 This research paradigm fit my experiences and helped to inform and frame my own experiences and to represent and better understand the larger sense of feeling regarding music teacher evaluation. Journal entry helped me to describe and make sense of my situation. I continued to make journal entries after the school year ended to work through my feelings and ideas, as well as dialogue with and interview my colleagues in the music department and also throughout New York City. Maso reminds us of the importance of “shared experiences for the purpose of helping insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture.” 12 Thus, my data included the reflective journal entries I had written during the 2011–2012 school year; journal entries I had written during my critical reading of and reflection on the Danielson Framework; and notes from dialogues with colleagues. I used these three types of data reflexively to describe my experience within the phenomenon of teacher evaluation. 13 I employed and adapted an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis approach by chunking data in larger conceptual categories. 14 This method of analysis is more concerned

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with participants’ personal awareness of an object or event, than with an attempt to fabricate an objective statement of the object or event itself. Patterns emerged through comparing and contrasting my teaching experiences with (a critical reading and reflection of) the Danielson Framework, then aggregating similar experiences into groups and analyzing the groups through the Danielson Framework in order to interpret the results to tell my story. 15 INTERPRETATION In my critical reading, I found echoes of democracy and critical pedagogy in Danielson’s explanations of her Framework: “For all human beings—adults as well as children—it is the learner who does the learning.” 16 It seemed that Danielson was signifying the problematics of depositing information into students and calling for a more critical approach to teaching and learning in order to facilitate deeper student understanding, engagement, and action. 17 I interpreted Danielson as urging constant communication and dialogue among teachers and their supervisors, in order to reflect, rethink and re-form pedagogy and practice over a lengthy period of time. In a critical pedagogy, emphasis is not on the product—fulfilling objectives and aims—but rather on the process of students engaging in thought and action. Students and teacher learn from each other through dialogue and doing, discussing social, political, and ethical implications; and through this dynamic, students learn to take responsibility for their own learning. Danielson suggests, likewise, that this kind of dialogue should take place between teacher and supervisor, where supervisor and teacher are open, acknowledging the complexities of teaching represented by the four domains, and utilizing discussion about technique and pedagogy to reach common understanding. I saw reflection at the heart of Danielson’s writing. She urged constant reassessment of pedagogy and practice and continual communication between teachers and supervisors in order to avoid “snapshots,” “drive-bys,” and “pop-ins.” 18 However, I had many pop-ins in my classroom, where my supervisor came to my classroom unannounced and never followed up with a reflection or discussion; neither did she state her expectations for the visit. I pondered in my journal, I have the feeling like I’m always being watched; like she [my supervisor] is directing a reality TV show, trying to uncover the seedy underbelly of my music classroom.

I found confirmation for my feelings from Danielson, who wrote,

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Without a Framework, the structure is reduced to whatever the mentor, coach, or supervisor has in her head, and it thus reflects the personal beliefs that individual holds about the teaching, regardless of whether these have ever been made explicit. 19

From my point of view, the Framework offered a means to dialogue with a common language, a means for intersubjectivity. There is great importance in openness and space for teachers to speak with one another and with their supervisors, to think through practices and align teaching expectations so there are no surprises in an observation report from a supervisor. Danielson also wrote of “clear standards of practice, instruments and procedures to capture evidence of those standards of practice.” 20 In my school, evidence started with the classroom environment. According to my supervisors, classroom environments should show student work and display rubrics accordingly. Goals for the year must be prominently posted on the wall, including the mission and vision statement of the school and the department. When visitors enter the room, they should immediately be able to observe that students are engaged in learning. Feedback on my classroom environment from my observation was as follows: “A welcoming and safe room; lots of photos and student captions of student performances. Please display more student work.” My supervisor showed little consideration for what an exhibition of student work might look like in a music setting, that most student work in music would be auditory rather than visual—or written—phenomena. Once observed during choral warm-ups at the beginning of the school year, I received feedback that the students were not learning in “small groups based on ability,” though they were singing in four-part harmony, and they were seated in separate sections by voice type. Regardless of my rationale for a traditional seating of singers, my administrator insisted that my classroom should look as if students were physically separated into groups. She even suggested students should show their learning by leading the warm-up, playing piano, and using conducting gestures as I do. While these might have been more reasonable recommendations for later in the school year, they were unrealistic in late September. I had to think through this to better understand: Our sound is changing every day. I know how to help to get it [blending and balance] where it needs to be right now. Having students run warm-ups will not help; they’ll mimic my actions/exercises without knowing why they’re doing it. This stuff will just start to click for them in the next month. Until then, I need to do what I know is best.

Contradictory to Danielson, and frustrating for me, my supervisor was neither being open nor asking questions about my instructional choices. In my

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post-observation, I became passive while the administrator ran the evaluation process, as she insisted upon routine instruction and skill-based activities, negating my musically sound choices. While Danielson suggested that “teaching is a thinking person’s job; it is not simply a matter of following a script or carrying out other people’s instructional designs,” 21 I was experiencing a one-sided post-observation. I shut down, becoming docile and silent, for fear of exposing my perceived shortcomings. Karen Hammerness suggests that when teachers’ visions are constrained to technicist reflections, they often ignore “differences in school and classroom contexts . . . demands and issues that may vary considerably from setting to setting.” 22 Danielson urges teachers to teach with and to the cultural beings in the class and use the students as the text for instruction. I wrote about my struggles in my journal: They want me to align with the band director’s curriculum, since we ‘teach the same subject: Music,’ and norm our weekly lessons to one another. My own chorus classes couldn’t be more different from one another. I’ll do it on paper, but I won’t follow it.

Though I engaged in an open and flexible pedagogy in our rehearsals and classes, adapting daily instruction to students’ musical readiness levels, administrators largely overlooked this facet of teaching effectiveness. I experienced even more frustrations when my administrator tried to offer feedback to the students during a snapshot observation: Supervisor: the altos sound a bit pitchy today. Student: that’s not a real word, Miss.

Although I could not ignore the effort of the administrator to bring some musical familiarity into the observation, even my students knew her knowledge was faulty. Eric, the band director at my school, described similar experiences: She (supervisor) came into my room for five minutes, looked over the students’ shoulders at the music, wrote vigorously, and ran up to the front where I was conducting and loudly whispered: HIGHLY EFFECTIVE! All we had done was play some major scales . . . which weren’t even tuned well.

Although our supervisor was trying to demonstrate musical knowledge, she was actually showing her shortcomings, her lack of understanding evaluation in the context of the music classroom. Eric knew he was not living in the world of “highly effective” at that moment, just as I knew I was most likely “effective” in my warm-ups. Our administrator saw what she was condi-

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tioned to look for in a classroom, although she was not able to recognize students learning, or effective teaching, in band or chorus. A similar scene can be found in ensemble rehearsals where the music teacher changes her questioning techniques and structure of teaching to appeal to the administrator in the room, swapping out musical terms for more terminology on evaluation rubrics. Even I have engaged in such behaviors. Marc, a secondary piano teacher, explained how he had given his students worksheets, just because he knew the written responses would be clear to non-arts supervisors: It’s like we have to dumb down what we do, and give them [supervisors] what they want to hear, what they can actually understand. It’s way more painful than a bad day with the kids.

While some worksheets may provide useful advancement of musical knowledge and provide adequate assessment, using them without connection to pedagogical goals is merely intended to appease the administrator. When either the teacher or the supervisor fails to recognize the specific context of teaching, they adopt what David Myers referred to as “standards that reduce us to the mean.” 23 As an educator, I had to ask, “What is the value of such appeasement? Survival is something static and does not move or push our students or us forward in our learning quest.” I wondered whether, conforming to such standards, I would lose my purpose as a music educator. For the first time in my career, it seemed as if that was possible. Last, I found myself wrestling with the concept and application of literacy. Danielson does not explicitly define literacy as reading and writing; rather, she states that it is our charge as educators to foster in our students a “deep conceptual understanding, thinking and reasoning, and the skill of argumentation (students taking a position and supporting it with logic and evidence).” 24 I interpreted those words to mean development of music literacy—reading, writing, listening and speaking musically—and critical literacy in my classroom. Critical literacy is a language that questions how the self has been socially constructed, and it challenges the status quo through dialogue in an effort to discover alternative paths for self-development. When we are critically literate, we examine our ongoing development and how we may (re)define ourselves. I consider this to be essential to my teaching, especially in an urban teaching environment, where power relations, discourses, and identities are rarely discussed, let alone questioned. In chorus, repertoire often facilitated critical literacy; for example, in singing “Homeland” by Z. Randall Stroope, students discussed what the term “home” could mean. Some students in class did not have a physical space to call home and claimed that they had little connection to the patriotic text of

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“Homeland.” They questioned and challenged the traditional view of home as place, imagining the text differently if home referred to a group of people, or a space of solace and reflection within the self. Working together, students articulated their own ideas of home and compared them to the text they were to perform, changing the performance of the piece in the process. Employing critical literacy in my classroom enhanced students’ conceptual understandings, their thinking and reasoning, and their ability to support a position, as Danielson recommended. More importantly, critical literacy solicited meaningful, musical performance. My supervisor, in contrast, seemed to limit the definition of literacy to traditional reading and writing, or showing evidence through written expression that students understand the subject matter at hand. She wanted to see traditional literacy demonstrated every time she observed. Although my supervisor might have enjoyed our discussion of “Homeland,” she would have preferred to see it in written form, and she could not have imagined the possibility of a musical performance resulting from literacy objectives. Consequently, I changed my practice, asking chorus and piano students in every class to write reflections on a piece of music or a prompt such as: Read the following and respond: “A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.”—Mariah Carey. How does Mariah’s quote compare to the Beatles’ quote “You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world?” Who do you agree with? Why?

Implementing this traditional sense of literacy in my classroom, I abandoned possibilities for students’ musical exploration, as well as their selfawareness and growth, and their meaningful music performance. Instead, I privileged teaching practices that would demonstrate to my administrator that I was “effective” educator. While prompts seldom tied into musical performance, they delighted my administrator as evidence of student learning. Whose literacy was I honoring? SUMMARY My interpretations of data suggested that there were inconsistencies between my interpretations of Danielson’s Framework and the way the Framework was being implemented during evaluations of my teaching. Reading the Danielson Framework and comparing the Framework to my journal entries yielded some surprising outcomes. I came to view the Framework as an example of process-based pedagogy and evaluation, and I sensed that the way Danielson had conceived the model was disconnected from implementation of the Framework for teacher evaluation in my school. From this exam-

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ination, themes of dialogue and common language, appeasement, survival, and literacy emerged. Although I saw Danielson calling for dialogue between teacher and supervisor to generate a common language around evaluation, I felt I needed to be silent during the evaluation process. My supervisor and I, as well as other teachers, engaged in mutual appeasement to survive the process of evaluation; she tried unconvincingly to demonstrate her understanding of music, and we changed pedagogical goals and practices to align with evaluation rubrics. My most profound insight came as I struggled with the idea of literacy, eventually privileging the traditional view of literacy because it was aligned with “effectiveness.” As a result, I neglected what I had previously considered a cornerstone of pedagogy: critical music literacy that benefitted my students, leading to their self-development and meaningful musical performance. IMPLICATIONS: WHY SHOULD WE CARE? AND WHAT CAN WE DO? After examining the Danielson Framework, journaling, and speaking with colleagues during my research, I wondered: if my supervisor was not implementing the Danielson Framework thoughtfully, at least in regard to music teaching, how could I help make the process of evaluation more successful? Prince and colleagues posited: Identifying highly effective teachers of subjects that are not tested with standardized achievement tests—such as teachers of art, music, physical education, vocational education, and foreign languages—requires a different approach. 25

I had recognized that my frustration was due, in part, to the lack of musical performance indicators in the Danielson text. So I began to write musical examples for the Framework; I thought that if I could develop some musical performance indicators, I might have a better basis for a conversation with my supervisors. Figure 6.1 shows my work on incorporating music teaching examples related to Domain 1a: Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy. I kept Danielson’s descriptors and critical attributes, and then, drawing from my own experiences in the classroom as well as from colleagues, I added musical examples for both the general music classroom and the ensemble music classroom. Generating these indicators helped me contextualize what effective instruction might look like in the music classroom, and the exercise of writing helped me consider how music-centered criteria might lead to improvement of music teaching and meaningful student learning in music. My examples might not pertain to every music teacher’s experience, but

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others may benefit from this exercise to adapt the evaluative language used in their teaching situations.

Figure 6.1. Music teaching examples incorporated into Danielson

Since conducting this autoethnography, I have entered a doctoral program, found a new role as a music teacher educator, and encountered standards-based teacher evaluation in preservice teacher preparation. Some teacher education programs employ a performance assessment designed by Pearson Education and the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity called the edTPA. In principle, the edTPA is a subject-specific assessment, aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC) standards, that helps preservice teachers “document and demonstrate their readiness to teach through lesson plans, instructional materials, student assignments and video clips of teaching, and analyses of teacher and student learning.” 26 Unlike the Danielson Framework, edTPA has musical context and content. The guidelines for performing arts in edTPA suggest possibilities for multiple types of learning experiences in the classroom, including performing, listening, responding, and critiquing. 27 Still, edTPA requirements prescribe a format that includes questioning and facilitating discussion, and the portfolio takes the form of a high-stakes test. Preservice teachers who do not achieve a passing score could have licensure denied. In the midst of creating portfolios for edTPA, preservice teachers may benefit from processes of self-discovery similar to the autoethnography in

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which I was engaged. By journaling and engaging in discussion with colleagues, preservice teachers can be encouraged to make sense of the portfolio evaluation system, examining it critically instead of accepting it passively. Teachers who are engaged critically during their preservice preparation may be better equipped to balance their own visions of good music teaching with checklists for lesson planning and classroom management, once they are employed in a public school. Finally, more research on the Danielson model, as well as other standards-based models of teacher evaluation, is needed. Through my autoethnography process, I found there was little published research on the Danielson model in music education. Others have called for more research in music teacher evaluation as well. It has been argued: The evaluation of music teachers remains an area in need of relevant research, and the development of an appropriate evaluation and observation instrument must be urgently addressed. It is now the responsibility of the united music teaching profession, in tandem with active music education researchers, to address this challenge. 28

Specifically, conducting interview research or focus groups may better elicit individual and collective voices to describe the ways in which new evaluation policies may structure music teachers’ practices. Similar research could be conducted with administrators and music teachers, as well as teachers of other nontested subjects such as art, physical education, and foreign languages, to develop descriptions of how they negotiate standards-based evaluation processes together. Last, it seems important to follow teachers who have experienced edTPA or similar preservice evaluation into their early careers to determine where standards-based evaluation systems enable or constrain music teachers’ professional development across the career span. All of this research will help inform music educators, administrators, and policy makers, and it is vital as a basis for change. It is a charge to music educators, music teacher educators, and researchers to examine standards-based evaluation systems. All must think beyond rubrics and conformity to honor students and their learning and to contextualize the high-quality music instruction that is already taking place. Music teachers’ critical reflection and dialogue about pedagogy and process with colleagues and administrators, as Danielson envisioned, may help construct models for evaluation that show how music classrooms look different from other classrooms. Furthermore, such reflection and dialogue may encourage supervisors to cede their evaluation duties to administrators who are more expert in music. Fair evaluation based on musical content that offers opportunity for music teachers’ professional growth can become a shoe that fits perfectly.

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NOTES 1. See Timothy Brophy and Richard Colwell, “Teacher Evaluations: Issues of Reliability and Validity” (presentation, National Association for Music Education Assessment SRIG Meeting, March 30, 2012, St. Louis, MO). Robert G. Croninger, Linda Valli, and Marylin J. Chambliss, “Researching Quality in Teaching: Enduring and Emerging Challenges,” Teachers College Record 114, no. 4 (2012): 1–11; Gary Fenstermacher and Virginia Richardson, “On Making Determinations of Quality in Teaching,” Teachers College Record 107, no. 1 (2005): 186–213. 2. Jane L. David, “What Research Says about Using Value-Added Measures to Evaluate Teachers.” Educational Leadership 67, no. 8 (2010): 81. 3. Linda Darling-Hammond, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Edward Haertel, and Jesse Rothstein, "Evaluating Teacher Evaluation,” Phi Delta Kappan 93, no. 6 (2012): 8–15; Heather C. Hill, Laura Kapitula, and Kristin Umland, “A Validity Argument Approach to Evaluating Teacher Value-Added Scores,” American Educational Research Journal 48, no. 3 (2011): 794–831. 4. Harold F. Abeles, “Assessing Music Learning,” in Critical Issues in Music Education: Contemporary Theory and Practice, ed. Harold F. Abeles and Lori A. Custodero (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169. 5. Joseph Murphy, Philip Hallinger, and Ronald H. Heck, “Leading via Teacher Evaluation: The Case of the Missing Clothes?” Educational Researcher 42, no. 6 (2013): 351. 6. Steven M. Kimball and Anthony Milanowski, “Examining Teacher Evaluation Validity and Leadership Decision Making Within a Standards-Based Evaluation System,” Educational Administration Quarterly 45, no. 1 (2009): 38. 7. Janet Barrett, “Judging Quality and Fostering Excellence in Music Teaching,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 21, no. 1 (2011): 3; Jeffery G. Watson, Sara B. Kraemer, and Christopher A. Thorn, The Other 69 Percent (Washington, DC: Center for Educator Compensation Reform. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2009), 5. 8. Charlotte Danielson, Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching. (Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2007). 9. Ibid, 38. 10. Ibid, 39. 11. Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12, no. 10 (2011): 273. 12. Ilja Maso, “Phenomenology and Ethnography,” in Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 139. 13. Wendy Luttrell, “‘Good Enough’ Methods for Ethnographic Research,” Harvard Educational Review 70, no. 4 (2000): 499–523. 14. Jonathan A. Smith and Mike Osborn, “Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis,” in Qualitative Psychology: A Practical Guide to Research Methods, ed. Jonathan A. Smith (London: SAGE, 2007), 53–80. 15. Margaret Diane LeCompte and Jean J. Schensul, Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research: An Introduction (New York: AltaMira Press, 2010). 16. Danielson, Enhancing Professional Practice, 15. 17. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1970). 18. Danielson, Enhancing Professional Practice, 92. 19. Ibid., 12. 20. Ibid., 27. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Karen Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn? The Role of Vision in the Early Professional Lives of Teachers,” Journal of Teacher Education 54, no. 43 (2003): 44.

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23. David Myers, “Navigating and Building Capacity for Music Teaching” (keynote address, Society for Music Teacher Education Symposium on Music Teacher Education, Greensboro, NC, September 26–28, 2013). 24. Charlotte Danielson, The Framework for Teaching: Evaluation Instrument (Princeton, NJ: The Danielson Group, 2013): 9. 25. Watson et al. The Other 69 Percent, 5. 26. Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity, edTPA Handbook, http:// www.edTPA.com. 27. Ibid., 43. 28. Brophy and Colwell, “Teacher Evaluations.”

Chapter Seven

Metaphor as a Tool for Understanding (and Questioning?) Preservice Music Teachers’ Beliefs Heather Nelson Shouldice

In her keynote address at the 2013 Symposium on Music Teacher Education, Karen Hammerness urged music teacher educators to consider the ways in which teachers’ visions—their “images of their ideal classroom practices” 1 —can help us understand their aims in the classroom. By articulating their vision for teaching, teachers allow underlying beliefs to surface, which, in turn, can serve as a means for examining and even challenging those beliefs. 2 Beliefs are powerful influences on our thoughts and actions, and, for this reason, the study of teacher beliefs has been an important area in the field of education. 3 Beliefs about teaching, learning, and subject matter function for teachers in a variety of ways, including three characterized by Fives and Buehl: (1) as filters through which they process new information and experiences, (2) as frames for facing new situations and problems, and (3) as guides for their intentions and actions. 4 Upon entering teacher education programs, preservice music teachers bring with them a set of existing beliefs formed throughout their many hours of K–12 schooling, what Lortie refers to as their “apprenticeship of observation.” 5 These belief systems can temper experiences in teacher education coursework, and unfortunately, they can “wash out” the influence of even a good preparation program. 6 It is critical that music teacher educators provide preservice music teachers with opportunities to examine and reflect on their beliefs about teaching, learning, and subject matter. However, examining and discussing beliefs can be challenging because many beliefs are held tacitly or subconsciously and thus can be difficult to articulate. Furthermore, whereas researchers have confirmed beliefs of in-service teachers by observing the 99

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ways in which these beliefs manifest in teaching practice, there are few, if any, opportunities to observe the practices of preservice teachers, making their beliefs even more difficult to discern. One way in which beliefs can be brought into conscious examination is through the use of metaphor, “the essence of [which] is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” 7 Lakoff and Johnson argue that, beyond its function as a figure of speech, “metaphor is not just a matter of language” because “human thought processes are largely metaphorical.” 8 We make sense of the world and understand ideas or concepts by relating them to understandings of other things. For this reason, “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. . . . The way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.” 9 Metaphor has been shown to be a useful tool for eliciting teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning. 10 Researchers have gathered data on preservice and in-service teachers’ metaphors for teaching through interviews and writing as well as through surveys. 11 In music education research, Thompson and Campbell used both drawn images and written descriptions as they investigated the teaching metaphors of preservice music teachers enrolled in an introduction to music education course. 12 Outside of music education, researchers have used metaphor as a tool to examine preservice teachers’ belief changes. 13 However, more research is needed on preservice music teachers’ metaphors for teaching and how these might change over time. In light of this need, the purpose of the current study was to explore firstyear music education students’ developing conceptions of teaching as evidenced by their personal teaching metaphors. Specific questions guiding this study included the following: 1. What do written and drawn metaphors of teaching reveal about incoming first-year music education students’ beliefs about music teaching? 2. To what extent do changes in metaphor within a semester-long course reveal changes in first-year music education students’ beliefs? 3. To what factors or experiences do students attribute their growing self-awareness and questioning of beliefs that led to the change in or affirmation of their metaphors? CONTEXT AND METHOD The participants in this study were thirty undergraduate students attending a large university in the Midwestern United States and enrolled in the freshman-level Introduction to Music Education course, for which I was the instructor. The majority of the participants were majoring in music education;

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however, a few were music performance majors interested in exploring music education or students enrolled in non-music-related majors, such as child development. All of the students who were music majors were either firstyear or transfer students just beginning in the music education program at this university. The initial data collection occurred on the first day of class in late August. We ended this first class meeting by discussing the idea of metaphor. I then asked the students to reflect silently on several questions, which included the following: • • • •

What is the purpose of a music teacher? What does a music teacher do? How does the music teacher interact with students? What does the music teacher accomplish?

