Educating music teachers in the new millennium. Multiculturalism, professionalism and music teacher education in the contemporary society. A report from a research and development project.

Abstract

This anthology sums up the issues and results of a research and development project at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NAM) called Music Teacher Education between the Institution, the Practicum and the Profession within the Multicultural Society (MUPP). Eight participants have worked with the project as an integrated part of their positions during the years 2006-2011 by carrying out seven single studies that jointly aimed at throwing light on a common, overarching research question. The project has been included in the NAM research and development priority program “Research in and for higher music education”. Since education of music teachers in Norway is taken care of by institutions of higher music education in addition to institutions of general teacher education, music teacher education constitute an important part of the activities of the NAM. The project members have presented and published several works from the single studies during the project period. The content of the present anthology consists of a selection of those publications together with chapters that are written specifically for this volume. Hence, it is a collection of texts enlightening central issues that were brought up in the project processes, and not a detailed account for each of the single studies. Some of the articles describe the background and context of the single studies whilst other report and discuss the results. In particular, both these approaches are used to report from the study of the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon as a context for student teachers’ practicum. Some of the chapters are written in Norwegian. Keeping our English speaking readers in mind we have tried to include some of the most central reasoning within those chapters in the overview chapters at the start (Chapter 1) and at the end (Chapter 14) of the book. The rest of the chapters are written in English because we consider most of our reasoning to comply with the international dialogue of the Music Teacher Education field. We would like to acknowledge the following for generously allowing us to reprint works from their journals and books: Research Alliance of Institutions for Music Education (RAIME), Visions of Research in Music Education, Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, Forum for kultur og internasjonalt samarbeid. Further information about this is given in a footnote at the start of the relevant chapters.