Abstract:

One of the challenges faced by most European higher education systems at present is their integration into the EHEA (European Higher Education Area), a common and coherent framework for higher education which should facilitate student, graduate and staff mobility, increase employment rates and promote access to high-quality higher education. With increased attention on employability, the EHEA attempts to bring the higher education sector and labour market closer. For this purpose, greater emphasis has been placed on competences to describe the professional profile of graduates.

Within this context of change, in which professional profiles are to be defined in terms of competences, we deem it important to carry out a diagnosis about the competences that music teachers consider to be necessary for the effective development of their professional tasks. Conducting such analysis will allow us both to identify their professional needs and to open the way to reflection on the possibilities for improvement of their professional training with a view to bringing it more in line with the reality of their practice as educators.

With the aim to defining the professional competences of music teachers, a first competence proposal for the professional profile of the music teacher is made by conducting an analysis of discipline-specific literature, carrying out interviews with teachers and teacher educators as well as consultations with competence experts. Subsequently, five teachers and teacher educators who participated in the elaboration of the music education curriculum for primary and secondary education in Catalonia are asked to validate the resulting profile.

Based on these competences, a questionnaire is made in order to collect the opinion of a cross section of music educators from Catalonia in relation to different aspects of the above-mentioned competences. Once completed, the questionnaire is subjected to a validation process by an expert panel. Several judges in the areas of education research, competences, music education and the inspectorate of education act as experts in the validation exercise. The final questionnaire consists of a first part in which we ask the teachers for some personal and professional information and a second one in which we request the participants' opinion in relation to several aspects of those competences: their importance for the development of their professional activity, the implementation in their practice and the degree of acquisition in their initial training.

Once the results are gathered and analyzed with the help of SPSS software (Statistical Product and Service Solutions), the most relevant results are highlighted and compared with the proposals of competences for music teachers defined in previous publications. Next, suggestions for the improvement of music teachers programs are formulated.

Although the lists of teaching competences constitute useful frameworks to establish learning goals and contribute in this way to the improvement of the initial training of teachers, the definition of the professional profile through competences offers a narrow and limited vision of the reality of the teaching activity. In the final discussion we mention such limitations and reflect on the necessity to adopt a more holistic approach to the professional profile which looks at the teacher and the complexity of his or her professional practice as a whole.

Keywords:

Professional competences, music educators, initial training, holistic approach, professional profile, music education.