Following this reflection, I prompted the students to construct a metaphor for a music teacher. Drawing from a technique used by Thompson and Campbell, I asked each student to draw an image of him- or herself as a teacher, label the picture “A teacher is like . . .” or “Teacher as . . . ,” and write a short paragraph describing what the picture was intended to show. (Although the prompt was phrased as a simile rather than a metaphor, I chose to maintain this wording in order to remain consistent with Thompson and Campbell.) 14 I then collected the metaphors and did not discuss them with the students until the end of the semester. After this initial data collection, we proceeded normally with the Introduction to Music Education course, which met twice weekly for fifty minutes and was focused on critical inquiry. Rather than emphasizing the content knowledge or skill development involved in becoming a music teacher, such as writing lesson plans or learning to lead warm-ups, this course was focused on ideas, experiences, reflection, and questioning, which occurred primarily through readings and discussion. For most class meetings, students read an assigned article or book excerpt and then engaged in whole-group, smallgroup, or one-on-one discussions about a variety of topics. Among these topics were student creativity, student voice and ownership, alternatives to traditional music programs, and reaching diverse learners, including consideration of factors such as race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, SES (socioeconomic status), and disability. In discussing these topics, the students and I shared our prior experiences, reacted and reflected with one another through questioning (e.g., What are the implications of this?), and played devil’s advocate, all strategies that were drawn from Brookfield and Preskill. 15 In addition to critical discussion, there were several other components of the course that prompted students’ exploration and reflection on ideas and

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questions from the field of music education. Guest speakers, including several music education faculty members, graduate students with prior K–12 teaching experience, and one in-service music educator, appeared in several sessions. Another component of the course was the exploration of a variety of music teaching possibilities, which was accomplished through both class discussion of these options and multiple opportunities to observe in a variety of public school music classrooms. Every student completed three observations, each in a different setting (instrumental, choral, and general music) and at a different level (elementary, middle, and high school). Finally, the students began developing their personal philosophies for music education by way of class discussion as well as a final critical reflection paper, in which they explored their own beliefs about music teaching and learning. The final data collection for the current study occurred in late November, three months after the initial data collection. During one of our last class meetings, I reminded the students of the initial metaphor task they had completed on the first day of the semester, including the questions on which they had reflected. I returned to each student his or her original metaphor and asked him or her to respond in writing to the following questions: • Has your metaphor for a music teacher changed from the one you created in August? • If so, how has it changed? What factors or experiences have contributed to the change in your thinking? • If not, what factors or experiences have reinforced or solidified your music teaching metaphor? I collected both the initial metaphor documents and the subsequent written reflections, along with permission forms allowing me to use students’ documents as research data, in a sealed envelope that I did not open until after submitting final grades for the course. Data Analysis In the first stage of data analysis, I focused solely on the initial metaphor documents. Rather than approaching the analysis with predetermined codes or categories, I chose to analyze the initial metaphors inductively by reading and studying them all multiple times to see what salient ideas emerged. At this initial stage, my attention was drawn to the contrast between the metaphors that were more teacher centered and those that were more student centered. Based on this observation, I drew from Patchen and Crawford and classified each metaphor as primarily teacher oriented or primarily student oriented. 16 Metaphors classified as primarily teacher oriented were those that “focus[ed] on the ways in which educational processes affect and are affected

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by the teacher” and in which students had “little, if any, role in contributing to the outcome,” appearing “as passive recipients of the teacher’s work” or not at all. 17 Metaphors classified as primarily student oriented were those that “explicitly describ[ed] roles, processes, and goals in relation to students” and even showed “teachers and students [working] together toward particular objectives.” 18 Secondly, the nature of the various ways in which the students characterized the role of the teacher caught my attention. Thus, I chose a second level of coding the metaphors according to the characterization of the teacher’s role, using categories loosely based on those used by Saban, Kocbeker, and Saban and Thompson and Campbell. 19 Among the teacher-oriented metaphors, three role characterizations emerged: (1) teacher as knowledge provider/transmitter, (2) teacher as craftsperson, and (3) teacher as authority figure. Two role characterizations emerged from the student-oriented metaphors: (1) teacher as facilitator and (2) teacher as nurturer. The second stage of data analysis focused on the subsequent written reflections. Similarly to the first stage of analysis, I began by classifying each reflection as being primarily teacher or student oriented. (For some students, reading their written reflections also caused me to revise my categorization of their initial metaphors due to the additional insight their reflections provided.) I then compared each reflection to the corresponding initial metaphor, noting whether each student’s metaphor and implied beliefs had strengthened, changed, or remained static throughout the course of the semester. I also noted whether the student’s reflection was more teacher oriented or more student-oriented in comparison to his or her initial metaphor. Finally, I coded the factors to which the students attributed the change in, or affirmation of, their personal metaphors and grouped these factors into related categories. To enhance the credibility of these findings, I solicited assistance from an external auditor who had experience in music education and qualitative research. This peer reviewer examined data excerpts along with my corresponding codes, categories, and interpretations and provided feedback on the extent to which he agreed (or disagreed) with my findings. As a result of this discussion, I recategorized several metaphors and consulted with the auditor a second time. FINDINGS Initial Metaphors Of the thirty initial metaphor documents, seventeen used metaphors that were primarily teacher oriented, while twelve used metaphors that were primarily student oriented. One student provided a literal description of an aspect of a

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teacher’s job. Because this was not a metaphor, I eliminated the description from analysis. Metaphors in which teachers were characterized as knowledge providers or transmitters depicted the role of the teacher as one who passes on knowledge to students. In these metaphors, the teacher was considered an “expert” who knew what students should learn and controlled when and how they were instructed. One such metaphor described the music teacher as “a gift bearer of musical knowledge. . . . We are like angels bearing great gifts.” This student’s drawing depicted the teacher as being high above the students, who are acted upon by the teacher (see figure 7.1). Another example of a teacher-as-knowledge-provider metaphor was that of an orientation video (see figure 7.2). This drawing portrayed no interaction between teacher and student. Instead, the teacher presented a set of predetermined knowledge, seemingly with no consideration of the students’ needs or interests. Metaphors in which the teacher was characterized as a craftsperson involved the teacher using his or her expert skills to create a final product. This final product was most often a musical performance, as in one example in which the teacher was classified as a weaver (see figure 7.3). This student compared a teacher to a weaver because “they bring everybody together in a beautiful blend of ‘colors.’” These teacher-as-craftsperson metaphors often depicted students as a “raw material” to be directed or manipulated by the teacher in order to achieve a high-quality product. For example, the student who described a teacher as a weaver stated, “The yarns could be children,”

Figure 7.1. Teacher as Gift Bearer

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Figure 7.2. Teacher as Video

and “the teacher would weave them all together to create beautiful tapestry or a pleasant sound and unified group.” Metaphors in which teachers were depicted as authority figures characterized the teacher as one who has control over students and their learning. For example, one student described a teacher as being like Moses (see figure 7.4) because “Moses led his followers to the Promised Land, and they all looked to him as their leader.” This drawing showed the teacher as large and foregrounded, while the students were small and faceless as they followed behind. Metaphors in which teachers were characterized as facilitators portrayed the teacher as one who provides students with tools or opportunities for learning. Rather than dictating exactly how and what the students should learn, the teacher helps students reach their own destination or create their own final product. One such metaphor depicted the teacher as an artist’s supply box. This student explained, “[Teachers] give you all the tools to paint your world, but they don’t paint it for you. They teach you how to think rather than what to think.”

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Figure 7.3. Teacher as Weaver

Finally, metaphors in which teachers were depicted as nurturers focused on student growth and development. For example, one student compared a teacher to a cocoon “that helps the caterpillar become a beautiful butterfly” (see figure 7.5). This student described her own experiences as a student, stating, “My music teachers boosted my self-esteem by encouraging and motivating me and making me feel special and of value. They helped me feel beautiful in spirit.” This drawing put the student (the butterfly) in the foreground with the teacher (cocoon) smaller and in the background. End-of-Semester Reflections The students’ written reflections on their metaphors at the end of the semester revealed a wide range of stability or change. In their written reflections on their metaphors, three students maintained views that were entirely teacher oriented at the end of the semester, while other students’ metaphors showed at least some change toward student-oriented views.

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Figure 7.4. Teacher as Moses

There were some students whose initial metaphors were primarily student oriented to begin with, but their reflections at the end of the semester revealed additional insight into their beliefs. One such student’s initial metaphor compared the teacher to the lines on a road because the teacher “allows students to go as far as they want in their musical journey” and “guide their students to accomplishing whatever goals they choose to accomplish” (see figure 7.6). At the end of the semester, this student reflected: I still agree that a music teacher is like lines on a road, taking students wherever they want to go. With many of our discussions we have talked about how teaching is not actually about the teacher but what the students need. We have talked about how teachers aren’t there just for themselves but to help students grow and expand their knowledge of music. Throughout this class I have learned many different ways to further students’ education and lead them to have the most success they can have. While these methods might mean breaking from [the] traditional music classroom, it is what is best for the students and the future world of music.

Another student created an initial metaphor comparing a teacher to a gardener “because with the rain and sun the flowers will grow, but with the extra care of a gardener they will grow stronger, just like kids grow up every day no matter what, but with music they will have richer, stronger lives.” At the end of the semester, this student reflected:

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I think my metaphor is true in some ways because I still believe part of any teacher’s job and especially a music teacher’s is to better, enrich, and help the student’s life. But it is a little different because students don’t have to accept your help and input, and we don’t reach all students. Talking about the small populace we do reach as music teachers was something I didn’t think about and can be hard to accept. It’s like now the gardener is only watering some flowers, which would less benefit the whole garden (to keep with the metaphor). Plus, some don’t necessarily take music to heart and do anything with it to impact their lives. Our talks have made me wonder how to fix that. . . .

Figure 7.5. Teacher as Cocoon

In addition to revealing more insight, some written reflections revealed strengthening of belief. Some students initially had created student-oriented metaphors, but their written reflections showed evidence that they had grown even more student-oriented throughout the semester. For example, one student’s initial metaphor depicted the teacher as a global positioning system (GPS) for navigation, which I initially classified as primarily student oriented because the purpose of a GPS is to reach a destination of one’s choosing. However, this student’s written reflection at the end of the semester revealed a different interpretation:

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After being exposed to so many varying methods of teaching, I have found that a teacher is more of a suggestion maker or question asker rather than a “dictator-like” GPS. Students are just as responsible for forming their musical knowledge as the teacher is. Rather than simply providing directions for students to follow, a teacher needs to captivate all students and motivate them to craft their own music.

Figure 7.6. Teacher as Navigation Tool

The most notable instances of growing self-awareness and questioning of beliefs occurred for several students whose written reflections suggested they had shifted from being primarily teacher oriented to more student oriented. For example, the student who originally depicted the teacher as Moses wrote at the end of the semester, While Moses leads all of his followers to one location, just like a music teacher does, Moses leads everyone in the same way. While listening to the professionals speak to us, [I realized] music teachers lead their students to one location, but must lead each of their followers in a different way. Everyone reacts to the teacher and the subject matter in many different ways, and the leader must adapt to work with everyone.

Another student who originally depicted the teacher as a door later reflected, “The thought of [a teacher as] a door is almost as if there’s a barrier that can only be passed through the teachers themselves. Through personal experience and discussion in this class, I know that music doesn’t have to be formally taught.” Another student compared the teacher to a painter, with each class being a “blank canvas” and the students as “colors,” and “it is up to the teacher to apply these colors to create something beautiful for the student to see.” However, at the end of the semester this student wrote, I feel that maybe students are not so much of a blank canvas as I thought. Students come with prior life experiences and we have to incorporate these into the classroom. It can still be a beautiful picture, but maybe more of a collage than a painting. From visiting classrooms and reading about students with unique qualities, I can see that no one is really a blank canvas.

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The most dramatic change during the course of the semester was revealed in Matthew’s reflections. Matthew came from a large, intense, performancefocused high school band program in Texas, and in August he expressed that he actually had no desire to teach K–12 students, but, instead, he planned to become a college tuba professor. Matthew’s initial metaphor depicted the teacher as a bumblebee (see figure 7.7) and he stated, “A music teacher pollinates us with music. They create musical life within us.” At the end of the semester, Matthew reflected, “I think that my metaphor has changed. Before with my metaphor of the teacher being a bumblebee and the students being a flower, that metaphor depicts the teacher forcing knowledge of music in a kid’s brain.” Matthew then stated, “I now believe that [a music teacher] is like this” and drew a new image (see figure 7.8). Matthew’s new metaphor shows the teacher as a salesperson who sets up a “shop” offering all kinds of music and knowledge from which students (shown in a variety of shapes and sizes) can choose. Perhaps most striking is Matthew’s reflection on why/how his beliefs about music teaching have changed: “My opinion has changed because I did not know any other type of learning music [than] getting it shoved down my throat.” Through their written reflections, students attributed change in, or affirmation of, their metaphors to a variety of factors. Several students cited guest speakers as catalysts for reflection. For example, one student mentioned that his metaphor had changed in part as a result of a particular guest speaker who made him consider the need for “asking ourselves what our students need,” while another student stated that her metaphor was reinforced by “the idea of creativity and ownership which has been reaffirmed time and time again by speakers.” Classroom observations were another factor that many students identified as influential to their thinking about music teaching. An example was a student who explained that her metaphor had changed “after being exposed to so many varying methods of teaching.” In addition to providing the students with opportunities to consider new possibilities for their future music teaching careers, these observations also pushed the students to reflect on and broaden their views about music teaching and learning. In addition to guest speakers and classroom observations, class discussion was cited as an influence on metaphor changes. For example, one student reflected that his metaphor was solidified “when the class [discussed] how music means something different to each of us or that people define music differently.” Another student stated, “The discussions in class have only emphasized my belief,” while others gave specific examples of how class discussions had changed their thinking, such as one student who wrote, “Discussions from this class made me realize that I care far more about the state of individuals’ hearts and souls than their exact knowledge or execution of musical concepts.” For many students, simply having a chance to reflect

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Figure 7.7. Teacher as Bumblebee

on—and even question—their experiences, and to hear the views of others, caused them to be more conscious of their own beliefs. DISCUSSION Through creating written and drawn metaphors for music teaching, the preservice teachers who participated in this study revealed underlying beliefs about music teaching and learning, including beliefs about the role of the teacher, how the teacher interacts with students, and the teacher’s larger purpose. These metaphors also served as a tool for the students’ subsequent reflection on their beliefs as well as on the experiences that had contributed to metaphor change or affirmation throughout the course of a semester while enrolled in an introduction to music education course. While the metaphors

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Figure 7.8. Teacher as Salesperson

served as an effective means for revealing beliefs and reflecting on them at the end of the course, these metaphors also could have been used to explicitly guide reflection and identity development in an ongoing way throughout the course. Just as Karen Hammerness suggests that teachers should be encouraged to “elaborate and interrogate their visions” as a way of possibly leading them “to identify conflicts and contradictions, vaguenesses, and even blind spots in their visions,” preservice music teachers might be encouraged to reflect on their personal metaphors for teaching as well as on the metaphors of others, examining what they imply about music teaching and learning. 20 We also might ask our students to compare metaphors with similar topics but different dynamics, such as comparing the “teacher-as-painter” and “teacheras-artist’s-box” metaphors created by students in the current study. What are the differences implied? How might those teachers’ music classrooms differ? How might the experiences of their students differ? Other metaphors could

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also be explored, such as a metaphor for the music classroom or for the music learner. While the findings of this study suggest that many participants’ metaphors for teaching changed as a result of their developing self-awareness throughout the semester, it cannot be concluded with any certainty whether these changes in teaching metaphor reflect broader and longer-lasting change in belief that might manifest in music teaching practice. Therefore, in addition to using metaphors as a tool for revealing and reflecting on preservice teachers’ underlying beliefs, future research might examine whether and how changes in metaphors during teacher preparation become reflected in the novice music teacher’s practice, during either student teaching or early career teaching. Furthermore, we might also examine the extent to which being presented with new metaphors for teaching might lead to a change in beliefs. According to Lakoff and Johnson, “new metaphors have the power to create a new reality.” 21 Similarly, Tobin claims that adopting a new teaching metaphor can act as a “master switch” for beliefs, observing that, for teachers in his study, “reconceptualizing [their] role in terms of a new metaphor appeared to switch an entirely different set of beliefs into operation.” 22 Tobin also suggests that what teachers do in the classroom may be directly connected to their teaching metaphors. For example, how might the beliefs of a teacher who conceptualizes his or her role as a knowledge transmitter play out in the classroom? How might the actions of someone who conceptualizes teaching in this way differ from those of someone who conceptualizes teaching as facilitating? More research exploring the extent to which teachers’ metaphors for teaching relate to their actual teaching practice is needed, specifically in the field of music education. Finally, the results of the current study support and justify the inclusion of a critically reflective and discussion-based introductory music education course for all music education students early in their programs, ideally in their very first semester of coursework, in order to encourage them to begin thinking like teachers and reflecting on their own experiences as soon as possible. Zeichner and Tabachnick suggest that, by immediately beginning with teaching students techniques for how to teach, teacher educators may actually reinforce traditional teaching and learning practices. 23 “By focusing on how things were to be done without asking students to consider what was to be done and why, the university initiated discussions that tended to encourage acquiescence and conformity to existing school routines.” 24 In advocating the study of teachers’ visions, Hammerness states that “uncovering [preservice] teachers’ lay knowledge and beliefs can have a profound impact on how and what [they] learn (as well as unlearn) in their professional development programs” and that “teacher development programs must elicit teachers’ lay knowledge to confront contradictions, challenge assumptions, and

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deepen knowledge, in turn laying the groundwork for more complex personal and theory-based professional knowledge.” 25 If we as music teacher educators begin by providing our students an opportunity to reexamine their prior experiences and to reflect on what we do in music education (both currently and what we might do in the future) and why we do it before focusing on the how in methods classes, we can start our students on the journey to becoming more reflective practitioners through ongoing contemplation and development of their beliefs about music teaching and learning. NOTES 1. Karen Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn? The Role of Vision in the Early Professional Lives of Teachers,” Journal of Teacher Education 54, no. 1 (2003): 45. 2. Ibid. 3. See Paul Ernest, “The Impact of Beliefs on the Teaching of Mathematics,” in Math Teaching: The State of the Art, ed. Paul Ernest (New York: Falmer Press, 1989), 249–54; Helenrose Fives and Michelle M. Buehl, “Spring Cleaning for the ‘Messy’ Construct of Teachers’ Beliefs: What Are They? Which Have Been Examined? What Can They Tell Us?,” in APA Educational Psychology Handbook: Vol. 2 Individual Differences and Cultural and Contextual Factors, ed. Karen R. Harris, Steve Graham, and Tim Urdan (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012), 471–99; Donna M. Kagan, “Implications of Research on Teacher Belief,” Educational Psychologist 27, no. 1 (1992): 65–90; Jan Nespor, “The Role of Beliefs in the Practice of Teaching,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 19, no. 4 (1987): 317–28; M. Frank Pajares, “Teachers’ Beliefs and Educational Research: Cleaning up a Messy Construct,” Review of Educational Research 62, no. 3 (1992): 307–32; James Raths, “Teachers’ Beliefs and Teaching Beliefs,” Early Childhood Research & Practice 3, no. 1 (2001); Virginia Richardson, “The Role of Attitudes and Beliefs in Learning to Teach,” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, ed. John Sikula, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 102–19; Linda K. Thompson, “Considering Beliefs in Learning to Teach Music,” Music Educators Journal 93, no. 3 (2007): 30–35; Sue Vartuli, “Beliefs: The Heart of Teaching,” Young Children 60, no. 5 (2005): 76–86. 4. Fives and Buehl, “Spring Cleaning.” 5. Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 6. Kenneth M. Zeichner and B. Robert Tabachnick, “Are the Effects of University Teacher Education ‘Washed Out’ by School Experience?” Journal of Teacher Education 32, no. 3 (1981): 7–11. 7. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5. 8. Ibid., 6. 9. Ibid., 3. 10. See Robert V. Bullough, “Exploring Personal Teaching Metaphors in Preservice Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 42, no. 1 (1991): 43–51; Bruce F. Gurney, “Tugboats and Tennis Games: Preservice Conceptions of Teaching and Learning Revealed through Metaphor,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 32, no. 6 (1995): 569–83; Ahmet Saban, “Functions of Metaphor in Teaching and Teacher Education: A Review Essay,” Teaching Education 17, no. 4 (2006): 299–315; Kenneth Tobin, “Changing Metaphors and Beliefs: A Master Switch for Teaching?,” Theory into Practice 29, no. 2 (1990): 122–27. 11. See Christianna L. Alger, “Secondary Teachers’ Conceptual Metaphors of Teaching and Learning: Changes over the Career Span,” Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009): 743–51; Thomas S. C. Farrell, “‘The Teacher Is an Octopus’: Uncovering Preservice English Teachers’ Prior Beliefs through Metaphor Analysis,” RELC Journal 37, no. 2 (2006): 236–48;

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Terri Patchen and Teresa Crawford, “From Gardeners to Tour Guides: The Epistemological Struggle Revealed in Teacher-Generated Metaphors of Teaching,” Journal of Teacher Education 62, no. 3 (2011): 286–98; Ahmet Saban, Beyhan Nazli Kocbeker, and Alihan Saban, “Prospective Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching and Learning Revealed through Metaphor Analysis,” Learning and Instruction 17 (2007): 123–39; Eulsun Seung, Soonhye Park, and Ratna Narayan, “Exploring Elementary Pre-service Teachers’ Beliefs About Science Teaching and Learning as Revealed in Their Metaphor Writing,” Journal of Science Education and Technology 20, no. 6 (2011): 703–14; Donita Massengill Shaw and Marc Mahlios, “Pre-service Teachers’ Metaphors of Teaching and Literacy,” Reading Psychology 29 (2008): 31–60. Lynn Thomas and Catherine Beauchamp, “Understanding New Teachers’ Professional Identity through Metaphor,” Teaching and Teacher Education 27 (2011): 762–69. 12. Linda K. Thompson and Mark Robin Campbell, “Gods, Guides and Gardeners: Preservice Music Educators’ Personal Teaching Metaphors,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education no. 158 (2003): 43–54. 13. Aisling M. Leavy, Fiona A. McSorley, and Lisa A. Boté, “An Examination of What Metaphor Construction Reveals About the Evolution of Preservice Teachers’ Beliefs about Teaching and Learning,” Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007): 1217–33; Seung, Park, and Narayan, “Exploring Elementary Pre-service Teachers’ Beliefs.” 14. Thompson and Campbell, “Gods, Guides and Gardeners.” 15. Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill, Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). 16. Patchen and Crawford, “From Gardeners to Tour Guides.” 17. Ibid., 290. 18. Ibid., 291. 19. Ahmet Saban, Beyhan Nazli Kocbeker, and Alihan Saban. “Prospective Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching and Learning Revealed through Metaphor Analysis.” Learning and Instruction 17 (2007): 123–39. Thompson and Campbell, “Gods, Guides and Gardeners.” 20. Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn?” 54. 21. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 145. 22. Tobin, “Changing Metaphors and Beliefs: A Master Switch for Teaching?” 126. 23. Zeichner and Tabachnick, “Are the Effects of University Teacher Education ‘Washed Out’ by School Experience?” 24. Ibid., 9. 25. Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn?, 53.

Chapter Eight

Goal-Setting in an Ensemble-Based Field Experience Linda C. Thornton and Jason B. Gossett

Reflective practice is necessary for good teaching. Scholars such as Dewey, van Manen, and Schön established the foundation for reflective thinking and reflective practice, 1 and the role of reflection in music teaching and music teacher preparation has long been examined. 2 This scholarship reinforces Dewey’s assertion that reflective practice occurs when teachers “look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings which are the capital stock for intelligent dealings with further experiences. It is the heart of intellectual organization and of the disciplined mind.” 3 Acting on reflection through goal-setting is essential to developing reflective skills among preservice teachers. Schunk stated, “A goal reflects one’s purpose and refers to quantity, quality, or rate of performance. Goal-setting involves establishing a standard or objective to serve as the aim of one’s actions.” 4 Although goals clearly are a part of reflective teaching, there is little research examining specifically how goals are set, how goals function, or how goals are understood by teachers. Because we teach an undergraduate music teacher education class with a focus on reflective teaching, we engaged in this investigation to assist our understanding of how our students understand goals, the goal-setting process, and the role of goals in reflection. Capturing reflection and documenting the reflective process is a challenge for preservice teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators. Rogers contended that this challenge arose, in part, from lack of consistent definition: “An inherent risk in an imprecise picture of reflection is that, in an age where measurable, observable learning takes priority, it is easily dismissed precisely because no one knows what to look for. Or worse, it is reduced to a checklist of behaviors.” 5 Accrediting agencies, such as the Council for the 117

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Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), have required evidence of reflection through student-generated electronic portfolios. These portfolios seek to document reflection in the teaching process and have become an additional source of reflective inquiry in teacher education as well as music teacher education. 6 Although reflection may not be defined consistently, Schunk provided a definition of goals and goal-setting that we found useful for our investigation. Schunk claimed that goals improved performance and learning through enhancing perceptions of progress, self-evaluation, and self-efficacy. Goals were defined through their three properties: specificity, proximity, and difficulty. Specificity referred to concrete objectives that were either completed or not. Proximity referred to the length of time to reach larger goals, and the presence of intermediate goals established to achieve the larger goal. Difficulty referred to the level of effort required in relation to ability level to attain a goal. Finally, Schunk described how motivation to work toward self-set goals could be greater than motivation for goals that were set by someone else. 7 The concept of goals as a motivational construct differs somewhat from goal-setting in reflective practice. Motivation approaches, such as Goal Theory, consider goal orientations and types of goals. Commonly explored goal orientations include performance goals (judging oneself in comparison to others), mastery goals (striving for improvement), and learning goals (increasing competence). 8 Goal types include approach goals (demonstrating competence) and avoidance goals (avoiding incompetence). 9 We chose not to examine goals as motivation but instead focused on goal-setting as a result of teacher reflection. We were most interested in the goal-setting process, the understanding of goals, and the follow-through, or persistence, related to goals by undergraduate preservice music teachers (PSTs). In addition to gaining understanding of the reflective thinking of our students, we wanted to gain insight into their development as teachers. Fuller and Bown developed a three-level model of concerns that began with teachers focusing on survival or self concerns, then showed teachers focusing on task or teacher concerns, and finally teachers moved to student or learning outcome concerns. 10 Because Fuller and Bown’s concerns model has served as a valuable framework for understanding teacher growth in music education research, we believed it would be useful for our research as well. 11 Our study took place with students enrolled in an early field experience intended to provide opportunities for PSTs to implement knowledge and strategies in authentic environments with school-aged children and to increase the teaching confidence of PSTs. Specifically, the PSTs who were participants in this study met with the same students once a week over the course of six weeks. Notably unique to this field experience was a public performance following the sequential rehearsals.

