DIGITAL LIBRARY
MUSIC AND HIGHER EDUCATION: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHING PRACTICE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHER TRAINING
University of Granada (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN10 Proceedings
Publication year: 2010
Pages: 404-409
ISBN: 978-84-613-9386-2
ISSN: 2340-1117
Conference name: 2nd International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 5-7 July, 2010
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
1. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
In this paper we wish to present the research carried out by a group of five lecturers from the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Granada in Spain, in which a DVD was recorded containing interviews made with Primary School Music Teachers who studied their Education degree specializing in Music Education at the University of Granada.
The idea was to show these experiences to students so that they can have some first-hand experiences of former students of the degree they are taking and its relation to their future profession, and thus establish a direct relationship between teaching practice and university teacher training and the link between the professional and academic profiles of music teachers.
Therefore, the objectives that we sought were:
1.To link teaching practice to the initial academic training of music teachers.
2.To show future teachers the reality of the education system they are going to work in so that they will demand more specific training in those areas which are still weaker in university education.

2. DEVELOPMENT OF THE RESEARCH
The questions we asked in this research are the following:
- What kind of training do students of the Music Education Degree receive? Is this training appropriate to the needs of Primary School Music Teachers nowadays, or is still based on the transmission of knowledge regardless of any future professional application?
- To what extent does this degree really qualify future Music teachers? Does it meet the expectations that students had when they started the degree in terms of its relevance to their future profession?
- What do present day Music teachers think about the training they were given during their degree? What strengths and weaknesses do they see in the composition of this degree?
With the aim of discovering varied personal and professional profiles and, therefore, providing information which was as diverse as the reality we were studying, we used the following criteria to select people for the interviews, bearing in mind we were looking not so much for representativity as diversity:

1. Former students who had finished in different years.
2. Primary School Teachers with different professional experience (years of teaching experience).
3. Teachers with a permanent post (civil servants) and those who still did not have a permanent post (non-civil servants).
4. Gender equality: 5 male teachers – 5 female teachers.
5. Teachers who combine their teaching with management work at their schools.
6. Teachers with experience in specific schools (schools for the deaf, bilingual schools, teacher training centres, rural schools with just one teachers, etc.).
7. Teachers who work in state schools and private schools.

We chose ten volunteers who, after informing them of the objectives and contents of this research, we interviewed and recorded with the help of audiovisual professionals.
Before the interviews were made, we wrote a script for them, therefore, what we can see on the final DVD, are semi-structured interviews which allowed us to explore certain questions more fully with all of those interviewed, although we sometimes changed the order of the interview or introduced new subjects depending on the reactions of those interviewed and the information they provided, thus encouraging a more natural and receptive approach on the part of the interviewer and a greater flexibility in terms of the collection of data.
Keywords:
Qualitative Research, Music Education, Teacher Training.