Music Teacher Education as Identity Construction

The research from which this report is extracted attempts to build a theory in the grounded tradition (Glaser &: Strauss, 1967) to account for the interaction of music education students in Canadian universities as they come to construct an identity as a 'musician'. The paper is based on a qualitative research initiative with data coming from participant observation and interviews with 108 students into the social world of music education students over a period of 36 months at five Canadian universities (Roberts, 1991a). The assumption taken here is that the meaning of 'musician' is a social construction (Berger &: Luckmann, 1966) for these students and that music education students interact on the basis of the meanings that they come to associate with this social construct. It can be shown that this construct is a pivotal component of the music education students' identity, in fact, an all-engulfing construct (Hargreaves, 1976, p.204) in the formation of their identity. Music education students appear to acquire an identity as a 'musician' which they seem to construct as having a core meaning 'performer', and this process of construction appears largely dependent upon social interaction in the fullest symbolic interactionist's and Meadean sense of both with 'other' and with 'self'. This occurs most particularly through societal reaction <Roberts, 1991b). Within the process of music teacher education in Canadian universities, however, what counts as 'musician' is not as unproblematic as might be assumed, and there is generally Widespread disagreement in the literature as to the nature of the 'musician' who eventually ends up as a teacher in front of our children in the schools. Witkin (1974) suggests that 'one of the problems is that the music teacher is usually himself trained from the point of view of the instrumentalist' (p.l20). There is, he asserts, 'among music teachers, a fear and distrust of experiment, of musical invention, of anything that threatens the disciplined. service to the musical masters that their training has developed in them'. He goes further when he writes 'Of all the arts that we have looked at in schools music is apparently in the greatest difficulty' (p.118). His suggestion is that many of these apparent difficulties in music education stem from the kind of training that music teachers undergo. His conclusions hint strongly that there is conflict between who the teacher is and who he or she wants the pupils to be and what might be perceived as a more legitimate instructional goal for school mus¥: education. As an aside, of course, the question may not be a simple matter of 'goal' and may much more significantly be tied to what counts as music altogether; There are clear signs in the music school of a stratified knowledge where types of music and involvement in these various types of music have an almost precise hierarchy (Roberts, 1991c). One university in this study, for example, claims that its goal for its music teacher preparation programme is to 'make musicians first, teachers second'. This motto is widely known and widely promulgated in the Faculty of Music. One needs to ask, in light of the apparent gulf developing between music education as practised. in the universities and music education as practised in the lower schools, just what meanings are taken into music education students' understanding of 'musician',