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Furthermore, our study used video recording and video analysis of PSTs teaching in their early field experience. Increased accessibility to both hardware and software has made video analysis a viable tool for aiding teacher reflection. Video coding has provided teachers with the opportunity to focus on specific aspects of their teaching, and research suggests that PSTs find video coding useful as a common frame of reference for instructor feedback and discussion. 12 Although prior research has implied that teachers could use video analysis to develop a “course of action for future teaching situations,” 13 there has been no evidence to indicate how video analysis affected such planning. We saw the potential to use video analysis to capture PST goal-setting in a way that was visible and explicit to both the PSTs and to us as instructors. For the present investigation, PSTs were provided access to Studiocode software. 14 Originally used by sports teams to analyze video, the Studiocode program allows users to create codes that focus and organize the video reviewing experience. So, for example, the key “M” might code instances of teacher modeling, and as the PSTs viewed their teaching videos, they would press “M” at the beginning of video segments when they saw themselves modeling and press the same key when they saw the action end. Coding then appeared as a block directly below their video window providing a visual representation of time spent on each action. Students could create as many different codes as they wished, and they could identify a given section of video with many different, applicable codes. PURPOSE Through a six-week field experience, we had the opportunity to watch PST goal-setting unfold. Analysis of lesson plans and reflections written by PSTs, in addition to analysis of video coding, afforded opportunity to gain understanding of how PSTs thought about goals as their reflective practice developed and simultaneously provided insight into their development as teachers. The purpose of the present investigation, therefore, was to examine PSTs’ conceptions of goals and goal-setting. We were curious about: (a) What are PSTs’ conceptions of goals? (b) What types of goals are evidenced by PSTs? (c) How do PSTs view progress vis-à-vis their goals? and (d) How do PSTs think about goal-setting as part of the reflective process? METHOD A case study design was used for the current investigation. Merriam defined case study as “an in-depth description and analysis of a bounded system.” 15 The system in this case was our course and, specifically, the sequential field

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experience embedded within. So the case study was limited to students enrolled in the course who then served as the unit of analysis for the project. Participants The four participants, Alice, Tom, Brenda, and Sasha, were undergraduate seniors enrolled in the course “Emphasis in Elementary and Intermediate Band.” The students intended to student teach the following semester, except Alice, who was waiting an additional semester. Following graduation, Alice and Sasha planned to seek teaching jobs, but Brenda intended to earn a graduate degree in performance. Tom was planning to audition for graduate schools, but at the time of the class, he was undecided about his path. Tom and Brenda were socially outgoing by nature, and Alice and Sasha were more reserved personalities. The participants were not a social group outside of class, which was somewhat unusual, compared to similar college courses we had taught. Both Schmidt and Conkling found that community was an important component of successful learning, 16 and the lack of community in this group seemed notable. Researcher Positionality We were investigators as well as instructors in the methods course, and we both had taught the course in previous semesters. We initiated the project after a visit from the Studiocode software representative. Intrigued by the video analysis software, we felt this course presented an ideal opportunity to try the software because of the nature of the field experience, which would allow students to follow their progress across five teaching experiences in the same setting. While discussing various uses of the software and examining literature about reflection and video analysis, we decided to focus our investigation on how students set, revised, and maintained goals. The practical value of the investigation was that it could provide us with insight for future iterations of the methods course and understanding of how goal-setting might function in music teacher education. Context During the methods course, the four PSTs participated in a six-week field experience. This field experience had been associated with the course for four years, and at the time of this study, a seven-year partnership had existed between the local public school and the university school of music. After observing us teach the first rehearsal, PSTs led weekly rehearsals of a fifthgrade band for five weeks, and they participated in a culminating public performance. The repertoire was selected by the fifth-grade teachers and primary course instructor, from which each PST chose a Grade 1 concert

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band piece to rehearse. There were two bands, each consisting of approximately fifty-five students, with reasonably complete instrumentation in each ensemble. Each band learned three pieces for the concert. Two PSTs were assigned to each ensemble. Each PST rehearsed for twenty minutes of each hour-long rehearsal and then conducted the piece in the culminating concert. Each band performed three pieces in the concert; the third pieces were conducted by an experienced teacher in one band, and the primary course instructor in the other band. For each rehearsal, PSTs: (a) wrote a lesson plan (and received feedback), (b) taught the lesson, which was video recorded, (c) participated in an informal reflective experience at a local restaurant, (d) received individual feedback from the instructors, (e) viewed and used software to code videos, (f) wrote a reflection after viewing their videos, and finally (g) participated in group reflection and planning for future rehearsals. The PSTs did not receive a grade for their teaching; this decision was made to help the students focus on improving their teaching and learning in the experience rather than on evaluation. However, the lesson plans and written reflections were weighted heavily in the syllabus to reflect the importance of these aspects of the teaching process. Furthermore, the syllabus stated that if lesson plans and reflections were not completed in a timely manner, the student would not be allowed to conduct during the rehearsal time. Prior to the six weeks of band rehearsals, we asked participants to reflect on effective teachers from their past as an initial step in the goal-setting process. Through group discussion, PSTs shared the traits that made teachers effective. A number of traits were discussed, including being organized, creating a positive, supportive environment, and stressing the importance of a routine. From this discussion of traits, two long-term goals emerged: managing instructional time efficiently and being flexible while implementing the lesson plan. Following the discussion, we gave PSTs three initial goals: talking less, modeling more, and having students play often. We selected these goals based on our past experiences with PSTs in previous years and due to suggestions in the literature that initial codes should be provided for the first video analysis. 17 Participants were also encouraged to establish their own goals as the field experience progressed. Data Sources and Analysis Data sources included the PSTs’ weekly teaching reflections, lesson plans, and video recorded teaching instances. Investigators kept weekly journals and conducted interviews with each PST, which also were included in the data. All data were generated during the field experience except the interviews, which were conducted in the semester following the field experience.

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Data from all four PSTs were included in this investigation; however, only three PSTs (Alice, Tom, and Brenda) participated in the interviews. After interviews were conducted and transcribed, we examined the data and conducted initial coding individually. Over several meetings, we compared, discussed, and revised these initial codes and discussed possible themes and issues. We then revisited the data through the lens of our research questions, coded the data once again individually, and met several times to discuss conclusions. FINDINGS What Are Students’ Conceptions of Goals? The PSTs seemed to conceive of goals as objects, ideas, or actions to be achieved. This conception of goals may be due in large part to PSTs’ driven natures. The participants were high achievers themselves. They had earned admission to a top-tier, competitive university based on their scholarship and successfully auditioned into a school of music. Being driven to achieve and to be successful has likely been a part of their lives for quite some time: “I think that if I didn’t have any type of short-term goal, like, at any point, when I was doing anything, then I wouldn’t really know what I was doing” (Brenda, interview). Conceptions of goals also seemed axiomatic, so much a part of everyday experience that PSTs ceased to think of having goals. They made reference to achievements: “I mean, I feel like I’ve always been driven, you know, to achieve something, so, I think I’ve always had in my mind and just never really realized . . .” (Brenda, interview). However, they seemed to not explicitly label “future achievements” (Tom, interview) as goals. The PSTs were nonetheless cognizant that goals existed as a form of motivation; it seemed goals were a fact of their academic lives. Although participants listed and discussed many different types of goals, when asked in the interviews to define goals, they struggled to provide clear and cogent definitions. As Alice expressed, “Ok, I guess I feel like a goal is something that you want to work towards? Um, just something that you preplan for beforehand” (interview). Toward the end of the field experience, one instructor observed, “Tom plans [to] review the previous week’s materials, and then drive home the fact that the fanfare theme repeats. I only know this from reading his lesson plan. He couldn’t articulate his goals for the ensemble very well” (Gossett, journal). This apparent inability to articulate the definition of a goal may have been due to a tacit knowledge of goals developed during their lives as students. It seemed clear that PSTs saw goals as a driving force for instruction, as well as for their own achievement in life as a student or teacher, and their

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students’ achievement. Both Brenda and Alice described goals as “preplanned” and Tom stated, “in preparation for a rehearsal or lesson, the first thing you need to do is set the goal” (Tom, interview). In their undergraduate teacher education experience, PSTs were required to plan lessons around student learning goals; however, in this investigation, PSTs did not make direct connections between the importance of student learning goals for teaching and their own personal goals. They seemed to compartmentalize conceptions of goals: goals for their students were achievements, while goals for themselves were motivations. This compartmentalization of goal conceptions can also be seen in the types of goals they set. Schunk described goals consisting of specificity, proximity, and difficulty. 18 While the PSTs set student achievement goals that were specific, such as performing with better balance, and teacher achievement goals that were specific, such as improving feedback, they did not set specific goals regarding attainment, such as “I will give feedback three more times than last teaching.” This could have contributed to their lack of focus on the goals they set and prevented them from reporting progress. Furthermore, PSTs did not vary the proximity, nor did they acknowledge proximity as variable. While all PSTs reported the existence, and importance, of short-term and long-term goals in their interviews, none expressed any proximal difference in their reflections or comments on their goals. In our pre–field experience discussion of effective teaching, they mentioned characteristics such as passion and responsiveness. These characteristics rarely reappeared in their own goals; for example, they did not mention, “I want to seem more passionate on the podium” or “I want to listen and respond to the ensemble better.” The PSTs’ goals were almost exclusively focused on controlling the ensemble. Probably the best illustration of this thinking is Tom’s goal to “prevent dragging” (lesson plan 5), as if he alone could impose consistent tempo on a group of fifty-five fifth graders. Therefore, it seemed that most goals were oriented toward the short-term. Although PSTs may have been thinking about a longer-term context of trying to become the effective teachers they envisioned, they did not explicitly articulate or reflect upon such goals. We found it challenging to assess the difficulty of PST goals. Some teaching achievement goals seemed more difficult than others, and, without specificity in these goals, attainment was probably more difficult. The achievement goals that PSTs set for the band members were more difficult at the beginning of the field experience (e.g., “play with good phrasing”), but became less difficult over time (e.g., “play correct rhythms”). Due to the complex act of teaching, however, making any changes at all, especially as a beginning teacher, may by itself be difficult.

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What Types of Goals Are Evidenced by PSTs? Students set several types of goals during the field experience, mostly related to student achievement or teacher achievement. The primary data source for student achievement goals was PST lesson plans; the topic did not appear as explicitly in their written reflections or discussions. Initially, goals for student achievement in the lesson plans were set in terms of concepts associated with the repertoire, such as understanding dynamics or performing with proper phrasing. In early goal-setting, PSTs identified playing specific segments of repertoire. For example, Sasha wrote, “[Students will be able to] play ‘Courtly Dance’ from mm. 1–25 with steady tempo, accurate dotted rhythm, and contrasting dynamics” (lesson plan 2). Some lesson plans did not contain goals. Instead, measure numbers were identified and a sequence of instructional activities were listed under the measure number. PSTs also identified goals for teacher achievement, evidenced primarily in their reflections, the codes they selected during their video analysis, and somewhat in interviews. At the beginning of the field experience, we gave each PST three goals to work toward in their teaching and to use when they coded their videos: talking less during instruction, modeling more, and having students play often. After their initial teaching episodes, however, participants were encouraged to retain these goals, if they were appropriate, or to establish new goals. All four participants maintained these initial teacher achievement goals in their video coding throughout the field experience. Alice and Tom each added the goal of giving clearer and more concise feedback. Sasha added a goal of asking more and better questions to get her students more involved. Brenda, Alice, and Tom added a goal to eliminate nonessential teacher talk, as Alice described: “I can’t stand how many times I say “so” and “um” while I’m giving instruction, so I want to be more conscious of that and try to say those words less” (reflection 4). The types of teacher achievement goals that might be equated with “survival concerns” had limited presence in the lesson plans, reflections, or in the student interviews. Similarly, goals associated with “student concerns” were not pervasive. “Task concerns,” from the Fuller and Bown model, were overwhelmingly present. 19 Quality and amount of communication were the main goals articulated by the students. Alice consistently discussed verbal communication goals such as “keep my instruction clear and to the point” and “I wasn’t quite sure how to get them to understand,” whereas Brenda tended to discuss nonverbal communication goals, such as “having the group watch me more” and “I need to talk less and communicate non-verbally more.” Sasha consistently focused on instructional delivery tasks, such as sequencing, “making instructions as concise as possible,” and making cues “large enough.” Tom also was concerned about the amount of talking he did (“I think I could improve my rehearsing by replacing a large amount of the

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‘talking’ with ‘modeling’”) or the quality of his communication (“concise and clear” and “feedback variety”). The culminating performance at the end of the field experience likely influenced the focus of attention regarding both student achievement goals and teacher achievement goals. While participants initially wrote lesson plans directed toward conceptual learning by the ensembles, they quickly changed orientation toward getting the repertoire “performance ready.” For example, one of Alice’s later lesson plans included making sure “entrances and rhythms are correct.” Brenda’s last lesson plan included, “The students will be able to play through the piece with proper balance, phrasing, and style,” (lesson plan 5). Tom wrote in his final lesson plan, “Solidify concept of entire piece as a whole and reduce chance of train-wreck.” This change of focus regarding student achievement goals could be seen as representing a shift in task concerns to survival concerns. Fuller and Bown described evaluation as one type of survival concern. 20 In this case, our PSTs might have been concerned about a public performance as a type of evaluation. They may have seen the quality of the fifth-grade students’ performance as a reflection of their teaching, and thus concerns about this evaluation became prominent. Fuller and Bown suggested that task concerns were usually attributed to teachers who have moved beyond survival concerns. This linear conception, initial survival concerns followed by task concerns, was not evident among our participants. Instead, our PSTs’ shifts in goal orientation supported Miksza and Berg’s assertions that the Fuller and Bown teacher concerns models may not be linear and instead may be best represented as clusters. 21 Furthermore, Fuller and Bown described survival concerns as those associated more directly with full-time teaching, such as learning students’ names, finding the copy machine, and other tasks that were absent from this and perhaps many short-term field-experience situations. On reflection, our participants claimed that the overarching goal for the fifth-grade field experience was to gain experience in teaching: “Well, for my . . . for both myself and the ensemble, I just wanted us both to improve. Like, I wanted to become a better a teacher through the experience” (Alice, interview). Even immediately following the field experience, such goals became evident: “I think the experience that I have standing in front of this group and rehearsing a piece with them for a longer period of time will definitely be useful for me in the future” (Tom, reflection 5). Because no PST explicitly stated a goal to gain experience before or during the field experience, such goals may have been latent. It is possible that this is further evidence that, to participants, goals are rooted in their daily lives and thus are not necessarily labeled as “goals.”

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How Do PSTs View Progress vis-à-vis Their Goals? In their weekly reflections, participants monitored the progress of their teaching achievement goals. “I did improve on my feedback variety. I had more specific feedback that was more relevant to the specific players that it applied to. My feedback consisted of more than just ‘great,’ ‘great,’ ‘great.’” (Tom, interview). PSTs continued to monitor progress on goals throughout the experience, keeping the same teacher achievement goals from week to week, even if there was no evidence of progress. As noted earlier, Alice set a goal of eliminating unnecessary filler talk, such as okay, um, and so, and her goal monitoring is illustrated in this sequence of statements from successive written reflections, “As for how I can improve, I can’t stand how many times I say ‘so’ and ‘um’ while I’m giving instruction” (reflection 3) and “Also, I can’t stand how many times I say ‘ok, uuuummm’! It’s distracting, and it’s starting to drive me crazy!” (reflection 4). Our preservice students seemed to benefit from the continuity of focus on goal-setting throughout this field experience, perhaps because they could see progress. Participants also monitored the progress of student achievement goals, especially in relation to their teaching achievement goals. Brenda illustrated the connection between student achievement and teacher achievement in this reflection: “Modeling for them was incredibly helpful. Sometimes I had to repeat examples, but every time I played for them, they improved” (reflection 2). In a similar way, lack of progress in teaching achievement was also tied to student achievement: “I tend to have a tolerance for chatting from the students during the rehearsal. I think I tolerate it because I honestly just don’t want to deal with it, so I ignore it. This is very effective in making the kids think that chatting is okay and acceptable” (Tom, reflection 4). The PSTs rarely claimed that they had accomplished a goal. The progress they made toward any specific goal had no discernible terminus. For instance, in Sasha’s culminating reflection, she noted improvement made toward goals she set early in the field experience: “One thing that improved by working with the fifth graders was projecting my speaking voice and speaking clearly so that everyone can understand” (Sasha, reflection 5), but Sasha never noted that she had accomplished the goal. Alice noted how the videocoding software helped her identify bad habits that ought to be improved, but not that she had successfully shed those bad habits. Video recording, analysis, and coding seemed to help students monitor their progress. Tom reported that he saw the “blocks in my head” (Tom, interview), specifically concerning trying to talk less; in other words, he wanted the coded “block” representing his talking time to get smaller. Tom’s experience was consistent with the results of Tripp and Rich, who reported that analyzing and coding videos created “vivid images” for experienced teachers, which helped them remember their teaching issues. 22 Similarly,

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Both Tom and Alice reported that by watching their videos, they saw their teaching improve: “’Cause at first I was, like, ‘there’s only two little blocks of feedback. That’s not good.’ It made me conscious of it. And then I had much more feedback by the end” (Alice, interview). How Do PSTs Think about Goal-Setting as Part of the Reflective Process? During their interviews, students consistently identified goals as the start of the teaching process, and they identified reflection as something that tied back to goal-setting. Through continued discussion, all three interviewed PSTs came to describe more of a “loop” or “cycle” in the teaching process, in which reflection led back to goals: “It’s kind of like a loop, like, after reflection you go straight to the beginning. Because then you’re thinking about how you met your goals and how do you want to further try to meet your goals” (Alice, interview) and “’Cause then after you reflect on whether you met this goal, then if you did meet that you have a new goal. But if you didn’t meet that goal, then maybe your new goal is to meet this goal again. In that case it would come back to the same goal” (Tom, interview). Although the PSTs spoke clearly about the cyclical nature of goal-setting and reflection, we did not see a progression of reflection toward continuation or completion of goals in the goal-setting and reflection in which PSTs engaged. As we mentioned earlier, PSTs maintained the goals that were initially provided for them (talking less, modeling more, increasing student performance), and although they commented on the effectiveness of these strategies, they never commented that they had accomplished these goals, nor had they replaced the goals with others. Further, while some of the participants set new goals, such as giving feedback and using fewer filler words, comments about the original goals only appeared in reflections if they were still a source of concern (“driving me crazy”). Likewise, the PSTs regularly set student achievement goals in their lesson plans, but they never discussed students having accomplished those goals. For example, Sasha’s goals for each lesson plan remained virtually the same, “steady tempo, accurate notes and rhythms and good balance” (Sasha, lesson plans). While the other PSTs changed student achievement goals in their plans, none commented in their reflections that students had met a goal they had established nor noted progress specifically on the goal. The student achievement goals appeared in and disappeared from lesson plans, but not based on any articulated completion. In other words, the students’ goalsetting process was not a “loop” or “cycle.” It seemed that PSTs knew the ideal relationship between reflection and goal-setting, but they did not apply their knowledge to their teaching practices.

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This disparity between how students described the reflection and goalsetting as a loop, and their own engagement with reflection and goal-setting may be consistent with Schön’s descriptions of “problem solving” compared to “problem setting.” “Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.” 23 This definition of “problem setting” seemed to mirror our conception of goal-setting. Students may instead have been focused on “problem solving,” perceiving that the problems before them were fixed and that applying specific teaching techniques would ultimately solve the problems. As Alice stated, “I feel like I learned different kinds of strategies, too, for um, having students learn the material” (interview) and Brenda stated the field experience was “effective in practicing and developing some teaching techniques” (reflection 5). Furthermore, the PSTs’ singular focus on communication strategies—both verbal and nonverbal—seemed also to imply a belief that adjusting strategies in their teaching would improve the students’ learning or performance. As Schön asserted, problem solving can interfere with problem setting; therefore, it is possible the students’ focus on task concerns could have interfered with their goal-setting and reflection in the field experience. VIDEO ANALYSIS AS A TOOL We purposely chose to not focus this investigation on the video analysis tool itself because we were more interested in students’ thinking and perceptions. However, due to the heuristic nature of this study, we found it valuable to reflect on the strengths and challenges of using the tool with our students. At the end of each interview, we asked PSTs individually what they thought of using Studiocode and whether they believed they would continue to use the tool in their teaching. Of the three participants we interviewed, we had mixed feedback, summarized as positive feelings (Alice), positive feelings, but with lessening need over time (Tom), and Brenda with a generally negative reaction. Our students seemed excited when we first introduced the Studiocode software to them, but interviews indicated a lessening of excitement over time. They remarked that it was beneficial, but, at the same time, they admitted that they found it tedious to use, “getting used to using it was hard” (Brenda, interview), and “it took me a while to actually do the coding” (Alice, interview). The difficulty students experienced and the time needed for coding might have accounted for why our students set few new goals beyond the initial goals they were given. Other researchers have found that technology can inhibit reflection, especially when the technology is difficult for the user. 24 Therefore, our students may have actually lessened their re-

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flective thinking through the use of the technology. Furthermore, Rich and Hannafin indicated that student teachers abandoned teacher-analysis tools and instead relied on the feedback of supervising teachers. 25 We did not see the students abandoning the video analysis, but they seemed to react better to in-person feedback: “[Alice] completely abandoned (from what I can tell) any thoughts she had prior to our discussion, and clung . . . to what we told her in class” (Thornton journal). The students did not seem to feel the video coding was necessary throughout the field experience to assist in tracking their goals, however. The experienced teachers in Tripp and Rich’s study seemed to reach a “saturation point . . . and were ready to move to another aspect of their teaching” 26 after focusing on an aspect of their teaching in three analyses. Tom stated that he felt coding the video maybe once or twice was enough, while Brenda was not sure that coding was ever helpful. Alice thought maintaining the goals five times was “okay,” but added “You may as well just do it” (interview). Consistent with the conclusion of Tripp and Rich, it seems unclear as to the number of times coding or analyzing a video for the same teaching aspects is helpful in monitoring the progress of, or perhaps even identifying, goals. The procedures we used regarding the video analysis tool were largely based on a study by Tripp and Rich with in-service teacher participants. We understood preservice teachers were very different from in-service teachers, but we hoped that the video coding would help our PSTs achieve some of the results Tripp and Rich found, particularly seeing “the need to change with their own eyes,” “identifying specific changes,” and “implementing ideas.” 27 While we did find these results to a limited extent (Tom’s reflection on his feedback as “great, great, great,” for example), we found different results using video coding with preservice teachers from Tripp and Rich with inservice teachers. As Fuller and Bown claimed, PSTs are students, yet trying to be teachers, so they can experience role conflict. Tripp and Rich reported that video analysis was helpful as formative feedback for in-service teachers; however, our PSTs apparently found it to be extra work. Furthermore, Tripp and Rich reported that when in-service teachers identified video teaching examples and requested feedback from a group of peers, they gained new perspectives on their teaching. Our PSTs struggled greatly with peer feedback (“It seems they still have a hard time identifying what they want the group to comment on” [Thornton journal]). As mentioned earlier, this specific group of PSTs did not seem to bond as a community, and the lack of scaffolding and support from a community that can benefit the development of the PSTs may have hindered the overall reflective nature of the experience for our students. Nevertheless, our PSTs did find benefits from the video analysis. Based on our experiences, we still believe in the potential for video coding for the students in this class. Anecdotally, we saw faster improvement in the PSTs’

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amount of talking and modeling than we had seen in previous years. Even though Brenda did not care for the process, like the other students she seemed to recognize that it could guide teachers in how to analyze their teaching videos. All PSTs indicated that video analysis seemed most appropriate for “beginning” teachers, Brenda indicating “earlier in the degree program” specifically. Considering the research indicating that experienced teachers value video analysis, Brenda’s perspective was intriguing. CONCLUSIONS There were aspects to this study that may have confounded the outcomes we observed. First, by using the video-coding software, we found literature advising us to start the students with some coding labels, which functioned as their first goals. 28 This was contrary to our desire for students to set their own goals, as Schunk indicated was most meaningful. 29 However, beyond the initial goals, PSTs were free to keep, adjust, or reject those initial goals. That most of the students maintained them perhaps speaks to the relevance of those goals for novice teachers or the students’ general dislike of the videocoding process, or it may have undermined PSTs’ sense of autonomy. Because we were interested in how PST goal-setting evolved, we limited explicit dialogue about goals. Although we asked PSTs to comment on goals and select goals for discussion and coding and we engaged in some discussion regarding their goal progress, we did not purposefully stimulate in-depth reflection on goals. In other words, we were not teaching them how to set goals or reflect; rather, we observed how PST goal-setting and reflection occurred naturally. Russell found that, “The results of explicit instruction [in reflective practice] seem far more productive than merely advocating reflective practice and assuming that individuals will understand how reflective practice differs profoundly from our everyday sense of reflection.” 30 Teaching goal-setting might be similarly necessary in order to make goal-setting meaningful for PSTs. Researchers have indicated that student teachers focus on a limited number of video-coding strategies, despite having many options before them. 31 That our PSTs added very few goals and did not revise their initial goals may be an indication that PSTs are unable, at least at first, to review and analyze their teaching in a multidimensional, complex manner. It is conceivable that coding caused students to focus on more pedantic aspects of teaching, which deterred their reflection from more subtle, as well as more complex, activities. However, it is also possible that students were advantageously focusing on what Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald described as a “core set of practices” that were valuable and necessary. 32

