Becoming Music Teachers in a Supportive String Project Community

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to examine two music education students’ experiences as String Project teachers (SPTs). Research questions were as follows: What connections were made between coursework and the authentic-context learning (ACL) experience? and What was the impact of ACL experiences on music teacher identity? Data were an open-ended questionnaire, journal entries, observations, videotaped teaching segments, and two semistructured interviews. These SPTs used terms and concepts explored in coursework in their goal-setting for themselves and their students, and also referenced concepts while reflecting on their teaching. The SPTs developed their music teacher identities as they learned in a supportive community, and they made connections between personal, musician, and teacher identities. Through ACL experience situated within a supportive String Project community, ideas initially explored during coursework became internalized as part of the SPTs’ thinking, practices, philosophies, and identities.

“A Circular Council of People With Equal Ideas”

Mentoring in music education programs is such a ubiquitous part of the process; it is sometimes overlooked or subsumed under other categories. The purpose of this article is to highlight mentoring relationships within an undergraduate music teacher education program. Formal, informal, vertical, and horizontal mentoring are examined from the perspectives of undergraduate preservice music teachers working in a community-university partnership. The data are culled from a 14 month, intrinsic case study of the University of South Carolina String Project, designed to examine the participant experience for all member groups within the string project—the undergraduate preservice teachers, the community students, and the faculty. Mentoring relationships are explored as a critical component of experience for the preservice teachers. Their voices are presented here to illustrate the value they placed on mentoring, as well as the challenges that emerged in construction of a mentoring mosaic as part of their preservice teaching experience.

Informing new string programmes: Lessons learned from an Australian experience

Although there are many examples of notable string programmes there has been relatively little comparative analysis of these programmes. This paper examines three benchmark string programmes (The University of Illinois String Project, The Tower Hamlets String Teaching Project and Colourstrings) alongside Music4All, an innovative string programme run over three years in five primary schools in regional Australia. The paper discusses difficulties encountered in the Australian experience and gives recommendations for future programmes including allowing adequate time and resources for the planning phase and the importance of ongoing professional development for staff.

The Role of the String Project in Teacher Training and Community Music Education

The National String Project Consortium was designed to encourage string education majors to become string teachers and to stimulate growth of new school orchestra programs. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the extent to which these goals were accomplished across 13 university sites in 2003-2004. Survey data were obtained from project directors, master teachers, student teachers, children, and parents (N = 1,458). Results indicated the majority of student teachers were music education majors who received professional and financial benefit from participation, and were engaged in authentic string teaching in productive and rewarding settings. Children studied string instruments under satisfying and affordable conditions. The String Project seems to have filled a void where school strings programs do not exist, or functioned to supplement strings instruction available in the schools.

Preservice String Teachers' Lesson-Planning Processes

This yearlong qualitative study is an examination of 10 undergraduate preservice teachers' lesson planning for the classes and/or individual lessons they taught in a university string project. Data analysis revealed that these preservice teachers held differing views of lesson planning from each other and from their supervisor. Five themes emerged: (a) concerns about knowing how to begin to plan, (b) difficulty identifying what the children needed to learn, (c) the prominence of decisions made on the fly, (d) comparisons of thinking about teaching and planning with actual written plans, and (e) limited transfer of in-class experiences to teaching in the project. Suggestions for teacher educators include acknowledging the complex nonlinear relationship between planning skills, teaching experience, and professional knowledge; structuring guided experiences with a variety of lesson planning formats (e.g., written, mental, verbal); and maximizing opportunities for preservice teachers to reflect on connections between their experiences as students and as teachers. September 22, 2004 December 10, 2004.