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This study explores music education teaching practice in Greece, collecting data from three university departments: two music departments (M1 and M2) and one primary education department (P) during the academic year 2006-2007. The project was based on data from 84 students (N = 84). Fieldwork in students' teaching practice comprised a selection of: (1) daily teaching plans, (2) students' self-evaluation diaries for each of their teaching lessons and (3) note-keeping from the regular meetings between the academic instructor and the students during the teaching practice period. Data from each of the three university departments are first described separately; then a comparison among the three departments is made, which is based on the following three strands: (1) what problems students faced, (2) what kind of help they needed the most and (3) what they gained out of their teaching practice.

Macedonia "Black Star" music video was released two days before Bowie's death (January 8, 2016). It bears various implications of dying and the notion of mortality is both literal and metaphorical. It is highly autobiographical and serves as a theatrical stage for Bowie to act both as a music performer and as a self-conscious human being. In this paper, we discuss the signs of mortality in Bowie's "Black Star" music video-clip. We focus on video's cinematic techniques and codes (editing, mise-en-scène), on its motivic elements and on its narrative in relation with music, lyrics, characters, and gestures. We also discuss the video's intertextual references and the broader signification of the black star figure. We adopt a quasi-semiotic approach considering "Black Star" music video-clip as a text which can be investigated through its signs, codes, and conventions of the musical, visual, and cinematic languages as well. Our interdisciplinary tools derive from visual semiotics and audiovisual analysis models (Barthes 1977; Goodwin 1992; Vernallis 2001, 2004), without leaving outside Bowie's musical-artistic and personal history. As it turns out, Bowie created a video clip that is philosophical in nature and poetic in structure, preserving the role of protagonist. With the visuals creating a psychedelic atmosphere, the lyrics often are heard as a personal confession. They both generate cognitive and emotional responses that influence the way the viewers-listeners may experience, decompose, and interpret Bowie's artistic endeavor bridging life and death.

The present article investigates the polysemic world of audiovisual digital objects of popular culture, using as a case study the video "Yes, We Can" which has been produced by the popular music producer and song writer will.i.am. "Yes, We Can" is a mashup music video which includes excerpts from Barack Obama's campaign speech (2008 pre-election campaign), featuring many celebrities. The analysis (decoding and interpretation) of "Yes, We Can" is based on a new synthetic multimodal model, following the premise that in every audiovisual object, language, image, sound and music interact dynamically, creating multiple levels of meaning. Our multimodal analysis focuses on the synergy of the video's semantic systems, its communication potential and aesthetic identity. According to our results, "Yes, We Can" differs from conventional music videos and can be considered as a special genre of music-political video which makes organic use of music video language in order to express social-political messages. Another conclusion is that our model is a functional one enabling the emergence of hidden meanings of a music video.

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