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There is much remaining to be learned about how goal-setting and reflection figure into preservice teacher education, and into field experiences in particular. Fuller and Bown’s development model may be more applicable to full-time teaching experiences, such as those of student teachers or novice teachers, than to the field experience, where survival concerns may be less evident. Similar to Miksza and Berg, we found that task concerns appeared more frequently, and we did not find a linear progression from survival concerns to task concerns. Additionally, there may not have been sufficient time in the field experience for concerns to shift. We did not examine the relationship between goals and motivation; however, an examination of the roles of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in the goal-setting and reflective process may illuminate music teacher preparation, further extending the work of researchers such as Hruska, and Parkes and Kadjer. 33 Throughout this project, we consistently wondered whether the PSTs’ motivations for the field experience were affected by their other classes, homework, and practicing. Divided attention, common to music education majors, might have caused PSTs to be conflicted in their approach to field experiences, seeing it as an assignment rather than an opportunity for professional development. Furthermore, because the PSTs were students who received grades in the methods course, their motivation to complete “assignments” may have been different from their motivation to complete the field experience itself. Further research on music education PST motivations for their many types of classes may be beneficial for understanding how PSTs view field experiences. 34 We began this project because of our interest regarding in the use of Studiocode to examine PST goals and goal-setting. For this field experience, we intentionally gave the PSTs few guidelines regarding their goal-setting, but we found that PSTs needed a great deal of guidance in their goal journey. Providing a focus for reflection may improve the quality of engagement and focus PSTs, not only toward goal-setting, but also toward recognizing when they have accomplished their goals. Because goals and goal-setting may be a natural part of the academic life as students, PSTs should be encouraged to revisit and assess both long-term goals and short-term teacher goals. Doing so can encourage habits of reflection necessary for effective teaching. We have already seen the influences of this project in our own teaching and plan to continue our focus on goalsetting for our PSTs’ learning and development. NOTES 1. John Dewey, How We Think (Boston, MA: Courier Dover Publications, 1933, 1997); Max van Manen, “Linking Ways of Knowing with Ways of Being Practical,” Curriculum

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Inquiry 6, no. 3 (1977): 205–28; Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983, 1991.) 2. See Nancy Barry, “Promoting Reflective Practice in an Elementary Music Methods Course,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 5, no. 2 (1996): 6–13; Susan W. Conkling, “Uncovering Pre-Service Music Teachers’ Reflective Thinking: Making Sense of Learning to Teach,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 155, no. 1 (2003): 1–23; Joyce E. Gromko, “Educating the Reflective Teacher,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 4, no. 2 (1995): 8–13; Alison Reynolds and Nancy Beitler, “Reflective Practice in a Middle School Instrumental Setting,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 173 (2007): 55–69; Margaret Schmidt, “Learning From Teaching Experience: Dewey’s Theory and Pre-service Teachers’ Learning,” Journal of Research in Music Education 58, no. 2 (2010): 131–46. 3. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Free Press, 1939, 1997), 110. 4. Dale Schunk, Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective (Boston, MA: Pearson Education, 2012), 138. 5. Carol Rogers, “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking,” Teachers College Record 104, no. 4 (2002): 844. 6. See Kelly Parkes and Sarah Kajder, “Eliciting and Assessing Reflective Practice: A Case Study in Web 2.0 Technologies,” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 22, no. 2 (2010): 218–28; Linda Thornton et al., “The Impact of an EPortfolio Program in a Music Education Curriculum,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 21, no. 1 (2010): 65–77. 7. Schunk, Learning Theories. 8. Bradley J. Hruska, “Using Mastery Goals in Music to Increase Student Motivation,” Update: Applications of Research in Music Education 30, no. 3 (2011): 3–9. 9. Eric Anderman, Chammie Austin, and Dawn Johnson, “The Development of Goal Orientation,” in Development of Achievement Motivation, ed. Allan Wigfield and Jacquelynne Eccles (Waltham, MA: Academic Press, 2002). 10. Frances F. Fuller and Oliver H. Bown, “Becoming a Teacher,” in Teacher Education, Part II: The 74th Yearbook of the National Society of the Study of Education, ed. Kevin Ryan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 11. See Margaret Berg and Peter Miksza, “An Investigation of Pre-Service Music Teacher Development and Concerns,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 20, no. 1 (2010): 39–55; Mark Robin Campbell and Linda Thompson, “Perceived Concerns of Pre-Service Music Education Teachers: A Cross-Sectional Study,” Journal of Research in Music Education 55, no. 2 (2010): 162–76; Peter Miksza and Margaret Berg, “A Longitudinal Study of Pre-service Music Teacher Development: Application and Advancement of the Fuller and Bown Teacher-Concerns Model,” Journal of Research in Music Education 61, no. 1 (2013): 44–62; David Teachout and Constance McKoy, “The Effect of Teacher Role Development Training on Undergraduate Music Education Majors: A Preliminary Study,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 20, no. 1 (2010): 88–104. 12. Peter Rich and Michael Hannafin, “Capturing and Assessing Evidence of Student Teacher Inquiry: A Case Study,” Teaching and Teacher Education 24, no. 6 (2008): 1426–40; Peter Rich and Michael Hannafin, “Video Annotation Tools: Technologies to Scaffold, Structure, and Transform Teacher Reflection,” Journal of Teacher Education 60, no. 1 (2009): 52–67. 13. Tonya Tripp and Peter Rich, “The Influence of Video Analysis on the Process of Change,” Teaching and Teacher Education 28, no. 5 (2012): 728–39. 14. See www.studiocodegroup.com. 15. Sharan Merriam, Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2009). 16. Conkling, “Music Teachers’ Reflective Thinking”; Schmidt, “Learning From Teaching.” 17. Tripp and Rich, “Video Analysis.” 18. Schunk, Learning Theories. 19. Fuller and Bown, “Becoming a Teacher.”

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20. Ibid. 21. Miksza and Berg, “Pre-Service Music Teacher Development.” 22. Tripp and Rich, “Video Analysis,” 736. 23. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, 40. 24. Thornton et al., “E-Portfolio Program.” 25. Rich and Hannafin, “Capturing and Assessing Evidence.” 26. Ibid, 739. 27. Tripp and Rich, “Video Analysis,” 734–35. 28. Ibid. 29. Schunk, Learning Theories. 30. Tom Russell, “Can Reflective Practice Be Taught?” Reflective Practice 6, no. 2 (2005): 199. 31. Rich and Hannafin, “Capturing and Assessing Evidence.” 32. Pam Grossman, Karen Hammerness and Morva McDonald, “Redefining Teaching, ReImagining Teacher Education,” Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 15, no. 2 (2009): 273–89. 33. See Hruska, “Mastery Goals”; and Parkes and Kadjer, “Eliciting and Assessing Reflective Practice.” 34. See, for example, Teachout and McKoy, “Teacher Role Development Training.”

Chapter Nine

Envisioning Reflection Collaborative Self-Study in a Music Education Methods Course Ann Marie Stanley and Lynn Grossman

November 27, 2011 12:12 pm To: amstanley From: miss.lynn.grossman Re: Lesson feedback posted to Blackboard course site Hi Ann Marie, I’m not being terribly pleasant on Blackboard. I’m feeling a little annoyed that the quality of the free choice lessons are not much different than the ones before. . . . I gave Mark a bunch of things to think about. He is doing a rhythm stick improv lesson. I’m not sure that he ‘gets’ putting sticks in front of kids because this lesson sounds just like the last one he did! Joe posted a ‘re-do’ of last week’s lesson (walking around the room to a Schumann symphony) but I don’t see anything about it that is actually different. ::smacks head:: . . . I hope they are more prepared for this coming week! Sorry for my grumpiness!! Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow :) Lynn November 27, 2011 4:03 pm To: miss.lynn.grossman From: amstanley Re: re: Lesson feedback posted to Blackboard course site

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Ann Marie Stanley and Lynn Grossman Oh wow . . . I know. . . . I am so grumpy too!!! I really do apologize for the lack of quality in their reflections. I am FINE with your comments on Bb. At this point, we have given them more than an adequate amount of hand-holding. Let their grade reflect their level of preparation, is what I say. I am extremely relieved that everyone posted their lessons on time at least!!! I always try to remember that you can’t force learning; you can facilitate it and try not to frustrate it, but you can only do so much as a professor. These kids need to let it all soak in and put it together. . . . Only they can do that. SighAnn Marie PS: looking forward to seeing you too!!!! :)

VISION AND CONTEXT: IRREPARABLY LINKED We are co-instructors of an undergraduate elementary general music methods course, and we rely on our strong vision for the course to guide our teaching. In our vision, elementary classroom fieldwork—practice teaching—intersects productively with university lectures, discussions, and readings. Our vision is of university students who prepare ambitious musical lessons for elementary students, reflect on their teaching experience, and adapt and adjust future instruction in response to our helpful feedback. To improve the course, we rely on our ability to analyze disparities between our vision and reality. In our reality, many students are thoughtful and responsive and embody a disposition toward meaningful reflective practice. Disappointingly, other students seem satisfied with slap-dash efforts and superficial, cursory reflections. The e-mail exchange above illustrates one such clash between our vision and our reality. The same e-mail exchange illustrates the importance of a supportive context in uncovering and repairing this gap. Our context relies on our strong relationship. We are co-instructors mutually interested in discussing problems, brainstorming solutions, and sympathizing with one another’s occasional grouchiness! Our context extends throughout our multiple roles in life: friends, as well as graduate student and professor. We were inspired by Hammerness’s writing about vision and context. She defined teachers’ vision as “teachers’ images of their ideal classroom practices.” 1 In her research, she suggested ways these stable, substantial, meaningful images—which often remain tacit, inarticulate—may be opened up and investigated in order to better understand the daily decisions that guide teaching practice. Hammerness wrote compellingly about the need to consider teachers’ particular environments side by side with their vision, in order to fully understand their experience:

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One cannot talk about vision and the role it plays in teachers’ lives without talking about the contexts in which these teachers imagine and work . . . whether these teachers feel their contexts provide support—or not—is critically important to their ability to carry out their visions. 2

Building upon Hammerness’ concepts of vision and context, in this chapter, we will suggest self-study methodology as a means for uncovering and interrogating our vision as teacher educators. We will explain the role of context in understanding vision; specifically, how a collaborative self-study of our methods course added a supportive layer to our teaching context. Collaborative self-study enabled us to focus, delineate, and describe our work in a methods course and refine our vision as we went along. WHAT IS SELF-STUDY OF TEACHER EDUCATION PRACTICE (SSTEP) METHODOLOGY? Self-study methodology has found a dynamic place in teacher education. The group that currently represents these principles is known as self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP), formed as a special-interest group at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). S-STEP continues to be one of the largest special-interest groups within the AERA. 3 The development of self-study as a distinct form of teacher research has grown from the domains of reflective practice and action research. While action research informs the methodology of self-study inquiry, the two differ mainly in the purpose for those inquiries. 4 In both action research and selfstudy, the researcher examines questions about professional practice within the classroom in order to improve teaching and learning. However, self-study may also incorporate data outside the scope of action research (such as personal history or narrative inquiry). Samaras and Freese wrote, “Action research is more about what the teacher does and not so much about who the teacher is.” 5 The focus of action research is to act on the personal practice of the researcher, institution, or community to “guide the development of a plan of action or to articulate a critical analysis of the individual and the institutional barriers that are shaping their lives.” 6 In contrast, self-study researchers incorporate their experience, their context, and their professional beliefs into their research data in order to gain insight into their work in the classroom. Those who engage in self-study use methods of self-reflection to gain a better understanding of their professional teacher preparation practice in order to improve instruction and contribute to the academic community. 7 In the field of teacher education research, the researcher functions simultaneously in two roles: researcher and practitioner. Because the act of teaching teachers is naturally riddled with complexities

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and tensions of practicing in the profession—while also teaching about the profession—teacher educators use self-study methods to “better align their teaching intents with their teaching actions.” 8 OUR SELF-STUDY Russell defined teacher education self-study as “research in one’s own setting of practice to understand and reduce the gap between the good intentions of teacher educators and the actual learning of preservice teacher candidates.” 9 In our case, we (Ann Marie and Lynn) are the teacher educators, coteaching an elementary general music methods course. The preservice teacher candidates are approximately fifteen Eastman School of Music undergraduate students who enrolled in our course. To further examine our vision for our teaching of these undergraduates, and the role our collaborative context played in our capacity to make this vision a reality, we constructed a collaborative self-study of our practice. In the following sections, we will orient readers to our individual teaching contexts, our individual course visions, and our vision for the collaborative self-study. Ann Marie I am an assistant professor of music education and have taught elementary general music methods at Eastman School of Music for seven years. My collaboration with Lynn dates to 2009 when Lynn entered the master’s degree program in music education at Eastman. Around that time, Lynn enrolled in two of my graduate seminars, and I started sending my students to Lynn for observations and informal fieldwork experiences. As our relationship evolved, we learned that we share a strong belief in the importance of creative, ambitious music teaching at the elementary school level. We have a vision that Eastman students will stretch their conception of what elementary music is and can be. In fall 2011, we formalized our coteaching relationship by creating a substantial guided-teaching portion of the general music methods fieldwork course. Eastman students were asked to prepare and teach lessons in Lynn’s (and one other local teacher’s) classroom on a regular basis throughout the semester. I was happy and optimistic: I felt this codified, organized fieldwork would help the students finally put theory and lecture into practice in a meaningful way. Lynn I am in my sixth year of teaching kindergarten through second grade general music in the most racially diverse 10 suburb of Rochester, New York (East Irondequoit). As an Eastman undergraduate, my coursework had been based

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on instrumental music instruction, so in my first year of teaching general music, I felt unsure of my skills in this new context. I wondered, “What do I teach?” and “How do I create a nurturing classroom environment?” My planning of musical activities and my inconsistent attempts at classroom management left me feeling as if I had fallen short of my teaching goals. One of the most influential pieces in my development as a teacher has been my experience in mentoring; especially with the Eastman students in Ann Marie’s general music methods course. I was excited but nervous when I began hosting them for observations and fieldwork. I identified with the preservice teachers’ inexperience with first graders, and I felt unsure that I could offer any real expertise. I still had many questions of my own about music learning and did not realize how the responsibilities and experience of mentorship would impact my view of elementary music instruction. Ann Marie’s Vision for the Course in 2011 I envisioned an atmosphere of experimentation, reflection, and effort on the part of the undergraduates. I wanted to give them teaching experiences in Lynn’s classroom that would allow them to grow their teaching personae in personal, individualized ways under our help and guidance. September 18, 2011 8:16 pm To: miss.lynn.grossman From: amstanley Re: So excited for tomorrow Hi there! Excited for tomorrow!!:) I hope it all goes okay. Thank you SOOOO much for your willingness to take this on. It’s going to be a wonderful experience for the students! (and me too, actually!)

I felt that the Eastman students’ excitement at trying their lessons with “real kids” at Lynn’s school was palpable. At the beginning of the semester, my overall impression was that students were trying hard and were motivated to reflect on what had and hadn’t worked well with Lynn’s students. October 6, 2011 8:29 pm To: miss.lynn.grossman From: amstanley Re: Students are EXCITED Wow the excitement in our class reached a fever pitch this week. They were so nervous and yet ready to try their teaching this week! I thought some people were GREAT, some people pretty good, and a couple ones—well, they were

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Ann Marie Stanley and Lynn Grossman not really makin’ it. However I think the people whose lessons were not successful have some good ideas about what to try differently next time (based on what they have shared in class, and just now when I read their reflections on Blackboard). We had terrific discussions in class about what happened. They have suddenly gotten very serious about seeking other’s advice and input on their lesson ideas. LOL!

As the semester progressed, it became obvious to me that the gap between my intentions and outcomes was larger than I had envisioned. While many preservice teachers were growing as skillful, reflective practitioners, some seemed stuck in “beginner mode”: writing easy lessons, not carrying them out particularly well, and then writing superficial, cursory reflections afterward. November 11, 2011 8:29 pm To: ronnie89 From: amstanley Re: Monday’s lesson Hi thereI posted on Blackboard two days some concerns about how the musical examples in your Mon lesson might be written/displayed. Can you let me know what you are thinking? I need to hear that you have thought about this. Thanks-AMS November 18, 2011 8:29 pm To: ronnie89 From: amstanley Re: Movement lesson RonnieI am looking for your movement lesson on Blackboard. Please post it asap; the rest of your group posted theirs days ago. Also, can you give some more thought to your reflection paper from last Monday’s lesson? If you’ll remember, I was concerned about how you were going to display the notation examples. The index cards were too small to read and ended up being confusing to the kids. But you don’t mention anything about that in your reflection. . . . Thanks-AMS

Lynn’s Vision for the Course in 2011 My role in the elementary general music methods course was to mentor and instruct the preservice teachers as they visited my classroom for observation and teaching experiences. I reviewed the preservice teacher lessons, observed fieldwork teaching, and then I gave feedback. Throughout this process, I

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found that my correspondence and interaction with the preservice teachers caused me to view my own work with a new perspective: as I taught, I began to assess my own practice with the critical voice and criterion measures I had reserved for the preservice teachers. I noticed that preservice teachers had varying abilities to explain or defend their teaching actions and ideas. In my efforts to help them develop this awareness, I discovered that I was simultaneously recognizing and articulating the beliefs underlying my own teaching actions. Until the mentorship experience, I had never been called upon to describe my vision for elementary general music or defend my teaching actions on the basis of these beliefs. Discussing my practice with preservice teachers helped me to understand my path in relation to my evolving vision of the general music classroom. November 4, 2011 12:14 pm To: amstanley From: miss.lynn.grossman Last night, I thought a lot about how I view my expectations for the Eastman students and what my objectives are in working with them. When I read their lessons and watch their teaching, I am reminding myself of what I knew at that point in my life. The amount of experience I had in front of a classroom by my junior year was . . .0? I also know that being a [Music Education Instrumental] student, I hadn’t spent considerable time thinking about what general music room looked and sounded like until I took the class. While I do want the students to be successful, I also understand that some things you have to learn by doing—and until you teach the lesson, it’s hard to know what to change. As I see more of their lessons, I’ve been better able to predict what might go wrong (based on what I know about them personally and the fieldwork students in general). This helps me give more constructive comments on their lessons. I think it’s really a learning process for everyone. (I know what you mean about feeling responsible as a teacher, I feel that way too, especially when I think someone’s lesson doesn’t go as well as it could have. I think I’m going to start being more demanding with some students now that they’d done a good amount of teaching in my class. But at some point I have to tell myself that I can only lead so far and the effort really has to be their own.)

Our Vision of Collaborative Self-Study Just as we were beginning our work together as co-instructors of the methods course for the first time, Lynn and I also began to discuss her master’s degree capstone project, and the possibility of a self-study. As Lynn’s academic advisor, I immersed myself in her literature review, and I immediately started

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thinking about how self-study, especially a collaborative self-study, could help me investigate my work in this course as well. July 29, 2011 5:27 pm To: miss.lynn.grossman From: amstanley Re: self study ideas We could call it “Collaborating and Creativity: How a Professor and a Music Teacher Collaborated to Teach Collaboration.” Okay. Maybe that’s really lame! Haha! But what I’m thinking is that we could study (through journals and our own emails back and forth) our experience with how we teach the undergrads to be collaborative, student-centered teachers, and in the process, learn something about ourselves and our own teaching. :) The key with selfstudy is that you keep track of what you are doing/learning at the time—that’s the data collection—and then look back at it and see what you can get out of the experience afterward.

The idea of self-study was in our minds as we worked together throughout fall 2011, but it percolated on the back burner rather than becoming a conscious forethought. It was in summer 2012 that we began a concerted effort to really examine the fall 2011 methods course. In fact, Lynn chose to write her master’s degree field project paper on the topic. We decided to pursue a collaborative self-study, which has two elements: (1) the two personal, independent self-studies we each undertook to examine our teaching practices and (2) our purposeful, meaningful interaction as “critical friends” as we reflected on and evaluated our work within the context of shared teaching and researching endeavors. 11 ANN MARIE’S SELF-STUDY: RE-VISIONING REFLECTIVE TEACHING I questioned what elements of the course and my teaching contributed to students’ development as reflective practitioners. I struggled to understand why—based on their words, written assignments and actions—my fall 2011 students seemed not to understand the value and purpose of their fieldwork experiences. Therefore, the purpose of my self-study was to identify which elements of my music education methods course seemed to yield movement toward a deeper, meaningful reflective practice on the part of undergraduates. In preparing the fall 2012 course, I analyzed fall 2011 outcomes, redesigned assignments, planned new experiences and ways of communicating with students: all with the goal of developing undergraduates’ ability to

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reflect meaningfully on teaching practice. I taught the redesigned class in fall 2012; immediately afterward, I began using self-study methodology to examine the changes I made and how they aligned with my vision for the course. These research questions guided my inquiry: 1. How did I change the content and tone of the course assignments, discussions, and activities between the fall 2011 and fall 2012 semesters? 2. What were my objectives in making these changes? How did my reflective thinking inform these changes? 3. How would I describe the course outcomes, especially my perceptions of my students’ development into reflective practitioners? I compared syllabi from 2011 and 2012 to begin with a macro-level view of changes in the course. I interrogated the alterations: “What was my reasoning for these changes? What was I hoping to achieve?” I traced a series of cases in which I believed preservice teachers lacked characteristics of reflective teachers: that is, the skills to think-in-action, observe meaningfully, and identify improvement opportunities. I employed five data sets, including class e-mails, Blackboard discussion posts, e-mails to/from Lynn, written and videotaped student assignments, and documentation of in-class activities. Using these data sets, I employed a framework from Tishman, Jay, and Perkins to pinpoint instances of transmitting the value of reflective practice to students, versus enculturating the students into the habit of professional reflection. 12 Enculturation, in accordance with Tishman, Jay, and Perkins, yielded more rewarding results. Findings While a lengthy discussion of the findings is outside the scope of this chapter, I can summarize the most important themes that emerged in three sections: (1) Reflection: a commitment to the future, (2) Internalized models of music teaching, and (3) “Skills-centered” versus “Enculturation” conception of the course. Reflection: A Commitment to the Future Through the matter-of-fact way I assigned my students to “write their teaching reflections,” I unconsciously reinforced the idea that reflection is an automatic step in the teaching process, one as easily completed by preservice novices as by veteran teachers. Not only did I find better ways than a “onepage required paper” to elicit students’ reflection on their teaching, but I also altered my own perspective on reflection. I think of the act of reflection now as a catalyst for habitual thinking that will fuel my students’ professional

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practice over the long haul. I am more interested in the ways I can start preservice teachers on a journey toward reflection, than in evaluating their current reflections as finished products. Internalized Models of Music Teaching Ball and McDiarmid explained how models of teaching are internalized at a young age. 13 I identified assignments that enabled my students to uncover and deconstruct their tacit teaching beliefs and discuss them meaningfully with others. I have been tempted in previous semesters to eliminate these assignments as too frivolous. However, in analyzing the conversation these assignments instigated, I recognized they were crucial to bring students into a shared culture of reflection about the past. “Skills-Centered” versus “Enculturation” In fall 2011, students went in small groups at various times to two different music classrooms (Lynn’s classroom and another colleague’s classroom) to eke out what I thought was “enough teaching time.” I learned that, although students in fall 2011 got more time in front of children, a lack of connection between the methods course and their fieldwork hindered their reflective process. The fragmented fieldwork inadvertently led my students to the belief that a well-planned lesson could be taught to any group of students, anywhere: All they had to do to be good music teachers was show up and display great musicianship. This view resulted in a reinforcement of “skillscentered music teaching,” rather than enculturation into a professional community of learners. In fall 2012, all thirteen university students went during course meeting times, together, to Lynn’s classroom, and they spent much more time observing Lynn and their peers teach. They got to know one group of first-grade students well, and they enjoyed whole-group discussions of music teaching and learning. While in fall 2011 I received e-mails complaining that “not everyone’s on the same page,” fall 2012 resulted in a close-knit group of undergraduates devoted to helping one another learn in a supportive atmosphere. LYNN’S SELF-STUDY: A VISION OF LEARNING FROM FEEDBACK In my self-study, I questioned how my interactions with preservice teachers showed evidence of my own evolving practice as a general music teacher. I wondered about the quality of my feedback and whether my responses contained sound advice. I struggled with the ideas of telling the Eastman students how to “fix” their lessons and leading or guiding them to discover

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through reflection. In 2012, I was focused on my own reflective practice throughout the mentoring experience, and I wondered how these ideas would inform my feedback to preservice teachers in the new semester. The purpose of my self-study was to examine my interactions with students in Ann Marie’s general music methods course to discover how my developing practice as a general music teacher is reflected in my feedback and evaluations. In addition, I sought to identify ideas, beliefs, and experiences that have become important in my teaching of both children and preservice teachers. In preparation for the 2012 course, I reviewed my feedback response process from the previous year. I felt that writing meaningful feedback took much longer than expected, especially without a forum for post-teaching discussion. So I examined my 2011 feedback responses and compiled a list of my most common types of responses (to save time during observation). After compiling my total feedback and evaluation responses for 2011 and 2012, I had seventy pages of my own writing. I used self-study methodology to analyze my written artifacts. Self-study allowed me to observe categories of response to preservice teachers and then compare these data to other data sources (correspondence with Ann Marie and my personal journal entries). These research questions directed my self-study: 1. How has my critique of preservice teachers influenced my knowledge of my own professional practice? 2. How has the quality and type of my feedback to the preservice teachers changed since the fall 2011 semester? 3. What lessons about my own teaching practice can I draw from analyzing my feedback? Findings While I will not write a lengthy description of my findings here, I can summarize them in three sections: (1) The Pedagogical Turn, (2) The Turn in Feedback, and (3) The Turn in Journaling. The Pedagogical Turn I framed my inquiry around the concept of the pedagogical turn. Russell wrote that beginning teachers often focus their energy on what to teach. But as teachers gain experience and rethink their content choices, they undergo what Russell referred to as a content turn: a rethinking of what to teach. However, “when individuals find themselves recommending particular teaching strategies for particular purposes, they start to realize that their own teaching must be judged similarly.” 14 This is a pedagogical turn: reflecting on how we teach and whether our actions align with our teaching intent.

