Music and movement teacher professional development: An interview study with Hong Kong kindergarten teachers

Abstract

Despite the urgent need to provide kindergarten teachers with professional development (PD) in music and movement, little is known about their needs, motivations, and preferences in this area. This interview study explores Hong Kong kindergarten teachers’ prior music and movement educational experiences and their self-perceived usefulness of such experiences, their needs and motivations to participate in further music and movement PD, and their preferences regarding PD facilitators, times, and learning activities. Evidence reveals that participants felt unprepared to enact the local music and movement curriculum guidelines, perceiving their prior educational experiences to be of low quality. Teachers showed high levels of need and motivation to participate in music and movement PD, showing preferences for initiatives facilitated by expert kindergarten teachers and musicians/performers, conducted during working hours or online, and involving classroom-based and content-focused activities. Findings raise awareness about the importance of providing kindergarten teachers with responsive music and movement PD.

Music Uses in Preschool Classrooms in the U.S.: A Multiple-Methods Study

“…Because teachers are the key facilitators of music-based activities in early childhood classrooms, their orientations toward music, including both their experience and comfort using music in the classroom and their beliefs in the benefits of music for children, may shed light on the prevalence of music use in early childhood settings. Few early childhood educators receive music education training (Gruehagen, 2012), which helps teachers feel more prepared and confident in their use of movement and music in their classroom (Barrett et al, 2019;Bautista & Ho, 2021). In fact, Bolduc and Evrald (2017) showed in their survey of 108 early childhood French-Canadian educators that teachers with deeper music knowledge used music more frequently in their classroom compared to those with less knowledge of music.…”

Arts and Creativity in Hong Kong Kindergartens: A Document Analysis of Quality Review Reports

“…These features reflect the traditional local culture, specifically Confucian values such as perfection, excellence, conformity, and knowledge/skill acquisition (Li, 2010;Niu & Kaufman, 2013). Other factors involved in the explanation of these findings are parents' academic demands and expectations (Chen et al, 2017;Watkins, 2010), time-related constraints in kindergartens (Rao et al, 2018), and teachers' limited training in Arts and Creativity (Bautista & Ho, 2021;Cheung, 2017;Leung, 2020).…”

“…Teachers tend to spend relatively little time in non-academic areas to meet parental demands for drill and practice in Language (Chinese and English) and Mathematics (Rao et al, 2018), which are seen as central areas for primary school. Furthermore, teachers might feel ill-prepared to teach Arts and Creativity to young children, given their limited formal training (Bautista & Ho, 2021), which could also contribute to reducing the time spent on this learning area in the classroom. These various factors may have resulted in relatively low emphasis put on Arts and Creativity in the reports.…”

“…Under the Arts Engagement learning area, teachers would be encouraged to facilitate the three components of creativity as much as possible. However, the curriculum should also recognize that the degrees of exploration, freedom, and choice given to children will depend on multiple variables, such as the time available in each specific program, the resources and spaces available, the teacher/child ratio in each kindergarten, and the prior training of teachers (Bautista & Ho, 2021). In sum, the revised glocal curriculum we advocate for would acknowledge that the level of creativity could vary across kindergartens and it would validate different types of teaching approaches, from child-centered to teacher-directed approaches (Veraksa et al, 2021).…”

<p>Music in Early Childhood Education: generalist teachers versus specialist teachers [Música en Educación Infantil: profesores generalistas versus profesores especialistas]</p>

“…Although music education at this stage is the responsibility of ET, the collaboration and intervention of MT can improve the quality of generalist teachers' music activities (Barrett et al, 2020;Baum, 2017;Bautista & Ho, 2021;Bond et al, 2022;Ibbotson & See, 2021;Rajan, 2017). Welch (2020) argues that collaboration between specialists (who have expertise in music) and generalists (who have knowledge of their pupils) can enrich everyone.…”