Drawing upon autoethnographic experience as a music educator, I make the assertion that transformative learning is particularly amplified in locations where a person encounters the unfamiliar, for those are often the precise places where an individual's habitus no longer holds efficacy. To build this argument, I propose that when inner…

This article documents the collaborative effort of a group of tertiary arts educators from Finland and South Africa. The methodological starting point of this study is collaborative autoethnography, as it focuses on our shared experiences and narratives. The data comprises our personal narratives, in which we highlight unique aspects of our…

Teaching in contemporary schools raises complex questions about how to engage meaningfully with diversity. Working within already politicized and fast-changing sociocultural landscapes, the diversity that teachers are required to navigate can no longer be accounted for by pre-existing categorizations. New qualities of difference are continually…

Although musical inhibition is well known in music education, it has not been studied extensively. This may result in misdiagnosis of student experience. In this paper, we examine how teachers have described the ways they help students overcome musical inhibition. Using a basic qualitative research design, we conducted semi-structured interviews…

This study explores the complexities of caring for students in a music studio lesson. In this study, we engaged four experienced string teachers in in-depth semi-structured interviews to explore their understandings of caring for their students in studio music lessons. Caring and compassion are concepts that have received greater attention in…

The COVID-19 pandemic had, and still has, an influence on everybody's well-being, including that of music teachers. The search for meaning in life and purpose for music teachers became even more compelling throughout this trying time. This interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) explores the multiple meanings that five self-employed music…

Gender inequality is a problem in western music education, but efforts to solve this problem in practice have thus far been insufficient. By adopting a post-human theoretical framework, this pilot study explores how music practitioners' visions of a gender-equal classroom can be used to question, reverse, and reconstruct gendered traditions within…

Some studies have reported that the initial music training of primary teachers can be problematic due to gaps in disciplinary and didactic training and a relative neglect of the objectives that music education should address in the school curriculum. Such gaps may lead to low levels of self-confidence in teaching music in the general classroom.…

Making Music: Composing "with" Young Musicians is a multi-year, multi-site research project partnered with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Canadian Music Centre to commission composers to collaborate with teachers and students (age 11 to 18) to write a piece of music. This article outlines findings on the analysis and…

Processes of curriculum reform are often a period of upheaval for teachers and schools. As values and priorities change and new knowledge and skills are required, teachers find themselves occupying new positions upon the school landscape. In the case of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts, some of the concerns emerging from recent reforms include…

In this paper, I share an analysis process that emerged from and evolved during my efforts to study children's musical learning from video recordings of choral rehearsals. Because written transcription would not adequately represent nonverbal data within social interactions, I developed a technique that (a) enabled me to disseminate understandings…

Through a duoethnographic study (Norris, 2008), Caitlyn, a newly graduated music educator and now masters student, and I, a seasoned music educator and new music teacher educator at Caitlyn's alma mater, collaboratively explored the experience of preservice teaching from our divergent roles and generational perspectives. Seeking to understand…

In an attempt to bridge the gap between the distinct pedagogical strategies often employed in the respective fields of song and dance, this study investigates how collaborative teaching and dialogue can serve as a starting point in finding new teaching and learning methods. This pilot study involving three teacher-researchers and three students…

In this paper, co-musicking in teaching is discussed on the basis of findings from a study on pop band and piano teaching. We understand co-musicking as collaboration between music-makers, including pupils. For this study, we chose to focus on the actions that teachers and student teachers take during pupils' performance of a piece of music in a…

This article examines generalist primary (elementary) school teachers' self-efficacy in teaching music. Five teachers, each with five years teaching experience, were interviewed for the study. Using this interview data narratives were constructed for each of the five teachers. These narratives focused on what factors contributed to the level of…