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Russell discussed that “schools already offer extensive resources for developing the content of teaching and surviving the content turn”; therefore, “teacher education has the responsibility for indicating the possibility of moving into the pedagogical turn as one’s career unfolds.” 15 Russell urged that in order for the field of education to glean insight into how we learn to teach teachers, teacher educators must be held accountable for introducing their students to the potential for the pedagogical turn: Unless we train people to do things that will document and show them what is happening to them in the world of practice, and then make something of the data when they return from practice, I’m going to continue to fall short of my goal of having the profession understand where its knowledge comes from. 16

Hammerness described three important dimensions for teachers’ vision: focus, range, and distance. 17 For students to enter their first years of teaching with a sense of vision, they need to be given opportunities to realize the possibility for the pedagogical turn and envision a classroom context where lesson content is not the primary focus of the teacher. In my first year of teaching, I was focused on what content I would teach and when. I made charts depicting my tunes and the corresponding months or weeks in which I would teach them. This became exhausting, and I started to question my selections: a content turn. As I gained experience, my focus shifted. I spent less time wondering what I would teach and most of my time considering how I would teach it: a pedagogical turn. It wasn’t until my mentorship experience that I truly examined my vision for my classroom and whether my actions aligned with this intent. The key components and data sources within my self-study included (a) lesson plan feedback via Blackboard journals, (b) post-teaching evaluation feedback, and (c) reflective teaching journal entries from 2012. I probed these sources to examine my own pedagogical turns in feedback and journaling. Pedagogical Turn: Feedback I arranged 2011 and 2012 Blackboard entries by student in chronological order. I read through my feedback responses, looking for emergent themes, then reread my writing in detail, coding my entries. I identified several phrases that frequently indicated evidence of one of the following six categories: validating, suggesting, questioning, relating, recounting, and cautioning. By analyzing my feedback, I was able to capture an important aspect of my classroom (interactions with preservice teachers) and compare my current practice to my ideal vision for a supportive, collaborative, and reflective environment.

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Pedagogical Turn: Journaling My journal entries were intended to examine significant events that took place during a teaching experience with kindergarten through second grade students or following interactions with preservice teachers. I was especially attentive to moments when I felt the influence of the pedagogical turn, observing how I judged my own actions similarly to those of the preservice teachers, and to how I became aware of my professional knowledge by comparing the preservice teachers to myself. In the excerpt from my teaching journal that follows, I reflected on a group discussion where preservice teachers commented on the teaching of their peers. I noticed that the preservice teachers’ critique and suggestions for one another were showing evidence, in many cases, of their abilities to think like a teacher. I felt this was significant because, in this moment, we had achieved part of our vision for reflective practice. In this entry, I was proud of the preservice teachers, and I echoed with my own learning: I am really excited that some of the preservice teachers are taking on the perspectives of our students and thoughtfully reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of their lessons. I think the ability to watch everyone else teach: make comparisons from lesson to lesson and person to person––and then evaluate each week, is really helping them to form valid generalizations about the students, and identify techniques and skills that they find valuable to their future teaching. This is what I feel I have gained from the previous experiences with preservice teachers: observing lots of varied teaching and making conclusions based upon which lessons or people were successful and which were not. I feel it is so important for the teacher candidates to also take part in this evaluation experience. (10/17/12)

Bullough and Pinnegar wrote, “Self-study points to a simple truth, that to study a practice is simultaneously to study self: a study of self-in-relation to other.” 18 My expressions of written reflection have illustrated how my professional practice is inextricably linked to my own character, teaching beliefs, and classroom vision. My reflective writing frequently compares the actions and experiences of preservice teachers to my own. Because of this opportunity for comparing and contrasting practice, I am able to view my work through a more diversely informed perspective. Thus, my articulations of professional knowledge gain clarity and insight into my unique context and experience of teaching general music. One of the most significant findings of my self-study was the way I learned to model reflective thinking to encourage preservice teachers to develop similar skills. The acts of giving advice and recommendations forced me to articulate why I hold certain beliefs about music education. I have become more aware of the impact of reflective thinking on professional practice; I now seek appropriate moments or opportunities where individual

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and group reflection may take place. I especially encourage preservice teachers to validate their ideas with examples of how they came to discover knowledge or gain particular opinions. COLLABORATIVE SELF-STUDY The context in which we (Ann Marie and Lynn) worked together was unique and specific to our respective teaching situations. The process for organizing the course included several elements: schedules, curricular goals (for both K–12 and university students), preservice teacher lesson topics and evaluations, managing and resolving conflict with preservice teachers, and facilitating discussions and reflection. Through our correspondence, we collaborated and compromised on all these issues, and together we developed our goals and vision for the Eastman students. While we both developed our own knowledge through our individual self-study processes, we also shared our frustrations, observations, and learning. Throughout this process, we interacted as trusted mentors, collaborators, and friends. Reflection became a shared experience. Thus, we maintained a supportive context within which to focus our vision for the course and to organize a collaborative approach to self-study. By collaborative self-study, we mean that we each had individual, separate research questions, methods of investigation, and unique (yet overlapping) data sources. However, our collaboration enabled us to hone our visions by comparing and contrasting our experiences teaching the same course through the lenses of our different research questions. Suggestions for Collaborative Self-Study We can envision productive collaborative teacher education self-study between colleagues, co-instructors, or even between professors and students. Berry examined the literature to identify four rationales for teacher educators to conduct self-studies. We recommend using these rationales when writing research questions: (a) articulating a philosophy and checking consistency between practice and beliefs, (b) investigating an aspect of practice, (c) developing a model of critical reflection, and (d) generating more meaningful alternatives to institutional evaluation. 19 We find the first of Berry’s reasons particularly interesting for its potential in self-studies in the context of music education methods courses, and in the following section we present two examples of how self-study can give teacher educators a way to interrogate beliefs vis-à-vis practice. Next, we give an example of how self-study can be effectively implemented using naturally occurring data sources from music education methods courses. Berry also wrote about how self-study researchers typically examine the naturally occurring artifacts and data sources to

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make explicit their internal knowledge, investigate practice, or develop a model for reflection or evaluation. Examination of Beliefs versus Practice Teacher education is a unique and challenging profession because students (preservice teachers) have already spent so much of their lives experiencing, observing, talking about, and functioning within schooling. Preservice music teachers often possess a variety of ideas on what it means to be a good music teacher, but this prior experience can also become an obstacle to learning teaching skills. Darling-Hammond described three obstacles to learning how to teach. These include problems of: (a) observation (educators often expect students to teach in a way that is different from their personal experience of education), (b) enactment (becoming a teacher involves both thinking and acting like a teacher), and (c) complexity (the classroom is a multifaceted arena in which teachers must understand and react to the needs of varying populations and situations). 20 Russell suggested that by considering the obstacles faced by preservice teachers, the teacher educator may “explore simultaneously the complexities of [his or her] own learning to teach.” 21 Through our collaborative self-study, Lynn found that she was more or less reliving her preservice and early years of teaching through the Eastman students’ experiences, as revealed in her journal: He [preservice teacher] makes me feel especially frustrated because I can see some of myself in his teaching. . . . I get annoyed with [him] just as I would get annoyed with myself. It’s like he is a reflection of a not-so-distant me. I feel like he should know better, when really it’s me that has since learned better. (12/17/12)

However, self-study helped Lynn realize the reliving actually helped her to recognize unexpected connections between the Eastman students and herself. She also was able to harness these recognitions to improve her teaching. When Lynn studied her journal entries and her e-mails to Ann Marie, she found she had a habit of comparing her teaching to the common mistakes of the preservice teachers. Lynn described this as “productive criticism, which had been homed on the teaching actions of preservice teachers . . . then reflected back onto myself.” Recognizing that collegiate music students hold preconceived ideas about music education is an important condition for reflection on teaching actions and beliefs. In his work, “Teaching Teachers, How I Teach IS the Message,” Russell asked, “How much of what we do as teacher educators is in reaction to our own experiences of schooling?” 22 For example, if music students come to our methods courses having prior experiences with skill-oriented, teacher-directed pedagogy (particularly in large ensembles) that was strong

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and positive, we teacher educators may seek to help them understand other models, such as more democratic ways to construct learning environments. In whatever ways we try to demonstrate such learner-centered environments in our music methods course, we may subconsciously or unwittingly still portray strong teacher-centered models in our own teaching (possibly in an unconscious reaction to our own years of experience with that type of schooling, as Russell would attest). Self-study can be an interesting way to uncover just when and why we revert to those vestiges of controlling or dominating pedagogy and help us understand discrepancies between our practices and our espoused beliefs. In her close reading and deconstruction of 2011 and 2012 syllabi, Ann Marie found this verbiage in the course goals of the 2011 version: “By the end of this course, you should be able to demonstrate an improvement of your competency in certain skill areas, and be able to reflect on your progress and goals for the future.” Without even really thinking about it, in 2012 she had changed that to read, “By the end of this course, you should be able to demonstrate an improvement in your ability and comfort level with teaching various musical skills and concepts, and understand how meaningful reflection on your experiences can help you improve immediately, set goals for the future, and make progress.” The second version was much more evocative of a course that Ann Marie was trying to orient around the students’ enculturation into a community of music teachers than the distinctly skill- and competence-oriented version in 2011. Without self-study and the zoom lens placed on all course artifacts (including the syllabi), Ann Marie would have found such changes typical and unremarkable. Self-study helped Ann Marie with location and deconstruction of all such changes in terms of how her practices were aligning with her vision and beliefs. Naturally Occurring Data In our case, we realized we had access to a large amount of naturally occurring data sets, most of which was recorded on our course management system, Blackboard Learn. We were able to retrieve and analyze 2011 and 2012 course syllabi, records, and artifacts from our class lectures and activities; lesson plans turned in by Eastman students; our written feedback on those plans; all assignments from Eastman students; and formal and informal written correspondence with Eastman students. In addition, Lynn had kept a personal journal. One of the largest and most fruitful data sources in our collaborative work was the e-mails we wrote back and forth to one another. It is probably normal in most music education methods courses to have all of these data sources, and more. We recommend choosing a few data sources and examining them in depth, rather than going superficially over all sources. Lynn, for example,

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coded for type of response in more than seventy pages worth of her feedback data on students’ teaching and lesson plans. She then quantitatively analyzed the feedback, using a tally sheet to record the frequency of each feedback category received by the preservice teachers in order to compare feedback among students and between the 2011 class and the 2012 class. Ann Marie focused on analyzing preservice teachers’ written reflections and written observations of teaching. By comparing words and phrases among the student reflections, she was able to determine that the type and amount of structure and guidance she was using to scaffold her students’ writing really had an effect on the quality of their reflection. We both felt it was most effective and more systematic to choose the types of course data most applicable to our research questions and examine them very closely, rather than to get broad swaths of information from all the sources. Such close examination of a few types of data yields specific results that allow the researcher to assess the alignment of practice and vision. As a result, self-study practice lends the element of critical reflection, which can illuminate, or even guide, the researcher toward better course design. SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH Because S-STEP is a relatively new research method for music education, there exists great possibility for further study. The specialized context in which music teacher educators work provides many opportunities for selfstudy methods to illustrate the unique knowledge within the music education community. The self-study literature primarily includes research done by teacher educators within the university setting; there is little from teacher educators who immerse themselves in K–12 settings. The perspective of a teacher-educator like Lynn, who also teaches school-age children, appears to be unexplored. However, several extant case studies involve cooperating and fieldwork teachers and their respective preservice teachers. Research into the pedagogical turn is similarly limited, especially as it relates to music teachers in the K–12 setting. The possibility for this unique point of view holds great promise in teacher education research. Draves wrote that the “mutual learning” that takes place between cooperating music teachers and their student teachers is worth studying. 23 Russell suggested researchers could examine: (a) assessment practices, (b) field supervision of teacher candidates, (c) the gap between practicum schools and teacher education departments, (d) connecting what teacher candidates learn to their student teaching experience, and (e) experience of educators from diverse communities as they face unique challenges with the tensions between self, practice, and context. 24

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CONCLUSION Our experiences both inside and outside the classroom shape our beliefs about good practice; yet despite our good intentions, it is easy to “separate [our] actions from beliefs and goals at the front of a classroom.” 25 Improving our practice as music teacher educators requires us to confront our actions honestly, “learning what words mean when we express them in our actions, and learning what ideas do to people we are teaching.” 26 Despite our attempts to create environments ripe with learning possibilities—where students are called to substantiate their thinking and where we as instructors model reflective thinking—it remains at times difficult to know whether the preservice teachers are learning what we believe we are teaching. As we share insight and knowledge with the Eastman undergraduates, it cannot be assumed that our words necessarily carry their intended meaning. However, we remain committed to a vision of a music education methods course that allows and encourages all participants to examine their own vision, a process that allows us to, as Hammerness wrote, “surface and examine teachers’ beliefs, . . . a way both to validate and build on teachers’ hopes and dreams.” 27 In addition, we are committed to the continued process of collaborative self-study as an invaluable part of the supportive context that undergirds our working relationship and allows us to pursue our vision. We found that collaborative self-study became a major motivator in our pursuit to better align actions with intent. We feel more invested in our vision because it is a shared vision. Through our collaborative context, Lynn feels supported in both her work at the K–12 level and in her work with the Eastman students. Ann Marie feels supported in her efforts to design and teach an effective methods course. We both feel supported because we know we share a mutual hope for good teaching and learning—for ourselves and for the Eastman students. The process of collaborative self-study has enabled us to uncover, articulate, and share our vision; a rich process that we recommend to other music teacher educators working together in the difficult but important work of preparing new teachers. NOTES 1. Karen Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn? The Role of Vision in the Early Professional Lives of Teachers,” Journal of Teacher Education 54, no. 1 (2003): 45. 2. Ibid., 46. 3. Julian Kitchen and Tom Russell, “Improving Canadian Teacher Education Through Self-Study,” in Canadian Perspectives on the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, ed. Julian Kitchen and Tom Russell (Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Association for Teacher Education, 2012): 1. 4. Anastasia Samaras and Anne Freese, “Looking Back and Looking Forward: An Historical Overview of the Self-Study School,” in Self-Study Research Methodologies for Teacher

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Educators, ed. Cynthia A. Lassonde et al. (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2009): 4–5. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Allan Feldman, Patricia Paugh, and Geoff Mills, “Self-Study Through Action Research,” in International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (Vol. 2), ed. J. John Loughran et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004): 953. 7. See Amanda Berry and John Loughran, “Developing an Understanding of Learning to Teach in Teacher Education,” in Improving Teacher Education Practice Through Self-Study, ed. John Loughran and Tom Russell (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002): 13–29; Mieke Lunenberg, Rosanne Zwart, and Fred Korthagen, “Critical Issues in Supporting Self Study,” Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010): 1280–89; Robert Bullough, and Stefinee Pinnegar. “Guidelines for Quality in Autobiographical Forms of Self-Study Research,” Educational Researcher 30, no. 13 (2001): 13–21. 8. John Loughran, “Researching Teacher Education Practices: Responding to the Challenges, Demands, and Expectations of Self-Study,” Journal of Teacher Education 58, no. 12 (2007): 12. 9. Tom Russell, “Self-Study by Teacher Educators,” in International Encyclopedia of Education (3rd ed.), ed. Penelope Peterson et al. (Oxford, UK: Elsevier, 2010): 690. 10. Tiffany Lankes, “Diversity Spreading Beyond the City’s Limits.” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY) October 27, 2013. 11. Amanda Berry and Alicia R. Crowe, “Extending Our Boundaries Through Self-Study: Framing a Research Agenda Through Beginning a Critical Friendship,” in Collaboration and Community: Pushing Boundaries through Self-Study: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, ed. Linda M. Fitzgerald et al. (Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa, 2006): 31–35. 12. Shari Tishman, Eileen Jay, and David N. Perkins, “Teaching Thinking Dispositions: From Transmission to Enculturation,” Theory into Practice 32, no. 3 (1993): 147–53. 13. Deborah Loewenberg Ball and G. Williamson McDiarmid, “The Subject Matter Preparation of Teachers,” The National Center for Research on Teacher Education, Michigan State University (Issue Paper 89-4), accessed March 25, 2014, from education.msu.edu/NCRTL/ PDFs/NCRTL/IssuePapers/ip894.pdf. 14. Tom Russell, “Teaching Teachers: How I Teach IS the Message,” in Canadian Perspectives on the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, ed. Julian Kitchen and Tom Russell (Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Association for Teacher Education, 2012): 19. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Ibid. 17. Hammerness, “Learning to Hope,” 45. 18. Bullough, and Pinnegar, “Guidelines for Quality,” 14. 19. Amanda Berry, “Self-Study in Teaching about Teaching,” in International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (Vol. 2), ed. J. John Loughran et al. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kulwer Academic, 2004): 1309–10. 20. Linda Darling-Hammond, Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006): 35. 21. Russell, “Self-Study,” 691–92. 22. Russell, “Teaching Teachers,” 12. 23. Tami J. Draves, “‘Firecrackers’ and ‘Duds’: Cooperating Music Teachers’ Perspectives on Their Relationships with Student Teachers,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 18, no. 1 (2008): 6–14. 24. Russell, “Teaching Teachers,” 6. 25. Ibid., 11. 26. Ibid. 27. Hammerness, “Learning to Hope,” 52.

Chapter Ten

Vision and the Legitimate Order Theorizing Today to Imagine Tomorrow Brent C. Talbot and Roger Mantie

[T]hose with power often feel no need to make it explicit and to justify it [which is why ordinary people], when they are up against issues, cannot get clear targets for their thoughts and for action; they cannot determine what it is that imperils the values they vaguely discern as theirs.—C. Wright Mills 1

This chapter is the result of our joint interest in engaging with what C. Wright Mills termed the “sociological imagination.” That is, we have attempted to make sense of our own personal experiences as music teacher educators by placing this experience in historical context with the hope that this exercise might help us to better understand the current landscape of music teacher education and training in the United States 2 and how we might better negotiate this terrain in light of a vision for music teacher education that imagines a greater commitment to diversity and inclusiveness within the profession. Our chapter focuses on two distinct, but related, issues: (1) the structural forces that help to determine who gets to be a music teacher and who does not and (2) the ways in which institutional professionalization and bureaucratization may be working to disenfranchise certain groups of people. The problem we perceive is the ability of music teacher educators to respond to social change as part of a commitment to social equity within the constraints of what Max Weber called vorstellung, the belief in a “legitimate order.” 3 Weber’s primary interest is related to problems of institutional change. We submit that music teacher education can be thought of as an institution insofar as it is part of a structure of social action designed to perpetuate a specific social practice, that is, the learning and teaching of music through 155

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compulsory schooling. By their nature, institutions strive to conserve the status quo and resist change. 4 This is to say that institutions are part of the social reproduction process. Theories of social reproduction usually posit that the social action of individuals is reflective of some combination of structure and agency, with structure most often operating in a deterministic way that constrains the freedom of agency. Notably, in most versions of reproduction theory, the agent is considered to be mostly unaware of the ways in which structural forces influence conduct. 5 The agent is therefore not as autonomous as is sometimes made out to be, even though it is people, not institutions, who carry out social action. To speak of “vision” in education, then, is to invoke particular assumptions about imagination that tend to obscure the situated historical socio-cultural aspects that structure and condition vision. One of Pierre Bourdieu’s major contributions to the social sciences was showing the ways in which agency is a marker of status. That is, the capacity to possess vision is not a problem of competence but is instead determined by our life experience—our biography. Through concepts such as habitus, field, and capital, Bourdieu demonstrates how the education system is structured to preserve existing social hierarchies. 6 From a Bourdieuan viewpoint, an individual’s vision of teaching (education, etc.) is a manifestation of their habitus; “good” teaching in the mind of the individual will inevitably be that which affirms a preexisting structure of values. According to Bourdieu, the individual’s value system is conditioned by the family, on the one hand, and by societal institutions on the other. Hence, institutions such as schools and universities, which are themselves the product of established social hierarchies, recognize and reward certain values at the expense of others. 7 For Weber, rational action is considered that which conforms to legitimate authority, that is, the kind conferred by canonized institutional knowledge and practices. Visions that fail to conform to the legitimate order are, for Weber, irrational and subject to social ostracism or professional sanction. Our goal in this chapter is to problematize social action in order to demonstrate how existing practices operate to advantage certain musical practices over others and, in so doing, advantage some groups of people over others. We attempt to show that those who do not conform to the legitimate order are denied opportunities to become music teachers (and, by extension, music teacher educators). By attempting to theorize the ways in which music teachers (and their teachers) are “produced,” we hope to challenge many of the grounds upon which “rationality” in music education is predicated. Ultimately, we argue that theorization is, in and of itself, a form of action with the potential to better inform acts of resistance that strive to work on behalf of those denied opportunities by the existing order.

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AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE PROBLEM Jack is a rock and folk guitarist. He has excelled to a point where he has twelve private students at the local music store in town. He leads the praise worship band at church and is a teaching assistant for an elementary classroom teacher in his school district. He mostly reads tab instead of traditional notation, and he records and composes his own music in a digital audio workstation. All of his mentors have encouraged him to become a music teacher because of his abilities to connect with young people and to play and teach by ear. During the fall of his senior year of high school, he applies to a liberal arts college that has a music certification program, yet finds he does not meet the audition requirements for the school. How does Jack follow his dream of becoming a music teacher? Hudai is a young woman from China who speaks English fluently and performs on the guqin or qin, a plucked, seven-string instrument from China, used in that region for over three thousand years. She has spent much of her youth performing in competitions and giving music lessons to younger people in her home region. Hudai meets with her advisor during her first year at college in the United States and explores options for a major. When the advisor asks what she is most passionate about, Hudai responds with stories of teaching music. Hudai and her advisor inquire about the possibility of majoring in music education at the university and find out that, unfortunately, there is no professor of guqin at the school and that the degree in music education clearly requires seven semesters of instruction on a primary instrument. How does Hudai become a licensed music teacher? For those acquainted with music teacher licensure, the problem is relatively straightforward: 1. Public school music teachers require a teaching license. 2. In the United States, individual states license music teachers and require successful completion of state teaching tests that are based, to a large extent, on the pedagogical content knowledge taught at universities. 8 3. For initial licensure, states require credentials in the form of a bachelor’s degree in music. 4. Most schools of music in the United States with programs leading to licensure base their programs of study, at least in part, on a desire to maintain accreditation from the National Association for Schools of Music (NASM). 5. Entrance requirements to schools of music require an audition that demonstrates evidence of Western staff notation literacy.

