The Project
Music teacher training in Spain began in the 1990s, at the time when the subject was included in the national curriculum. Much time has gone by since then, and considering the recent changes proposed by the current Educational Act, we see the need to investigate the training of music teachers with respect to the new framework of educational reform policies.
Thus, this project aims to evaluate, on the basis of empirical data, the adequacy of teacher training in relation to the challenges posed by compulsory education classrooms today, as well as to document changes in the experiences of teachers in relation to the performance of the music educator profession. In this way, the purpose of this project is to produce knowledge from research data to determine whether the primary and secondary music teachers are prepared to face the challenges of the society and economy knowledge. In other words, we pursue to evaluate whether the initial training of pre-service music teachers is adequate to respond to the individual, social, cultural and economic needs of the current reality of our classrooms and, also, to trying to understand the characteristics of the lifelong training offered by public administrations to in-service music teachers and the demands it meets.
Our purpose: to study the initial and lifelong training of music teachers in Spain
In order to respond to these purposes, the following will be studied: in-service primary and secondary teachers, professional practices in the university environment and the practicum for pre-service music teachers and the lifelong training of in-service teachers. This project thus joins a stream of research that requires analysis, assessments and decision-making based on both quantitative and qualitative empirical data.
The project has a mixed research design to be developed in three years (2018-2020). The work starts with a state-of-the art literature review and the elaboration of categories of analysis to prepare a set of research tools. It includes different strategies for the collection and analysis of data, as well as for the validation of results. The Project is developed by a team of music education researchers from the Autonomous Universities of Barcelona, Granada, Basque Country, Seville, Valladolid, and Zaragoza, as well as two colleagues from the Education University of Hong Kong (China) and Miami U (United States) who play the role of critical agents which allow us to contrast the national situation with other realities.