Student music teachers’ learning and its relations to identity

Abstract

The increased attention towards educational quality in higher education is a global phenomenon. Quality agencies exist in almost every country and evaluations, subject assessments and audits proliferate. Among the concerns of such agencies is to analyse the quality of teaching and learning. This presentation focuses on institutions for higher music education, and the quality of teaching and learning going on within them. One concern which has frequently been addressed as a major challenge for the development of music teacher competence is the relationship between what students learn at the institution and their learning during their school based, pre-service music teacher training. This paper concerns whether and to what extent student learning is related to connections between these two fields, and how various ways of seeing oneself – questions of identity – may affect their learning. Hence, the central question here is: In what ways can student learning between the institution and pre-service music teacher training be described as connected to identity, and in what ways do these identity-learning relations entail either deep or surface learning?