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While technically at the discretion of the institution, the criteria for entrance to a NASM-accredited institution insist upon “the ability to relate musical sound to notation and terminology both quickly and accurately enough to undertake basic musicianship studies in the freshman year.” 9 In practice, this means that entrance is based on the performance expectations of the Western, European art music tradition. For example, a traditional audition on piano would include three “contrasting pieces”: a prelude and fugue from the WellTempered Clavier by Johan Sebastian Bach, any first movement of a sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven, Josef Haydn, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a short work from the nineteenth or twentieth century. 10 Ergo, most music teaching in schools in the United States is done by people who can perform Western European classical music from Western staff notation. Additionally, since most positions in music teacher education list “at least three years’ experience teaching music in schools” in their job descriptions, most music teacher educators are of this particular practice as well. Selection bias ensures that music teacher vision reflects a conditioned set of socio-cultural values. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Though it is thus not difficult, knowing the situation, to understand the action of anyone individual, it is an entirely different matter to grasp the behaviour of the system of action as a whole, when the concrete situation of each component individual is a varying function of the action of the others. 11

While Weber’s area of concern was social action, his primary focus was on theorizing the motivations for action. Weber outlines four “types” of social action: (1) traditional (relating to family or community), (2) affective (relating to friendship or love), (3) value-rational, or what Weber called wertrational (relating to inner-directed ethical or normative values), and (4) purposive-rational or zweckrational (relating to instrumental, rational choice, i.e., the cost-effective means to ends). 12 In the case of what we are calling the “music education order” (figure 10.1), one sees processes of rationalization involving a combination of the wertrational and the zweckrational. Most of what music teachers and music teacher educators do is rationalized first on the basis of conditioned values (habitus) connected to the perceived nature and value of music 13 and, second, on the basis of utility relative to existing historically constituted structures, for example, choosing repertoire that might afford the best chances for one’s ensemble to receive a high rating at a music competition or the most efficient means for fulfilling certification and licensing requirements for school music teaching. Considering music education as an order requires understanding Weber’s concept of solidary groups, consisting primarily of communal and associa-

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tive relationships. The former type involves subjective feelings that the actors belong together, whereas the latter involves a pragmatic alliance based on common goals. One might roughly think of communal groups in terms of identity, or even identity politics. Associative groups, on the other hand, rest “on a rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement.” 14 That is, people set aside communal differences in favor of shared interests, such as, in the present case, a commitment to music education. Hence, as shown in figure 10.1, groups such as the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) and College Music Society (CMS) are associative groups, even if in many cases actors may feel as though communal aspects are present. Weber claims that every system of social action tries to establish and maintain a belief in its own legitimacy. The bases for legitimacy correspond roughly to the four types of social action: traditional, effectual, absolute value, and (the most common basis for legitimacy) legal—“the readiness to conform with rules which are formally correct and have been imposed by accepted procedure,” by which Weber does not mean legality in the narrow sense of formal laws but, rather, a form of rationality that recognizes the legitimacy of rules. 15 An example of the latter form of legitimacy is the way in which music teacher educators comply with both state licensing require-

Figure 10.1.

The Legitimate Order

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ments and NASM certification requirements in the designing of curriculum and instruction and programs of study. This is to say that legitimacy works because people in the system believe in its rightness or correctness. Weber takes issue when people fail to take note of the bases for legitimacy: “In a very large proportion of cases, the actors subject to order are of course not even aware how far it is a matter of custom, of convention, or of law.” 16 One witnesses this whenever music teachers and music teacher educators fail to observe the historically normative grounds upon which music teacher certification and licensing are based. The result of the failure to grasp the historical nature of legitimacy is that existing action is rarely questioned or challenged; everything in the legitimate order appears as common sense. In other words, people do not act as freely as they imagine themselves to act; rather, they believe themselves to be acting rationally by obeying the commands of legitimate authority—authority (imperative control) defined by Weber as “the probability that specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of people.” 17 The act of obeying, however, is indicative of an asymmetrical relationship. As Weber explains, “a certain minimal willingness to obey; that is, an interest (external or internalized) in obeying is essential in every real model of domination.” 18 It follows, then, that for social change to occur, the legitimacy of the system must be questioned. Even if it is questioned, however, the supremacy of bureaucratic organization helps to ensure that resistance is kept in check. Weber’s thesis on bureaucratization is among his most famous. Articulated in several of his writings, but most completely in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Weber argues that the technical superiority of bureaucracy as a mechanism for action helps to ensure its inevitable domination over other forms of organization. Our invocation of bureaucracy as a description of the music education order may at first blush seem forced. Weber’s characteristics of bureaucracy—official positions, hierarchy, written documents, specialization, professionalism, management—may not be the first items that come to mind when one thinks of music education, and indeed, Weber’s original conception has been faulted for failing to adequately distinguish between administrative tasks and professional activities. 19 When considering the totality of the certification and licensing enterprise, however, the abstraction of bureaucracy provides a fitting model of description and analysis. There are official positions and hierarchies within the various spheres (government agencies, independent associative groups, and tertiary-level education); there are written documentation (policies, handbooks, rules, and laws), specialization, professionalism, and management. 20 While the social reproduction of knowledge and the processes of accreditation, music teacher training, certification, and licensure are the kinds of things one might associate more readily with professionalization than with

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bureaucratization, Weber makes clear that bureaucratization is in fact a mechanism for the entrenchment of solidary group values: Bureaucratization is the specific means by which concerted “communal action” is transformed into rationally organized “societal action.” Therefore, as an instrument for the socialization of authority relations, bureaucracy was and is a powerful tool of the first order for those who control the bureaucratic apparatus. 21

What we are suggesting, then, is that the current formal and informal processes by which music teachers are licensed to teach, and by which music teacher educators and their knowledge are produced, is both a reflection of values and a mechanism for their entrenchment. METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK To examine social action, we drew upon Scollon and Scollon who are concerned with how power relationships are woven into social practices in complex ways at both micro and macro levels. Scollon and Scollon prefer to use Nishida’s (1958) term historical body rather than Bourdieu’s habitus because it situates action more precisely in the individual body. They point out that this idea of embodiment is central in Foucault’s writing: “within sociocultural and historical periods are particular ways of seeing, analyzing, and acting in the world which distribute power such that participants in these periods take on the discipline of living out their periods’ discourses.” 22 In other words, socio-cultural values are imbued so completely that the actors embody them in all that they do. Ways of seeing and acting condition and are conditioned by power relationships. Scollon and Scollon provide a methodological approach, known as nexus analysis. They describe a nexus as a link between ideas or objects, linked in turn to a series or network; thus, nexus analysis is “the mapping of semiotic cycles of people, discourses, places, and mediational means involved” in social action. 23 A nexus analysis entails not only a close, empirical examination of the moment under analysis but also an historical analysis of these trajectories or discourse cycles that intersect in that moment as well as an analysis of the anticipations that are opened up by the social actions taken in that moment. 24

A nexus exposes a “repeated site of engagement where some type of social action is facilitated by a relatively consistent set of social processes.” 25 As shown in figure 10.2, it is an intersection in real time and space of three different “aggregates of discourse”:

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The discourses in place, some social arrangement by which people come together in social groups (a meeting, a conversation, a chance contact, a queue)—the interaction order, and the life experiences of the individual social actors—the historical body. 26

Figure 10.2.

Scollon and Scollon Nexus of Social Action

Discourse, as social action, emerges out of the nexus of these three forces, and an analysis of discourse consequently needs to take all three into consideration. This theoretical ambition takes the methodological shape of historical analysis. As Blommaert points out, When the Scollons talk about an ethnographically situated object—human action and practice—this object is historically grounded and generated, and the features of the synchronic object must be understood as temporary outcomes of this historical process of becoming. The three aggregates of discourse are all historical dimensions of any synchronic social action, and their historicity lies in the fact that all three refer to histories of “iterative” human action crystallizing into normative social patterns of conduct, expectation and evaluation— traditions in the anthropological sense of the term. Synchronic events, thus, display the traces of (and can only be understood by referring to) normative— traditional complexes of social action, resulting (in a very Bourdieuian sense) in habituated, “normal” or “normalized” codes of conduct. And these codes, then, are situated in three different areas: individual experience, skills and

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capacities (the historical body), social space (discourses in place) and patterned, ordered, genred interaction (the interaction order). 27

Scollon and Scollon’s field guide for conducting nexus analyses involves five steps: 1. Enter into a zone of identification with key participants, find the crucial social actors, observe the interaction order, and determine the most significant cycles of discourse. 2. Map the cycles of people, places, discourses, objects, and concepts in place. Ask: How did these participants all come to be placed at this moment and in this way to enable or carry out this action? 3. Explore objects and concepts as mediational means. Ask: How did this object come to be present for this action; i.e., through whose agency? What is its history of use? How thoroughly internalized is this mediational means and by which social actors? How widely is a concept shared among the participants? How fully internalized is the concept? Is it internalized about the same or equally for all participants? 4. Examine how various interests are produced, privileged, and negotiated. Ask: How are social power interests produced in this discourse? What hidden discourse and dialogicalities are there? 28 That is, what’s not being said, being evaded, or so obvious that it’s virtually invisible but nevertheless governing the entire action or activity? 5. Focus on a structure of participation. Ask: What positions and alignments are participants taking up in relationship to each other, to the discourses in which they are involved, the places in which these discourses occur, and to the mediational means they are using, and the mediated actions which they are taking? 29 Such an approach broadens the scope of analysis by focusing on the interplay of the social and material works in relation to discourse, its (re)production, and its history of use. Entering and Mapping Our Zone of Identification Our investigation began by entering into a large zone of participation: the entire field of music teacher education in the United States. We started at the macro level and worked our way down to micro levels. We mapped the cycles of people (teachers, professors, accreditors), places (K–12 schools, small liberal arts colleges, midsize universities, large research institutions), discourses (teacher education, accreditation, standards, alternative licensure) objects (journals, course syllabi, textbooks, degrees), and concepts of the

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social practice of professional school music teaching. 30 We identified the social issue as the process of social reproduction in music teacher education. This included aspects of accreditation, certification, licensing, authority, legitimacy, legitimate knowledge, agency, and vision (or the epistemological beliefs as grounds for vision). We identified the primary social actors of social reproduction in music teacher education as the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), the Society for Music Teacher Education (SMTE), the National Association for Schools of Music (NASM), and higher education music units with music teacher education programs. We looked at places where discourse cycled in the field of music teacher education. This included organizational and institutional websites, handbooks (and their revisions), curriculum guides, journals in our field, and articles and policy documents on reform, accreditation, certification, and licensure. We considered how those involved with school music teaching came to be placed at this moment and in this way to carry out these actions by tracing the historical trajectories of our field. This required us to account for what our field considers legitimate knowledge and practice. One of the ways we “mapped” the field was by examining how institutions comply with NASM certification requirements in the designing of curriculum and instruction and programs of study. We acquired a master list of all NASM accredited programs of music in the United States (N = 641) and randomly sampled twenty-one schools with music education populations over one hundred, stratified according to NAfME division and balanced in terms of public and private institutions. We downloaded the programs of study from this randomly selected list from the Internet. The schools’ programs of study were remarkably similar. In our analysis of the various institutions we found that only the specific names of the individual courses varied: for example, String Techniques and Pedagogy, String Methods and Materials, Strings Class, String Class Methods, Strings Instrumental Methods, Class Instruction in Orchestral String Instruments, Orchestral Strings Pedagogy. Table 10.1, which compares the preservice music teaching degree program of study at Boston University from 1929 (called “School Music”) to that of 2012 (NASM accredited), provides an illustration of the workings of rationality (wertrational and zweckrational). If one carefully compares the names/content of courses, one observes surprisingly little difference in the basic preservice music teacher curricula of 1929 and 2012. The legitimate order has essentially remained unchanged for close to one hundred years, in spite of a myriad of socio-cultural and technological changes that have occurred in society during this time.

Table 10.1.

Preservice Program of Study Boston University 1929

Year I

Year II

Year III

Year IV

2

Music Appreciation

4

Counterpoint

4

School Orchestras and Bands

2

Elementary Harmony

6

Piano

6

Music Appreciation

4

Elementary Instrumentation

4

Collegiate Life

1

Advanced Harmony

6

Child Voice

2

Music Appreciation Methods

2

Piano

6

Voice Training

2

High School Choral Music 2

Practice Teaching and Observ

4

European History

6

Psychology

6

Educational Psychology

4

Prin. Of Sec. Education (Sem. I)

3

Modern Language

6

Public Speaking

2

Harmony Methods

2

School Organization (Sem. II) 3

English Literature

6

School Music Methods

4

Fine Arts

3

Voice or Instrument

6

History of Education

4

Elective (min.)

2

total

27

English Composition 6

total

33

total

32

total

28

Approximate breakdown: music (40–45%), general studies (30%), professional (25–30%)*

* Exact breakdowns are dependent on how courses are classified. Conducting, for example, could be considered “music” or “professional.” NASM guidelines suggest 50% music, 30–35% general studies, and 15–20% professional. ** Not the actual course names.

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Sight-Singing

Boston University 2012** Year I

Year II

Year III

Year IV

165

166

6

applied music

6

applied music

3

applied music

6

music theory

6

music theory

6

music theory

4

practicum

8

ear training-sight singing

2

ear training/sight singing

2

music history (III/IV)

6

liberal arts elective

4

group piano

2

music history (I/II) 6

musical organization

2

liberal arts elective

4

freshman writing

8

English literature

8

educational psychology

4

musical organization

1

liberal arts elective

8

musical organization

2

conducting (I/II)

4

music education elective

2

musical organization 2

string or voice class

1

elementary methods

4

music education elective

2

brass or voice class

1

percussion or voice class

1

secondary methods

4

music technology

2

WW or voice class

1

Introduction to teaching (I/(II)

4

choral methods

2

instrumental methods

2

total

34

total

36

total

35

total

29

Approximate breakdown: music (45–50%), general studies (25–30%), professional (25–30%)*

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applied music

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In order to further map and better understand cycles of discourse in our field, we conducted a few more analyses. First, we did a Google search for the familiar titles of music education courses, such as “Introduction to Music Education,” “Instrumental Methods,” and so on. We then looked at the required textbooks from a convenience sample of the top search hits. For purposes here we have chosen to focus on two examples. Of 16 syllabi examined for “Elementary Methods,” 3 textbooks showed up with great frequency: Music in Childhood: From Preschool through the Elementary Grades (n = 7), Integrating Music into Elementary Classroom (n = 6), and Sweet Pipes Recorder Book (n = 3). 31 Of 15 syllabi examined for foundations courses (course titles: Foundations of Music Education, Foundational Concepts in Music Education, Curricular and Instructional Foundations of Music Education, History and Philosophy of Music Education, Philosophical Foundations of Music Education), 7 textbooks showed up more than once: Foundations of Music Education (n = 6), A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision (n = 5), Contemporary Music Education (n = 4), Prelude to Music Education (n = 3), Introduction to Music Education (n = 3), Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (n = 2), Music Education in Your Hands: An Introduction for Future Teachers (n = 2). 32 Second, we examined course objectives listed in various course syllabi for familiar courses. To illustrate, table 10.2 shows compiled course objectives from ten Elementary Methods syllabi. We listed these verbatim, categorized into five general topics or areas of concern. A close reading shows a high degree of similarity and overlap. As is evident, American students in music education generally read the same authors and mostly study the same things regardless of where they receive their degrees, further underscoring the homogeneity that exists within the music education order. 33

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Table 10.2 Elementary Methods Course Objectives

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Table 10.2 (con't)

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Table 10.2 (con't)

Exploring Objects and Concepts as Mediational Means Another aspect of the music education order is the production of expert (legitimate) knowledge. We looked at author affiliations for articles published in Journal of Research in Music Education (N = 482) and Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (N = 532), between 2000 and 2012. We counted the number of times an institution was cited (for coauthored articles we counted the author and institution individually, hence the total number for analysis exceeded the total number of published articles) as well as the number of different authors appearing with a given institutional affiliation in order to better show whether any perceived influence was associated with an individual or with the institution. 34 As shown in figure 10.3, twenty-one institutions accounted for most of the published expert knowledge in the profession. 35 In JRME, fifteen institutions accounted for 42 percent of all published articles; in CRME, fourteen institutions accounted for 37

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percent of all published articles, and eight institutions appeared in both lists. 36 Next, we considered the social reproduction of music teacher educators. We looked at the music education faculty at forty-nine doctoral programs in music education at NASM-accredited institutions and examined where faculty at these institutions received their terminal degrees. Upon closer inspection we found that 48 percent of all faculty in these programs attained their education from just eight institutions: Florida State University, Northwestern University, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, the Ohio State University, the University of Kansas, Temple University, and the University of Texas, Austin (figure 10.4). That almost half of all faculty who teach in the music education doctoral programs in the country attained their education from just eight institutions suggests a very high degree of homogeneity of expert knowledge, which is distributed across the legitimate order, both geographically and temporally. EXAMINING HOW VARIOUS INTERESTS ARE PRODUCED, PRIVILEGED, AND NEGOTIATED The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) was founded in 1924 to bring coherence to the policies and practices of institutions of higher education, focusing on entrance requirements, standardization of credits,

Figure 10.3.

Institutional Affiliation of CRME and JRME Articles, 2000-2012

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Figure 10.4. Terminal Degrees of Faculty (N=245) at 49 NASM accredited Doctoral Programs in Music Education

technical standards, and repertory, following studies of music schools conducted by Manchester in 1907 and Pratt in 1917, both of which lamented “low standards and unethical practices” and stressed the need for regulation. 37 Self-governance was apparently viewed at the time as preferable to the feared imposition of regulation on the part of the government, although it can also be understood as part of a widespread voluntary association movement prevalent in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 38 Since 1929, member institutions have agreed to abide by policies articulated in the “NASM Handbook” in order to attain and maintain their status as “certified” institutions, something that today has become a marker of quality assurance for many prospective students. 39 The “founding fathers” of NASM were initially concerned with the vocational training of musicians and of future music professors. 40 In other words, NASM was founded to professionalize the postsecondary musical training of musicians—or more precisely, the conservatory-style training of musicians of the Western European classical tradition. 41 Almost from their inception, however, standards for the certification of “public school music” teachers were on the agenda. 42 Notably, the first standards for music education were

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adopted in 1930 following the recommendations of the Research Council of Music Educators National Conference. 43 Following many years of reexamination and revision, leaders from NASM and MENC met in the early 1950s to help “shape the future of music in education and the future of music as an art in the United States.” 44 Since that time, NASM “has established standards for teacher preparation . . . [insisting] that each music teacher be a musician.” 45 This, of course, raises the question of what, precisely, defines someone as a “musician.” The “NASM Handbook” states: “Musicianship begins with acquisition of fundamental competencies such as aural and rhythmic skills, the reading of notation, and the use of musical terminologies.” 46 The “Handbook” also includes this statement on admission to degree programs in music: “The musical background required for admission to curricula leading to an undergraduate degree in music must include the ability to relate musical sound to notation and terminology both quickly and accurately enough to undertake basic musicianship studies in the freshman year.” 47 Very clearly, notational fluency and knowledge of “terminology” (presumably meaning knowledge of terms germane to the performance of Western European classical music) are not just the defining characteristics of musicians (i.e., those possessing musicianship as defined by NASM), but, as criteria, they represent the entrance barriers for anyone desiring to become a licensed music teacher. While it is true that alternative paths to licensure do exist, their very designation as “alternative” denotes that they do not represent legitimate paths. 48 Moreover, while it is plausible in many states to attain a temporary or preliminary teaching license, initial licensure in music is dependent upon passing a state’s licensure test(s). Consequently, even those who obtain their teaching preparation outside of a university music unit are still subject to the same knowledge requirements as those who obtain their preparation within music units. The bottom line is that the accreditation standards of NASM ensure that the only people who can become licensed to teach music in schools are those who possess the ability to perform, from Western notation, in the received Western classical vocal and instrument tradition. The decision of NASM and MENC to ensure “the future of music as an art” is problematic insofar as it excludes the kinds of participatory musical practices that could (and arguably should) form a basis for school music instruction. 49 Most vernacular musical practices—ones that might hold the potential for greater participation among the wider school population—are not predicated upon the values of art (or Art), nor do they function as such. To speak in terms of the preservation of music as an art is to express a very specific (and narrow) conception of music involvement, one that helps to ensure that only those who share this conception are allowed to become school music teachers. This is not to suggest that music-as-art (or art form) is

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bad or undesirable. Arguably, schools should help to ensure that encounters with and engagements in artful experiences are made public and not restricted to the few. By restricting the definition of music to only a particular definition of “art,” the musical lives and experiences of many students are invalidated (or subjugated) in ways that help to maintain existing sociocultural hierarchies. 50 NASM accreditation has become a codified process in the social reproduction life cycle of music teacher licensing. The NASM/MENC “curriculum” for music teacher degree programs has maintained its 50-30-20% structure (music-general studies-professional) since its inception. Originating with individuals representing the classical music establishment, who continue to this day to dominate music units in higher education, the curriculum for degree study leading to licensure in music exemplifies and perpetuates the values of a narrow range of musical practices, helping to ensure that the values embodied by other musical practices never see the light of day. 51 In Weberian terms, NASM is an associative group representing legitimate, legal authority where social action is motivated according to both the wertrational and the zweckrational. In his sweeping study of higher education music departments, Timothy Hays concludes that NASM “has provided to be the single most important professionalizing and mediating force in the history of the American music academy.” 52 There is little opportunity for resistance to the authority of the “NASM Handbook” because of the homogeneity of values present among all the stakeholders. Weber writes, A system of order will be called convention so far as its validity is externally guaranteed by the probability that deviation from it within a given social group will result in a relatively general and practically significant reaction of disapproval. Such an order will be called law when conformity with it is upheld by the probability that deviant action will be met by physical or psychic sanctions aimed to compel conformity or to punish disobedience, and applied by a group of [people] especially empowered to carry out this function. 53

Because entrance into higher education music units is determined by those already in music units, it is highly unlikely that anyone not endorsing preexisting values will be accepted. Hence, not only are school music teachers delimited according to the established system of order, music teacher educators are similarly delimited. Participants comply not out of duress, but out of subscribing to the legitimacy of the system.

