Preparing Future Professional Musicians for School Collaboration:

Professional musicians are increasingly expected to work not only as performers, but also as educators, facilitators, mediators and collaborative partners in schools and community settings. Research on musician-teacher and artist-school partnerships suggests that such collaborations can enhance pupils' engagement in music, enrich teachers' pedagogical repertoires, and create reciprocal professional learning opportunities for musicians. However, the literature remains less precise about how future professional musicians acquire the child-centred pedagogical competences needed for school contexts, and how these competences shape their collaboration with schoolteachers and their professional identity. This article presents a qualitative research plan situated in higher music education, with a focus on HEMU (Haute École de Musique de Suisse Romande). The project investigates how students and recent graduates develop competences related to child development, classroom heterogeneity, pedagogical communication, differentiation and interprofessional collaboration. It proposes a multi-sited qualitative design combining interviews, observations of training and partnership settings, and analysis of curriculum and reflective documents. The expected contribution is a theoretically grounded and empirically informed framework for preparing future musicians to collaborate with schools, without reducing their professional identity to performance alone. Note: This is a research plan / study protocol, not a completed empirical study.