Taming the wild beast! : developing pre-service primary music education students' confidence and competence

Face-to-face hours for preservice music education have decreased significantly over recent years and many institutions struggle to adequately prepare their generalist teachers for teaching music in schools. Much music education research has highlighted the situation of these non-specialist primary teacher education students as having little confidence in their own musical ability and their ability to teach children music. Added to this, problems such as a lack of resources, confidence, priority, time, knowledge and experience appear to inhibit the regular teaching of music by generalist classroom teachers. This paper details a case study describing how one primary teacher education course responded to these challenges. Key problems to teaching music in the classroom were identified, then learning experiences planned to respond to these were devised, which included using a combination of face-to-face tutorials and lectures, online support materials, a textbook that combined theory and practice, practical music-making requirements off campus, writing integrated arts programs which included a sequence of music lessons, and professional experience teaching music lessons in schools. The course was also firmly based on the Authentic Learning model as espoused by Herrington, Oliver and Reeves (2002), in that it ensured the students' learning experiences, both online and face-to-face, were authentic, ill-defined and complex as well as allowing the students to examine the task from different perspectives, to collaborate and to reflect. Although more face-to-face hours are still a necessity to provide students with in depth training in music education, most students exited this course indicating that they felt much more confident to teach primary music education.