Abstract:

The mandatory school closures of 2020 and 2021 and the swift transfer to synchronous and asynchronous online teaching required that teachers carve new pathways for their own and their students’ learning. Tensions and challenges were created and new knowledge landscapes arose for teachers and music teachers around the world. This paper will focus on our own work as music teacher educators and in particular on pre-service teachers’ voices so as to present the opportunities as well as the challenges arising from the move to online music teacher education in the spring term of 2020.

The two-term placement module at the Department of Music Studies, University of Athens, includes theoretical lectures and practical workshops, as well as a 30-hour placement in local schools. During the 2020 school closures, and as reported in Αuthor 1 & Αuthor 2 (2020), developing a flexible model for the completion of the student placements involved a series of five steps that included mapping students’ progress to-date, strengthening our collaboration with our team of teacher-mentors that continued to teach online, finding online alternatives for observing teaching, creating new teaching material to encourage students to re-imagine music teaching and learning online and, inevitably, shifting assessment requirements to accommodate the novel circumstances (p.443). It became clear for us that this new digital landscape could provide opportunities for the development of technology-infused musical content for classroom use, as well as considerations of its pedagogical application, thereby enhancing our students’ technological content knowledge (TCK) and technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK). New and collaborative forms of knowledge creation are arising and foregrounding new understandings of what we are teaching, how it is being taught and why we are teaching it.

This paper explores the ways in which students understood, created and made use of new digital classroom materials across their online placement, through their own accounts of knowledge transformation. Forms of data explored for the above themes included written student reflections in their placement portfolio assignments, tutor observations from online meetings throughout the term, and a recorded end-of-term online group meeting. During the latter, students were placed in breakout rooms, in order to initially complete a reflection exercise on the themes of the focus group discussion that followed.

The findings of our ongoing work are challenging pre-existing notions of the role and function of technology in the music classroom, of valued forms of knowledge in teacher education programmes and also providing us with new opportunities for exploring these new valued forms of knowledge in our teacher education programmes.

Keywords:

Music teacher education, on-line teaching and learning, teaching practice, technological content knowledge, technological pedagogical knolwedge.