Toward reform in music teacher education

Abstract

Although severe criticism of teacher education is currently the mode, I begin this paper giving credit where, I believe, credit is due. The music teacher education program represents one of the more successful programs of teacher education. The success of music teacher educators is reflected in the public school music program which has for years been the dominant arts program in public education; that program has been a success and is without peer in the modern world. The teachers who have been successful in organizing and conducting the public music school program are products of the music teacher education program. The music teacher education program has been a success; it requires no apology; it merits praise. Success is, however, a relative quality and one cannot be sanguine about the results achieved by music teacher education. It has produced and continues to produce too many ineffective and ill-prepared music teachers. Furthermore, it often fails to attract students with the highest levels of musical and intellectual ability; and part of the lack of attraction may be due to the nature of the program. Music teacher education in most colleges and universities, rightly or wrongly, has low status in the valuations of administrators, faculty members, and students. The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the problems and issues confronting music teacher education, to propose a rationale for reform in music teacher education programs, and finally to suggest some cues for beginning the process of reform. Music teacher education has changed very little in the last fifty years. The program has been studied by doctoral students and by authorities in the field since the landmark study at Teachers College by Edna McEachern in 1937; the same deficiencies have been identified with amazing consistency through those years. Official bodies of the Music Educators National Conference and the National Association of Schools of Music have studied the program and made varying types of recommendations for its content. Yet little has changed; curricular reform has not taken place. Graduates of contemporary programs identify the same problems and deficiencies in preparation that graduates of programs in 1930's identified. The lack of change in the music teacher education program and in its problems and deficiencies may be traced to a basic problem which has afflicted music teacher education from its beginning, a problem which is an historical fact. That problem is that no program has ever been systematically developed for the specific purpose of preparing music teachers. Existing programs without exception are hybrids, the result of a kind of cross fertilization of three related programs from different types of institutions the conservatory, the liberal arts college, and the teachers college. The result has not been the consistent and beautiful flower that sometimes results from hybridization but a big overgrown thicket which pleases nobody, not the musician, nor the humanist, nor the educationist. Music teacher education programs in schools of music grew during an era in which the dominant approach to program development involved beginning with a basic core of traditional courses and adding other courses to meet needs or demands that arose. Early programs were grafted on to programs designed to prepare performers, a conservatory program. The direction this grafting took was to make every effort to keep the conservatory program as nearly intact as possible in intent and content but to dilute the content sufficiently to permit the inclusion of methods courses and general education courses. As time has gone on, additions, substitutions, and deletions have continued as

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