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STRUCTURE OF PARTICIPATION: THEORIZING A WAY FORWARD In the way that C. Wright Mills described, with his concept of the “sociological imagination,” we have endeavored to make sense of our own frustrations operating within a system that we previously failed to grasp adequately. From our point of view, musical people whose chosen musical practice falls outside of the norms of Western classical performance should not be denied opportunities to become school music teachers. Through our nexus analysis, we have attempted to make explicit the structure of participation in what we have called, following Weber, the “music education order.” For Scollon and Scollon, nexus analysis provides not only a set of procedures for examining power relations but also tools that enable action. By examining programs of study, textbooks, course objectives, the production of expert knowledge, the terminal degrees of music teacher educators, and the “NASM Handbook,” we have come to better understand the ways in which social reproduction occurs in the music education order and why it is often so maddeningly difficult to effect change. As avid readers of Foucault, we are reminded of his observations on the important distinction to be made between power relations and institutions: “[O]ne must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa. . . . [The] fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution.” 54 This is to say that, even if sociocultural hierarchies are perpetuated through institutions like music units in higher education, one must look outside of and beyond the institution to truly understand what Weber theorizes as the motivations behind social action. The “NASM Handbook,” after all, is the product of those who work in music units. The document is, therefore, an embodiment of power/knowledge par excellence. 55 The “Handbook,” in this sense, represents the vision of a group of individuals who are authorized to establish, through rational action, what has come to be the legitimate process for the credentialing and licensing of those authorized to teach music in schools. Notably, Foucault distinguishes between power and domination. In a power relationship, change is possible; in a state of domination, it is not. 56 In Parson’s view, Weber’s work demonstrates the instability of social structures, not their inexorable domination. 57 We firmly believe that creating new visions in music education—ones that imagine a greater commitment to diversity and inclusiveness—are possible. Change, however, does not come about without intentionality. Vision cannot solely be an individual matter; it must be a collective one. Redefining and re-imagining music teacher education must involve a concerted effort to account for both the wertrational and the zweckrational in

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order to make clear the value structure and its operation. The reason institutions are unstable is precisely because a state of tension—the result of power relations—exists. Those desiring change must attempt to make the implicit explicit by undertaking activities that expose the wertrational. Without questioning the wertrational—the historically conditioned normative values that constitute legitimacy—“visions” risk lapsing into idealized versions of the existing order. If one’s individual vision—one’s “hopes and dreams” as Hammerness puts it—is founded solely on uncritical acceptance of the legitimate order, the “reach” that feels “too distant” 58 will not be a reach for something different (and more inclusive), but merely a reach for a version of what already is. There are various ways to accomplish this kind of critical questioning (critical pedagogy being a well-known example). We used nexus analysis, focusing in particular on the role of discourse writ large. The goal in any case is to make explicit the actors, the history, the processes, the silences, and the people that may be missing from the picture. Questions and problems need to be brought out into the open: Why does the “NASM Handbook” exist, with its recommendations and requirements? Who created them and why? What has been the result? Why do licensing requirements exist? Who created the state teacher examination and on what basis? Who created the Common Core? How? Why? Questions then need to extend from the descriptive to the normative and speculative: Given the myriad of ways in which people can now make music beyond the traditional ensemble model, why is the musically educated person defined almost solely in terms of their ability to perform music from staff notation? How and why did bands, orchestras, and choirs enter the school, and why do they remain central to school music? How might music teacher preparation and certification be conceptualized to allow for teaching that doesn’t require staff music notation, given the policies required to maintain NASM accreditation? Engaging these and similar questions is difficult, of course, because those doing the questioning are the product of the very system being questioned. It is never easy to doubt the internalized values upon which one has lived one’s existence. The failure to analyze and imagine how things could be different, however—to imagine different rationalities—almost certainly guarantees that things will not change. Those desiring change must sensitize themselves and others to the workings of the zweckrational. When we conceptualize our work as music teacher educators as executing procedures and meeting requirements (e.g., a NASM self-study, filling out teacher evaluation paperwork) we are no longer engaged in the kind of truly reflective practice required for visioning. It is so easy to get caught up in the bureaucracy, the system constituted on the basis of professional practice and concern, that we cease thinking about what we are doing and why we are doing it. 59 When we as music teacher educators

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adopt Weber’s technical rationality (zweckrational) as the marker of professionalism and perpetuate such values with preservice music teachers, we abdicate our obligations to higher values, such as ensuring that all people who so desire have a reasonable shot at becoming a licensed music teacher. Change can only occur when we do not allow ourselves to become cogs or to treat our primary responsibility as executing bureaucratic processes under the guise of professional conduct. Weber’s “light cloak” cannot be allowed to become an “iron cage.” 60 We must work tirelessly to resist passive acceptance of the legitimate order, authority, and doxa masquerading as rationality and common sense. We must continually think and question and think and question and think, being ever mindful of the words and actions that occur within the profession. We must ask how we can foster the best aspects of professionalism without degenerating into the worst aspects of professionalization. We must ask how, in our efforts to maintain rigorous standards and fulfill our duties with respect to accreditation, credentialing, licensing, our visions for music teacher education might include space for the Jacks and Hudais of the world, so that they too have a legitimate opportunity to become school music teachers. NOTES 1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 170. 2. We use the word “training” deliberately. We argue that, due to the uniformity of curriculum, instruction, and processes of certification and licensure for school music teachers, music teacher education is much closer to training than it is to education in its more open-ended conceptualization. 3. Max Weber, Sociological Writings (New York: Continuum, 1994), 7. 4. As Michel Foucault explains, “The mechanisms put into operation by an institution are designed to ensure its own preservation.” See: “The Subject and Power,” in Power (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 343. 5. Although Anthony Giddens has argued, via structuration, that theorists have erred in dichotomizing structure and agency and that social action is in practice a combination of the two (structure being simply the effect of norm-creating repetitious action and therefore subject to change), Giddens has been criticized for failing to adequately explain or account for domination and resistance, especially given the latitude he grants agency. See The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 6. See for example Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1990). 7. See for example Jason Kaufman and Jay Gabler, “Cultural Capital and the Extracurricular Activities of Girls and Boys in the College Attainment Process” Poetics 32, no. 2 (2004): 145–68. 8. The Massachusetts state music test, for example, “assesses the candidate’s proficiency and depth of understanding of the subject at the level required for a baccalaureate major.” According to the Study Companion for the widely used Praxis: Music Content and Praxis: Music Content and Instruction tests, the content of the tests was based on a survey of music educators, thus ensuring that preexisting values (i.e., those of the schools of music that graduat-

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ed the music educators) are perpetuated. Moreover, the Praxis tests were developed in consultation with resources from MENC, NASM, and the College Music Society. 9. NASM, “National Association of Schools of Music Handbook 2012–2013” (Reston, VA: National Association of Schools of Music, 2013), 91. 10. Taken from http://music.indiana.edu/admissions/auditions/piano.shtml#education. 11. Talcott Parsons, Introduction, in Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 23. 12. Max Weber, Sociological Writings (New York: Continuum, 1994), 1–5. 13. See for example Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970); A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989); A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003); David Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 14. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 136. 15. Weber, Sociological Writings, 12. 16. Weber, Sociological Writings, 13. 17. Weber, Sociological Writings, 28. In his introduction to The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Parsons writes: “Probably Weber’s analysis of authority even as it stands constitutes the most highly developed and broadly applicable conceptual scheme in any comparable field which is available, not only in the specifically sociological literature, but in that of social science as a whole.” See Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 77. 18. Weber, Sociological Writings, 28. 19. Parsons writes: “[The] emphasis on the economic rather than the occupational perhaps tends to account for one of Weber’s conspicuous blind spots in this field, his failure to bring out the structural peculiarities of the modern professions and to differentiate between the organization of professional services and what may be called the ‘administrative hierarchy’ of occupational structure types. His ‘bureaucracy’ is a composite of both.” See Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 54. 20. As an illustration of licensing and certification practices and procedures, see Michele Henry, “An Analysis of Certification Practices for Music Educators in the Fifty States,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 14, no. 2 (2005): 47–61. 21. Weber, Sociological Writings, 92. 22. Ron Scollon, Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice (London: Routledge, 2001). 524. 23. Ron Scollon, and Suzanne Wong Scollon, Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet (New York: Routledge, 2004), xii. 24. Scollon and Scollon, Nexus Analysis, 8. Ron Scollon later replaced “cycles of discourse” with “discourse itineraries.” Such itineraries are trajectories of “resemiotization.” which, in turn, relied on Scollon and Scollon’s fundamental insight that discourse is always mediated—it is never just “language,” but always human social action in a world full of people, objects, and technologies. See Ron Scollon, ed., Discourse Itineraries: Nine Processes of Resmiotization (London: Routledge, 2008). 25. Scollon and Scollon, Nexus Analysis, vii. 26. Scollon and Scollon, Nexus Analysis, 19. 27. Jan Blommaert, Ethnography, Diversity, and Linguistic Landscapes (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications, 2013), 29. 28. Dialogicality is in reference to Bakhtin’s (1975) The Dialogic Imagination—the salient idea being the openness, multiplicity, and undecidability of texts and their meanings. 29. Scollon and Scollon, Nexus Analysis, 153–74. 30. Space does not permit a full discussion, but suffice it to say we conducted an extensive literature review with the following keywords: NASM, NCATE, TEAC, accreditation, certification, teacher training, teacher education, standards, self-governance, autonomy, self-determination, policy, regulation, social reproduction, social mobility, cultural capital, culturally re-

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sponsive pedagogy, culturally responsive teaching, culturally relevant pedagogy, culturally relevant teaching, occupational socialization, distributed knowledge. 31. See Patricia Shehan Campbell and Carol Scott Kassner, Music in Childhood: From Preschool through the Elementary Grades (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2014); William Anderson and Joy Lawrence, Integrating Music into the Elementary Classroom (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2007); Gerald Burakoff and William E. Hettrick, The Sweet Pipes Recorder Book: A Method for Adults and Older Beginners (Arlington, TX: Sweet Pipes, 1980). 32. See Harold F. Abeles, Charles Hoffer, and Robert H. Klotman, Foundations of Music Education (Boston: Cengage Learning, 1994); Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003); Michael Mark and Patrice Madura, Contemporary Music Education, 4th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2014); Joanne Erwin, Kay Edwards, Jody Kerschner, and John Knight, Prelude to Music Education (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003); David J. Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Michael Mark and Patrice Madura, Music Education in Your Hands: An Introduction for Future Teachers (New York: Routledge, 2010). 33. Based on their analysis of NASM-accredited institutions, Jennifer Mishra, Kiana Day, Dan Littles, and Eddie Vandewalker argue that degree programs, while similar, are less homogenous than we contend here. See “A Content Analysis of Introductory Courses in Music Education at NASM-Accredited Colleges and Universities,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education no. 190 (2011): 7–19. Clearly this is a matter of degree and perspective. 34. That is, an institution appearing ten times with ten authors will be viewed as having greater institutional weight than an institution appearing ten times with one author. In the latter case, influence would be likely attributed to the individual. We used the cut point of eight appearances based on a visual inspection (tallies computed with SPSS) that suggested eight was the most obvious dividing line establishing high-production institutions. 35. That some institutions appear to favor one journal or the other raises interesting questions, given that both journals have historically published mainstream empirical research. 36. Observe that this is based on our arbitrary cut point. This does not mean that the 6–7 institutions not appearing in both lists have no published articles in the other journal; it only means they did not meet the threshold. 37. Carl Melvin Neumeyer, “A History of the National Association of Schools of Music” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1954), 41. 38. See Timothy Hays, “The Music Department in Higher Education: History, Connections, and Conflicts, 1865–1998” (PhD dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago,1999); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 39. NASM is recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation as the official body overseeing higher education accreditation in music. Technically, formal accreditation did not begin until 1939. Voluntary compliance, however, began ten years earlier. From a Weberian perspective, voluntary compliance is an even greater indicator of legitimate authority. 40. They were, indeed, all men. The six original organizers were also all from conservatories of music. 41. See Hays, “The Music Department in Higher Education.” 42. For a description of the first undergraduate degree in “Public School Music” see Karl Wilson Gehrkens, “The Development of a College Curriculum in Music Education” Music Educators Journal 47 no. 2 (1960): 31–34. 43. Neumeyer, “History of NASM,” 247. 44. Sheila A. Barrows, Historical Perspectives, 1924–1999: National Association of Schools of Music, Seventy-Fifth Anniversary (National Association of Schools of Music, 1999), 14. 45. Ibid., 33. 46. NASM, “National Association of Schools of Music Handbook 2012–2013,” 86 (emphasis added). 47. Ibid., 91 (emphasis added).

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48. For more on alternative licensing see: Daniel Hellman, Barbara Resch, Carla Aguilar, Carol McDowell, and Laura Artesani, “A Research Agenda for Alternative Licensure Programs in Music Education,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 20, no. 2 (2011): 78–88; and Daniel Hellman and Carol McDowell, “Backgrounds, Teaching Responsibilities, and Motivations of Music Education Candidates Enrolled in Alternative Certification Music Education Programs,” Research and Issues in Music Education 9, no. 1 (2011). 49. For a description of participatory practice, see Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 50. The poststructural and postcolonial literatures have made much of Michel Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledge” (stemming from his power/knowledge thesis). See, for example, Foucault’s collection of essays in Power (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). 51. In his report on thirty higher education music schools, conducted in 1932–1933, the celebrated composer Randall Thompson noted that applied teachers had “limited education” but represented the largest voting bloc. 52. Hays, “The Music Department in Higher Education,” 75. 53. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 127. 54. Michel Foucault, and James D. Faubion, Power (New York: The New Press, Distributed by W. W. Norton, 2000), 343. 55. Michel Foucault, Northrop Frye, and Colin Gordon, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 56. The master-slave relationship is sometimes used to illustrate this distinction. While an asymmetrical relationship to be sure, the slave usually has some options available. 57. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 32. 58. Karen Hammerness, “Learning to Hope, or Hoping to Learn? The Role of Vision in the Early Professional Lives of Teachers,” Journal of Teacher Education 54, no. 1 (2003): 43–56. 59. Weber’s thesis on bureaucratization, where people are metaphorically reduced to cogs in a machine, illustrates this problem. Similarly, Hannah Arendt used the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, wasn’t “thinking,” but was, rather, simply executing bureaucratic procedures. 60. Weber uses the imagery of light cloak/iron cage in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to illustrate the dangers of becoming a prisoner to our own well-intentioned processes and procedures. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958), 181.

Chapter Eleven

Utopian Thinking, Compliance, and Visions of Wonderful Transformation Susan Wharton Conkling

In her writings, Karen Hammerness describes teachers’ visions as “substantial and concrete, vivid and powerful, and stable and consistent over time.” 1 They have what Maxine Greene has called “‘consciousness of possibility’. . . images of what could be or might be in their classrooms, their schools, their communities, and in some cases society as a whole.” 2 My purpose in this chapter is to wonder how such images are influenced and inspired and particularly to wonder how teacher educators might create opportunities in courses and early fieldwork that allow such visions to emerge. I begin by considering what consciousness of possibility entails. Greene herself describes it as a kind of “utopian thinking: thinking that refutes mere compliance, that looks down roads not yet taken to the shapes of a more fulfilling social order, to more vibrant ways of being in the world.” 3 Although Greene associates utopian thinking with hopefulness, the term often has pejorative connotations. It can imply fanciful, unrealistic, and distracting thinking on the one hand, or a dangerous, totalizing blueprint on the other. Particularly in the field of education, we tend to dismiss such extreme thinking. Henry Giroux acknowledges as much when he calls educators and other public figures to resurrect a language of educated hope, that is, an “attempt to make a difference by being able to imagine otherwise in order to act in other ways.” 4 Giroux claims that this kind of utopian thinking: is neither a blueprint for the future nor a form of social engineering. Utopian thinking in this view rejects a politics of certainty and holds open matters of contingency, context, and indeterminacy as central to any notion of agency and the future. 5 181

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Indeed, Giroux refers to educated hope as utopian longing, which he regards as vital for teaching. It seems unlikely, at least on the surface, that uncertainty and contingency could inspire the vividness, concreteness, and specificity of teachers’ visions that Hammerness highlights in her research. Why would she associate a kind of utopian thinking with those visions? Elizabeth Ellsworth provides one answer, claiming that the very stuff of pedagogy ought to be “open and unprescriptive.” 6 Not surprisingly, she claims that “pedagogy consists of the practices and processes that qualitatively transform the ways in which we think and act in the world,” 7 yet she goes on to explain that this open pedagogy brings “inner ways of knowing into a mutually transforming relation with outer events, selves, objects and ideas.” 8 Ellsworth draws on Peter de Bolla to suggest that interactions with the arts, in particular, ought to provoke uncertainty, arising from a “frission of the physical encounter” and an “immediate somatic response.” 9 To speak or write about pedagogy as experience, then, presupposes living, active bodies. Pedagogy that is open and unprescriptive, that provokes uncertainty, is not strictly a matter of the intellectual, but is instead an experience of the mind/body/spirit. With Ellsworth, I propose that the deeply felt emotion of transformational pedagogy forms the substance of utopian thinking. Further, I suggest that if utopian thinking is so fully embodied, it is a potentially powerful motivator of teachers’ visions. ANOMALOUS PLACES OF LEARNING In Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, Ellsworth “invite[s] readers into an experiment” thinking about art, architecture, media, and other performance events as pedagogical forces, those that “provoke us to think or imagine in new ways.” 10 Among the learning places Ellsworth describes as anomalous places of learning are the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and performance art on New York’s Lower East Side. She does not argue that these designs should be prototypes for pedagogy, either for students’ learning or for teachers’ learning. Instead, Ellsworth uses these designs as “conceptual test pieces” for speculation about pedagogy. She describes how designers of museum spaces imagine the paths that viewers must traverse to encounter everything on display, or how theater directors imagine the rhythms of speech that listeners will hear in performances; thus, Ellsworth describes such anomalous places of learning as having pedagogical intent, although familiar terms of pedagogy seldom are associated with them. She calls anomalous places of learning “highly charged event potentials that promise surprise and constantly challenge us with new and unexpected questions.” 11

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One of Ellsworth’s examples caught my attention because I recalled it vividly from elementary school: Hemo the Magnificent is a Bell Labs film about the circulatory system. Ellsworth describes Hemo (a cartoon drawing) and Dr. Research (a human actor) as “peculiar” heroes of the film: Hemo’s “power comes from his ability to give life, but he . . . does not know who he is. He knows his power but he does not understand it.” Dr. Research explains the scientific principles of the circulatory system, but does so through metaphor, “underscored by the film’s interweaving of animation and live-action footage.” In the process of explaining, Dr. Research acknowledges that he does not have all the answers and that scientists may never have all the answers. Ellsworth writes: Dr. Research seems almost joyful at arriving at the limits of his own knowledge, because paradoxically that limit point becomes a pivot point into a vast spaciousness. Suddenly, there is space for the many doctors and nurses who are actively seeking answers to questions about disease. Suddenly there is space for the future. 12

Ellsworth emphasizes spaciousness because she is concerned with room for knowledge-in-the making, instead of knowledge already made. I watched Hemo the Magnificent in preparation for writing this chapter, and I was surprised at how emotion from second grade came flooding back intensely— primarily my sense of awe at how much there was to know, and how much might ever be known about the human body. Ellsworth describes this feeling as an experience of the learning self, which occurs through “engagement with pedagogy’s force.” 13 She claims that, in anomalous places of learning such as this Bell Labs film, the learning self is put in motion: “[The places] create for us a relationship to the outside, to others, to the world, to history, and to the already thought in a way that keeps the future . . . open and undecided.” 14 Ellsworth admonishes, “You cannot give someone the experience of their learning self; yet we are capable of designing places that elicit profoundly moving experiences of encountering the ‘outside.’” 15 She admits that musical spaces might be designed as pedagogical forces, but she makes limited analysis of such spaces and experiences. So, here I detail two cases of music education that might count as open and unprescriptive, spaces that were designed to allow encounters with the outside, and with others. Thus, they opened up awareness of the learning self for those who experienced them. I first analyze the performance of an orchestra, which, like the Bell science film, hardly seems anomalous. Still, the ways in which this particular orchestra engaged minds and bodies in unfamiliar ways with familiar repertoire offered musicians an opportunity to encounter a musical work as something new. Second, I examine a study abroad where music education students and

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their professor traveled in order to study Balinese gamelan and second-language learning in tandem. In the process, they discovered the limits of language for learning and teaching. Moving Music At the University of Maryland, the symphony orchestra and music director James Ross recently collaborated for a second time with choreographer Liz Lerman to fully integrate movement and music. 16 According to previews of the program, student members of the orchestra were required to memorize the twenty-three-minute Appalachian Spring before they could add the staging. Logistical challenges, such as how to transport a cello around the stage while playing it, and how to perform as an ensemble without a conductor, had to be overcome. Then, the musicians had to learn to move like a welltrained dance company while executing complicated technical passages on their instruments and taking deep breaths in order to fill the hall with the majestic phrases of the Shaker hymn. Of course, orchestra musicians usually move when they perform. Woodwind players move their fingers quickly over keys, and string players use their arms to move the bow. It is common to see players lean into dissonances, relax at the resolution of a phrase, or give a firm head nod to emphasize an accent. Commissioned by Martha Graham, Copland conceived “Appalachian Spring” as a ballet, as an orchestral work with movement, but Graham’s choreography was not what Lerman had in mind for the orchestra. Lerman was quoted: “You have to get musicians to engage with their arms and torsos. You try to help them discover possibilities in movements they inherently make.” 17 So, Lerman’s choreography was built on musicians’ natural movements and the student musicians had input into how they used the performance space and employed their instruments as props (and dance partners) when they weren’t playing. Staging and movement allowed the players to experience a familiar work with fresh eyes and ears. Tess, a trumpeter for the performance, wrote, “I’m used to sitting in the back of the orchestra and hearing the sound as it bounces back to me. . . . I’ve had the opportunity [with Appalachian Spring] to make eye contact with violinists, clarinetists, and percussionists while we play together.” Although she was intellectually aware of the structure of Copland’s composition, Tess felt it was “a completely different experience to be dancing a hoedown with my duet partner than . . . staring at the back of his head.” 18 Anne Midgette reviewed the performance of Appalachian Spring for the Washington Post, and she wrote about how the integrated movement changed the relationship between orchestra and audience:

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Once the players become active participants, the audience does, too, almost by default. I defy anyone to sit and watch an entire orchestra move toward him, in full cry, and not have a reaction. At the end of the piece, the players walked to the foot of the stage and laid their instruments down, one by one, in a kind of surrender to the silence, or an offering to their listeners. The gesture felt like an act of tribute, and the audience responded with a roar of applause. 19

By fully integrating music and movement in rehearsal and performance of Appalachian Spring, the orchestra students had understood Copland’s music anew, yet they had also brought the audience to a new relationship with orchestral music. Embodiment of music is not foregrounded in a world bathed in music every day, in elevators, cars, and shopping malls. Even where music is appreciated, that experience is often self-contained, tethered to iPod and headphones, and seldom an experience of the mind/body/spirit. In Appalachian Spring, embodiment as a way of knowing was inescapable. Ellsworth posited, “If there is one ‘human universal,’ a fact of shareable knowledge that is accessible to everyone across all human experience, it is the fact of embodiment. . . . As living, moving sensing bodies we all exist only and always in relation.” Still, Ellsworth cautioned that each person knows through sensation and movement uniquely: “In this way, we are at the same time profoundly alone and profoundly connected to one another.” 20 There were no music stands and chairs to impede the movement, and there was no music notation to distract students’ attention from knowing Appalachian Spring through the body. Liz Lerman’s choreography put inner ways of knowing into a mutually transforming relation with outer ideas and selves, as each individual musician’s sensation of the music, the individual’s sense of music as movement through time and space, was put in touch (often literally) with all the other orchestra members’ embodied knowing. Although such learning typically defies verbal explanation, it became evident that the student musicians “felt completely different” during rehearsals and performances. They heard the music differently, and they interacted with other musicians differently from in previous performances where chairs, stands, notation, and conductor were present. This led one of the performers to interpret his experience: “My thoughts of ‘Oh my God, will I remember my notes?’ and ‘Will I remember my movements?’ have turned into ‘I really don’t want this to end!’” 21 Although Copland’s score, the basis of the Appalachian Spring production, was knowledge already-made, James Ross and Liz Lerman employed it, in Ellsworth’s words, as “a provocation and a call to invention.” 22 Rehearsals and performances allowed each student to encounter his or her learning self in the experiences of knowledge-in-the-making (and music-in-the making), to recognize inner thoughts and desires, and to put the self in motion with

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others. The students did not want this deeply emotional transformation to end. Music with(out) Language For several years, the Sunderman Conservatory at Gettysburg College has featured a Balinese gamelan anklung, called Gita Semara (beautiful sound), in which music education majors, as well as faculty and community members, participate. When students at Gettysburg decide to participate in Gita Semara, they must be willing to confront assumptions about how music is constructed and how music is learned. The students encounter instruments that are tuned differently from Western instruments, as well as traditions of learning that are unlike those they experience in their other conservatory studies. First, music is learned without the assistance of notation, which can be disorienting for musicians who are so accustomed to relying on a musical score. Second, instruments reside in a communal space, so a player cannot take an instrument home to practice as she or he would do for performance in a Western wind ensemble or orchestra. Music learning and practicing occurs in community. But learning gamelan in Gettysburg is different from learning Gamelan in Bali. Even though his students had contact with Balinese teachers, Professor Brent Talbot longed for his students to encounter Bali—and Balinese gamelan—in person. So Talbot organized a summer study abroad mainly for music education students who had been participants in Gita Semara. 23 The course fulfilled the teacher education program objective of learning to accommodate English-language learners in schools. This was because the students were positioned as second-language learners by studying in a country where the primary instruction was not in English. Like second-language learners they might someday teach, the students were supposed to be aware of the ways in which they negotiated cultural identities and communication strategies while they learned in Bali. The group spent the first five days of their study tour in the capital city of Denpasar, a city full of Western tourists. The visit coincided with the Bali Arts Festival, so the Gettysburg students could observe professional-level musicians and dancers and ease their way in to experiencing cultural differences. The pace intensified for the next ten-day period in Flower Mountain, the former estate of ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown. There the group studied gamelan anklung, gong kebyar, and Balinese dance, each for two hours per day. Although the gamelan anklung was similar to the gamelan at Gettysburg, other experiences were unfamiliar. The third stop on the trip was the Banjar Wani village, where the Gettysburg students stayed in homes, rented the village gamelan (gong kebyar), and played for two hours each morning and each evening. Village gamelan players typically joined the

