Structure and agency in novice music teaching

Abstract

Using multiple interviews and observations, I chronicled the experiences of three novice music teachers in the United States over a 2-year period, including their student teaching internships and first years of in-service teaching. I analyzed these experiences through the lens of strong structuration theory, Stones’s (2005) extension and elaboration of Giddens’s (1984) original structuration theory. My guiding research questions were: a) How do the structures of music teaching within public schools in the U.S. enable and inhibit the agency of novice music teachers? and, b) How do the practices of novice music teachers reproduce, sustain, and change the structures of music education? I discuss how teacher educators, preservice teachers, and in-service teachers can work together in dialogue to assist novice music teachers in cultivating agential resistance by developing perceptions of power/capability, adequate knowledge, and requisite reflective distance.

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