Mission impossible or possible mission? Changing confidence and attitudes of primary preservice music education students using Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory

Many Australian state primary schools have a policy to use generalist teachers to teach music as well as many other subjects, however research indicates that primary generalist teachers lack confidence and competence to teach music in their classrooms. Added to this, preservice teachers enter their initial teacher education course with little or no background in music education and low confidence to teach music. Skills, knowledge and attitudes that are learned in the preservice teacher education course are crucial to developing the students’ confidence and competence to teach music. This paper presents one approach to addressing this situation, based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model. A description of a primary creative arts teacher education unit is given, then results from a quantitative and qualitative student survey are triangulated with the students’ online journals and are used to evaluate the unit in terms of the students’ developing confidence and competence in music education, based on their learned skills and knowledge. Results indicated that the majority of the students (97%) developed their confidence and competence to teach music using this approach. Specific learning experiences that helped affect their sense of competence in teaching music included experiential, face-to-face and online training approaches to learning relevant skills and knowledge, which confirmed the importance of using Kolb’s Experiential Leaning Theory as the basis for the unit.