Document Type
Journal Article
Publisher
IIER
School
School of Education
RAS ID
23863
Abstract
Music is essential in developing the young brain, particularly skills relating to concentration, filtering, information retrieval, verbal competencies, mental visualisation, problem solving, empathy and personal expression. With the introduction of the Australian National Curriculum and its adoption as the basis of the Western Australian P-10 music syllabus, there is cause to reflect on the effectiveness of music provision within teacher education courses and pre-service generalist teachers' abilities to deliver the new music syllabus. Accordingly, a mixed method study was conducted with first and fourth year Bachelor of Education primary students at a Western Australian university, to investigate students' music experiences prior to and during the course. Fourth year graduating students were also asked to reflect on their self-efficacy to teach music based upon the course. For this article, selected data from 2013 and 2014 is presented as descriptive statistics along with interview observations to contextualise the findings. While students generally reported encouraging levels of musical engagement, this did not translate into self-efficacy to teach music. This article emphasises the importance of building pre-service teacher self-efficacy to support ongoing personal and professional engagement with music so future generations of young people can benefit from sustained, quality music education in primary schools.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Lowe, G., Lummis, G., & Morris, J. E. (2017). Pre-service primary teachers' experiences and self-efficacy to teach music: Are they ready? Issues in Educational Research, 27(2), 314-329.
http://www.iier.org.au/iier27/lowe.html