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Westerners. As Talbot pointed out, because the tuning of each gamelan varies slightly, the instruments in Banjar Wani felt different from the Gettysburg instruments, and also different from the instruments the students had been playing so intently at Flower Mountain. Partly conditioned by the course description and goals, the Gettysburg students anticipated that a language barrier would slow down or interfere with the processes of teaching and learning. Once in Bali, the students were surprised to find that language was unnecessary as the medium to facilitate learning: “They [the leaders] played it out and then we listened to it a few times and started feeling it” was how one student described the context of learning gamelan anklung and gong kebyar. In Flower Mountain, however, one leader was responsible for each of their classes, and the students’ learning felt fast paced and intense. Once they arrived in Banjar Wani, the students essentially received side-by-side tutoring from village gamelan players. That situation, according to one of the students, “was like being surrounded by teachers everywhere.” The Gettysburg students seemed to feel little judgment from the village gamelan players: “They would just show you how to do it.” The Gettysburg students went to Bali believing they would negotiate language and communication, but they found that learning preceded language. “Playing it out,” “showing it,” and “feeling it” were pedagogy, pedagogy was experience, and experience presupposed actively engaged mind/ body/spirits. Ellsworth claimed, “We come to the time and space of speaking about a learning only after it has already taken place in a time and space that language cannot name. Language follows that which it would name.” 24 Moreover, with teachers everywhere around them in Banjar Wani, the Gettysburg students discovered that teachers could be “openers of the future, . . . co-discoverers [with students] of the limits of knowledges and of what we can do (next) at those limits.” 25 Because the Gettysburg students were preservice teachers and one of the purposes of their trip was to consider second-language learning, they not only thought about knowledge-in-the-making but thought of themselves as teachers-in-the making. For instance, one of the preservice teachers made a special project of learning about Hindu ritual offerings, which were small, beautiful sculptures made out of natural things, such as a banana leaf folded to hold rice, fish, and flowers. Offerings were part of daily life in Bali, and they were made naturally and simply out of gratitude and respect. Christina reflected, “Playing musical instruments from a different culture is more than understanding how the pitches work and how the notes fit together. . . . Music is so connected to religion for the Balinese, and making offerings to the gamelan is about respecting the music, the instruments, and the gods that reside within them.” After the students returned to Gettysburg, Christina began making offerings to the Gita Semara gongs. “I could not come back to

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our gamelan and not see it as a living thing,” she explained. Christina was aware that a limited number of Gita Semara members had been to Bali; she wanted to bring back her transformational experiences from Bali to others in Gettysburg. As she performed the offerings, Christina hoped that others would come to “understand that it was significant to our music and the experience we were about to share.” The aspect of Christina’s study abroad that stood out was her new regard for gamelan as a “living thing.” By returning to the United States and performing offerings to the gongs, Christina was not merely reproducing Balinese practice, she was attempting to open up a space for all the members of the Gettysburg gamelan to learn, to wonder about the possibilities and limits of a living music. In this way, Christina’s offerings became a way of thinking and acting pedagogically. Whether other gamelan participants in Gettysburg imagined actual gods inhabiting the gongs or instead imagined energy created in and through embodied gamelan practice mattered little to Christina. Her interest was in creating a space for others to meet the gamelan as a living and emergent thing, as Christina herself had experienced it in Bali. According to Ellsworth, those “who invent ways to see and say new things through [pedagogy] do not preexist it but are rather invented in the process. . . .Teachers [are] in the making themselves.” 26 When the Gettysburg students went on their study abroad, all of them experienced music-in-the-making instead of music already-made. Christina’s offerings to the gamelan after the group returned to the United States suggested that at least some students had begun to experience themselves as teachers-in-the-making, “thinking pedagogy through Deleuzian notions of sensation, experience [and] movement.” 27 Pedagogy required engagement of the mid/body/spirit, and designing places for learning required an experience of the self in motion, an encounter with an open future. REJECTING CERTAINTY, OPENING POSSIBILITIES FOR AGENCY Most musicians have known exquisite moments of performance—those spine-tingling times commonly described as “magic.” Music critics describe such performances as “riveting,” “passionate,” and even “transcendent.” When we who are musicians experience those moments with others—an orchestra, a jazz combo, a study abroad cohort—the sensations lead us to call the experience “life-changing,” yet we inevitably qualify our description with, “but words don’t do it justice.” This common story from musicians acknowledges that we are challenged to explain profoundly moving experiences, yet we are aware in these moments that something is happening to our selves. We are in motion. We are being transformed. We do not know what lies ahead of us, but we are somehow ready—open to the surprises that await us. We are rejecting certainty and holding open the possibilities for agency.

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Hammerness writes that vision consists of images of what a teacher hopes could be or might be—it consists of something imagined when the teacher reaches the limits of his or her knowledge and stands at the edge of a vast open space. Moreover, Hammerness writes of teachers’ intense emotional attachment to their visions—regardless of whether they are novices or more experienced teachers. This is why encounters in anomalous places of learning are so significant: a teacher cannot become conscious of possibility without first facing an open future; neither will she become emotionally attached nor hopeful until she has sensed her learning self in relation with others. But what happens when teachers’ encounters are only with knowledge or music already-made? What if they have never felt their learning selves, or their teaching selves, in process of emergence? Recall Greene’s contention that utopian thinking “refutes mere compliance,” her supposition that consciousness of possibility stands against the constraints of the present. Ellsworth, too, refers to limited visions of learning and teaching as compliance. 28 Describing three cultural myths about learning to teach, Deborah Britzman allows readers to look in on compliance and its affects. Britzman claims that these cultural myths “provide a set of ideal images, definitions, justifications, and measures for thought” about teaching; that is, she recognizes that these myths inform and shape teachers’ visions. In exploring the myths and their application to music education, we must keep in mind that compliance is as powerful as utopian thinking for instigating teachers’ visions. Specifically, the myths Britzman analyzes are: “everything depends upon the teacher; the teacher is the expert; and teachers are self-made.” 29 Cultural Myths and Compliance The myth of everything depending on the teacher relies on a vision of prediction and control—of curriculum, of pedagogy, and of the students. “The problem,” Britzman contends, “is that within the push to control learning” a teacher “must devalue his or her own power to explore with students the dangerous territory of the unknown.” 30 This language opposes descriptions of utopian longing where teachers arrive joyfully at the limits of their knowledge and look hopefully into an unknown future. One illustration of this cultural myth applied to music education is a secondary-level ensemble teacher who values and expects students’ silence during rehearsal. Although such a teacher may claim to understand the everyday complications of school life or that students bring a myriad of music learning histories to the classroom, she or he may nonetheless hold visions of certainty dear. As student musicians become more familiar with music, instruments, and repertoire, they inevitably grow more independent, raise questions, collaborate among themselves to make corrections, and ask the teacher questions such as “wouldn’t it be easier if we did it this way?” Music teachers whose visions

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rely on predictability may view such situations as threats, and they may feel out of control, as if they have “both a character flaw and a problem of management.” 31 Closely related is a cultural myth of teacher as expert. Britzman writes, “Many . . . approach the problem of knowing not as an intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic challenge but as a function of accumulating classroom experience.” 32 Intuitively, it makes sense that the teacher who has more years of experience in the classroom is a better teacher than the early-career teacher who has fewer years of experience. Still, years of classroom experience may give a teacher time to routinize his or her teaching practices so that she or he will not be exposed to others’ critiques. For example, an experienced teacher may not incorporate improvisation in ensemble rehearsals, and he may explain that he lacks time to teach improvisation well, or that he wants to focus on fundamentals. In reality, this teacher may lack improvisation experience. He may reason that, because improvisation is included in national standards, he ought to know how to teach it, but he refuses to take a risk at the limits of his knowledge because he does not want his lack of expertise to be exposed. Similarly, an experienced choral director may refuse to take a new teaching position that includes teaching a section of beginning violin. Although she has taken a beginning strings class during her undergraduate work, and she is licensed to teach all K–12 music, she will not allow students or supervisors to know that she feels anxious about teaching beginning violin. Because of “the pressure to know and the corresponding guilt in not knowing,” a vision of teacher as expert may be so powerful that it keeps some music teacher candidates from entering the profession altogether. 33 Finally, the cultural myth of the self-made teacher, according to Britzman, is a vision where “pedagogy is positioned as a product of one’s personality and therefore is replaced by teaching style.” She continues: Indeed, many in the field of teacher education promote the view that teaching style cannot be taught, but is considered a self-constructed product, mediated only by personal choice. . . . In this discourse, teaching style becomes like a costume: one tries on different personae until the right one is found. 34

Britzman is quick to point out that this myth throws the very idea of teachers’ professional growth into question because it positions teaching solely as a matter of natural talent. She also suggests that “a kind of social Darwinism is sustained,” where only those with the right kind of personality ultimately survive. 35 Britzman’s words ring true at those times when well-meaning cooperating teachers ask their student teachers, “where is your teaching personality?” as if there was one self existing in the classroom and another self existing outside of it.

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As is evident from these three cultural myths, compliance is a powerful force in shaping teachers’ visions for their work, and particularly in shaping the vision that preservice teachers carry into their work. According to Hammerness, vision is often used as a measurement, and teachers who cannot realize their visions often “seek reasons to explain their disappointing assessment, at times blaming themselves, the school, or perhaps worse, their students and the communities in which they teach.” 36 Teachers whose visions are shaped primarily through compliance would have reason to retreat into disappointment due to shame and guilt arising from not being in control or not having the right personality to survive in the classroom. HOW CAN MUSIC TEACHER EDUCATION HELP? Although the opposition between utopian thinking and compliance is a useful rhetorical device, and although Greene offers a compelling justification for placing these sources of teacher vision at opposite ends of a continuum, reality is messier than rhetoric. Ellsworth cautions about a “sense of urgency” for rethinking binaries in education and creating a language about pedagogy that opens up “complex, moving webs of interrelationalities.” 37 Neither utopian thinking nor compliance influences music teachers’ visions singly, but instead the inspirations for teachers’ visions are more interrelated and dynamic. Teaching and teachers are highly regulated in the current education climate, as Cara Bernard demonstrates in her chapter of this volume. Considering student learning outcomes, value added measures, regional accreditation, and teacher education program accreditation, visions constructed by compliance might be difficult for preservice teachers to avoid. We who are music teacher educators have an obligation to portray the profession honestly. To be worthy of preservice teachers’ trust, we need to “have a clear understanding of what education is like in the community . . . where [our] students will teach.” Our “characterizations of schools and teaching” ought to “be conscientious.” 38 This means that, at the same time we design meaningful experiences where preservice teachers have the opportunity to encounter their learning selves, and to think of themselves as teachers in the making, we must also acknowledge contemporary policies and practices that constrain their teaching selves. Still, we do not teach music teachers in order to maintain the status quo. As the chapters in this volume make very clear, we teach envisioning greater equity, inclusion, creativity, and joy for the children who will be in our preservice teachers’ future classrooms. These “unknown children” are the ones we imagine when we design experiences for preservice teachers’ growth and transformation. 39 Ellsworth tells us that our music classrooms

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can set learning selves in motion—they can be zones of emergence. The key, according to Ellsworth, lies in the design of event potentials, finding “ways of making classrooms and other places of learning points of rendezvous and envelopes of passage.” 40 I have already detailed two cases of music education designed as event potentials, but tracing through the chapters in this volume, there seems to be no shortage of music teacher education designs. For example, Jacqueline Kelly-McHale’s students took a walk together through the neighborhood in which they would be teaching. What would they find while they were in motion? What kinds of children lived in that neighborhood? Who might the student teachers become as they worked in that neighborhood? What would they do when they faced the limits of their knowledge? Likewise, Ball State University students embodied not only roles in teaching and mentoring but also in such areas as fundraising, marketing, and policy analysis. How are their learning selves set in motion in such immersive experiences? Kimberly Lansinger Ankney and Daniel J. Healy highlighted an unknowable future par excellence, that of free improvisation. They emphasized that free improvisation is impossible without musical interaction, without a rendezvous with others engaged in music-in-the-making, and they asked readers to consider what learning selves prospective teachers might encounter in such an open environment. How would such an environment bring prospective teachers face-to-face with the limits of their knowledge? Heather Nelson Shouldice acknowledged that, for first-year undergraduates who are on the verge of imagining themselves as teachers, explaining teaching roles concretely might be challenging. Because language follows that which we would name, Shouldice instead invited her students to draw their images, accompanying them with metaphor. Linda C. Thornton and Jason B. Gossett invited their students to reflect on their goals using video. In our best moments, we who are music teacher educators envision our students’ minds/bodies/spirits fully engaged, viewing themselves as teachers-in-the-making, and we remain hopeful for the surprises that await these novice teachers. If we are no longer in touch with our own utopian thinking, if we feel as if our visions have “compromised, derailed, [and] hijacked,” as Janet Barrett so aptly writes in this volume, 41 then we should consider why that might be. Ann Marie Stanley and Lynn Grossman recommend one means to investigate the context for our vision: collaborative self-study. Likewise, Brent C. Talbot and Roger Mantie suggest that critical analysis might involve a collaborative approach, shining light on the discourses that have structured our professional values. Both pairs of authors remind us that processes of envisioning and designing music teacher education need not, and indeed, should not be undertaken alone. As Ellsworth makes clear, because selves are continuously in emergence, pedagogy must be similarly emergent. The good news for music teacher

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educators is that we are neither at the beginning nor the end of our journey. We are always in the middle—our learning selves are in motion even as our designs of event potentials are in a process of becoming. As music teacher educators, it is our “work and play . . . to keep the flow of difference, movement, sensations—and their destinations—open and undetermined” 42 and to envision those preservice teachers who are entrusted to us fully engaged in wonderful transformation. NOTES 1. Karen Moore Hammerness, “Seeing through Teachers’ Eyes: An Exploration of the Content, Character, and Role of Teachers’ Visions” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1999), 41. 2. Ibid. Hammerness quotes Greene from Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 43. 3. Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 5. 4. Henry A. Giroux, “Youth, Higher Education, and the Crisis of Public Time: Educated Hope and the Possibility of a Democratic Future,” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 158. 5. Ibid., 159. 6. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11. 7. Ibid., 116. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Peter de Bolla, Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2. Cited in Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 8. 10. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 5. 11. Ibid., 11. 12. An extended analysis of Hemo the Magnificent appears in Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 168–74. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. Ibid., 54. 15. Ibid. 16. Although I have interviewed students who participated in the performance, descriptions of the performance in this chapter all came from public documents. 17. Tim Smith, “University of Maryland Symphony to Perform Memorized, Choreographed ‘Appalachian Spring,’” Baltimore Sun, April 29, 2014. 18. “Moving to Appalachian Spring,” last modified April 29, 2014, http:// www.music.umd.edu/news/post/1195. 19. Anne Midgette, “Choreographer Liz Lerman Brings U-Md. Orchestra to Its Feet in ‘Appalachian Spring,’” Washington Post, May 5, 2014. 20. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 167. 21. “Moving to Appalachian Spring,” last modified April 29, 2014, http:// www.music.umd.edu/news/post/1197. 22. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 165. 23. All notes were taken from interviews with Brent C. Talbot, and quotations were transcribed from documents shared during those interviews. 24. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 167. 25. Ibid., 165. 26. Ibid, 28. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 16. 29. Deborah P. Britzman, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 222–23.

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30. Ibid., 224. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 229. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 232. 35. Ibid., 230. 36. Hammerness, “Seeing through Teachers’ Eyes,” 61. 37. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 3. 38. Mary Lynn Hamilton and Stefinee Pinnegar, “On the Threshold of a New Century: Trustworthiness, Integrity, and Self-Study in Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 51, no. 3 (2000): 238. 39. Ibid. 40. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 176. 41. Janet R. Barrett, “Mapping New Landscapes for Music Teacher Education,” in Susan Wharton Conkling, ed., Envisioning Music Teacher Education. 42. Ellsworth, Places of Learning, 176.

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About the Editor and Contributors

ABOUT THE EDITOR Susan Wharton Conkling is a professor of music and music education at Boston University, where she teaches courses in conducting, choral methods, and doctoral-level research. As a teacher and scholar, Conkling has been a leading voice for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning movement in the performing arts, beginning with a Carnegie Fellowship in 1999. She also is well-known for her efforts to create professional development partnerships between public schools and collegiate schools and departments of music. Her research interests include the professional development of music teachers, particularly in schools affected by poverty and income inequality, and the designs for and intersections of learning experiences in postsecondary institutions. Conkling currently serves as the national chair of the Society for Music Teacher Education. ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Kimberly Lansinger Ankney is the director of music education at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Her research is focused on improvisation, teacher noticing of student thinking in creative musicmaking, string teaching, and professional development. She received her PhD from Northwestern University, an MM from the University of Michigan, and a BM from Temple University. Kimberly’s publications appear in Advances in Music Education Research and Visions of Research in Music Education, and she has contributed to Engaging Music Practices: A Sourcebook for Instrumental Music. 205

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About the Editor and Contributors

Janet R. Barrett is the Marilyn Pflederer Zimmerman Endowed Scholar in Music Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the reconceptualization of the music curriculum, secondary general music, interdisciplinary approaches in music, and music teacher education. Barrett has published widely in music education and is the author or editor of five books, including the The Musical Experience: Rethinking Music Teaching and Learning (coedited with Peter R. Webster, Oxford University Press). She has served as a national chair for the Society for Music Teacher Education, and she currently serves as editor for the Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education. Cara Bernard is a doctoral candidate in music education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She also serves as an instructor at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses in music education. Bernard is well-known for her work with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City Satellite School Program, bringing choral music to over nine hundred children throughout the city. Additionally, she is the codirector of SoHo Voce, a women’s a cappella ensemble based in New York City. Bernard is a recipient of the Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award and holds degrees from Westminster Choir College; Teachers College, Columbia University; and New York University. Jason B. Gossett is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University. He taught middle and high school band in Kentucky for ten years before beginning his doctoral studies. An active researcher, his interests include pedagogic value of teachers, undergraduate philosophy development, music education philosophy, and motivation for preservice teachers. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kentucky’s Murray State University. Lynn Grossman has been teaching general music at Helendale Road Primary School since 2008. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music education from the Eastman School of Music, she has maintained her connection to the university as a host for fieldwork students from Ann Marie Stanley’s elementary music methods course. Grossman also teaches general music at an El Sistema–based afterschool music program, ROCmusic Collaborative. She is the president elect of the New York chapter of the Gordon Institute for Music Learning Theory. This is the first time Grossman’s work has been published. Karen Hammerness is an associate professor and the director of program research in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Her research focuses on the design and pedagogy of teacher education in the United States and internationally, with

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particular interest in the features of strong teacher education programs. Hammerness is doing comparative research on teacher education in six countries, is conducting a study of urban teacher preparation, and has just completed a longitudinal study of context-specific teacher preparation. She coedited a book on context-specific teacher preparation with Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Eran Tamir, Inspiring Teaching: Preparing Teachers to Succeed in Mission Driven Schools. Daniel J. Healy is a PhD candidate in music education at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, where he pursues research interests in improvisation, creativity, flow, and teacher attrition/retention. Healy has presented his research for the Society for Music Teacher Education Symposium, the New Directions in Music Education Conference, the International Society for Improvised Music, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium, and the Critical Perspectives on Music, Education, and Religion Conference. He has published in Music Educators Journal and is developing a textbook on free improvisation with Kimberly Lansinger Ankney for use in K–12 settings. Healy is also an accomplished jazz saxophonist. Karin S. Hendricks is an assistant professor of music education at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, and previously served as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois. She has taught courses in music education research, sociology and psychology of music, string pedagogy, and contemporary and nontraditional practices in music education. Before moving to the collegiate level, she taught public school orchestra for thirteen years. She is an active youth orchestra clinician and a private string instructor, and has won several awards for her teaching. Hendricks has presented workshops at national and international conferences and has published papers in a variety of academic journals. Her research interests include social psychology and early childhood string pedagogy, with a particular focus on contextual and cultural influences on motivation, self-belief, and musical engagement. Ryan Hourigan joined the faculty at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, in fall 2006 after nine years of teaching music at the secondary and university level. He serves as associate director of the School of Music and is the President’s Immersive Learning Fellow at Ball State University. Hourigan is coauthor with Alice Hammel of Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs: A Label-Free Approach. The authors’ second book, Teaching Music to Students with Autism, was released in fall 2013. In 2009, Hourigan cofounded the Prism Project, providing opportunity for Ball State students to gain skills teaching students with special needs. In 2013, Hourigan, along with Families Helping Families of Greater New Orleans, expanded the Prism

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About the Editor and Contributors

Project to the city of New Orleans. Hourigan’s workshop, Reaching Students with Autism through the Arts: Implications for Inclusive Arts Classrooms, is on the National Roster of presentations through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Kimberly J. Inks is an associate professor and the coordinator of music education at Ball State University where she teaches undergraduate courses in elementary general music methods, field practicum, and specialized approaches in Dalcroze, Kodály, and Orff Schulwerk. At the graduate level, she teaches courses in music teaching and learning, history and philosophy of music education, and assessment techniques. In addition, Inks is the founder and director of the Young Children as Music Makers preschool music program for community children and their parents. Her research interests include active music-listening strategies for the elementary setting, the reflection and the writing process in the music classroom, and improvisatory activities for children. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Research in Music Education, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, General Music Today, Music Educators Journal, and Teaching Music. Jacqueline Kelly-McHale is an associate professor and coordinator of music education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. Kelly-McHale’s research focuses on culturally responsive teaching, issues of social justice, and composition in K–12 classrooms. She has published in Journal of Research in Music Education and Mountain Lake Reader. Kelly-McHale is an active clinician, having presented workshops at state and national conferences. She also serves as a consultant for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Institute for Learning, Access and Training and the Ravinia Festival’s Reach, Teach, and Play programs. Kelly-McHale earned her PhD at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Roger Mantie is an assistant professor at Arizona State University, Tempe, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate music education courses. Mantie previously taught instrumental music in Manitoba, Canada, and directed jazz ensembles at Brandon University, University of Manitoba, and the Royal Conservatory of Music Community School in Toronto. In addition to contributions in major scholarly journals, he is coeditor with Alex Ruthmann of the Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (forthcoming), and has an upcoming monograph on music and leisure (to be published by Oxford University Press). Douglas C. Orzolek is an associate professor of music education, the associate director of bands and director of graduate programs in music education at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is immediate past

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chair of the Society for Music Teacher Education. At St. Thomas, Orzolek teaches music education methods, conducts the Symphonic Band, advises master’s papers, and teaches workshops and core classes in the master’s and doctoral programs. In Minnesota, he has served as president of the Minnesota Music Educators Association and cochair of the Minnesota Arts Education Standards Review Committee. John W. Scheib was appointed director of the School of Music and associate professor of music education at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, in July 2014. Previously, he served the Ball State University School of Music as its director and as a member of the faculty teaching courses in music education and research methodology. Scheib’s research interests include the beliefs and practices of music teachers and their students, music teacher identity construction and related job (dis)satisfaction, and music education reform. His research is published in the Journal of Research in Music Education, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, Arts Education Policy Review, Journal of Band Research, Music Educators Journal, Teaching Music, and the recently released Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education. Heather Nelson Shouldice is an assistant professor of music education at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate music education courses. She holds degrees from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan and specializes in early childhood and elementary general music. Shouldice currently serves on the board of the Michigan Music Education Association and is president elect of the Gordon Institute for Music Learning, for which she also is a professional development faculty member. Ann Marie Stanley has been on the music education faculty of the Eastman School of Music since 2007, where she teaches undergraduate elementary general music methods and graduate seminars. She is the advisor for all doctoral students in music education and the director of the summers-only music education master’s degree program. Stanley’s research on musical collaboration and music teacher professional development has been published in Arts Education Policy Review, Bulletin for the Council for Research in Music Education, Research Studies in Music Education, and in the Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education. Stanley taught general music in California for seven years before earning her PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Brent C. Talbot is coordinator and assistant professor of music education at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College and artistic

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About the Editor and Contributors

director of the Gettysburg Children’s Choir and Gamelan Gita Semara. He holds degrees in music education and ethnomusicology from the Eastman School of Music and Indiana University and is certified in three levels of Orff Schulwerk. Talbot serves on the steering committee for the MayDay Group and is associate editor of its journal, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education. He has presented and published numerous papers on topics such as discourse analysis, power and identity, and world and popular music pedagogies. Linda C. Thornton is an associate professor of music education in the Pennsylvania State University School of Music, where she teaches courses in band methods, reflective inquiry, psychology of music, and assessment. She also guides graduate research. Thornton’s research interests include creativity development and pedagogy for instrumentalists, teacher identify formation and socialization, music teacher recruitment, and reflective pedagogy. Her publications have been published in the Bulletin for the Council of Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, and Contributions to Music Education, and she has contributed to several books, including Musicianship: Composing in Band and Orchestra (GIA) and Alternative Approaches to Music Education (Rowman & Littlefield).