Reaching to Transgress: A Critical Self-Study of a Teacher Education Program

Abstract

Teaching to transgress, according to bell hooks, entails educators moving beyond an assembly-line approach to embrace integration of the mind, body, and spirit, and engaging in ways that honor the uniqueness of all students. The purpose of this study was to evaluate our music teacher education program in order to critically analyze how our practices may or may not transgress. In keeping with principles of S-STEP (Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices), we share the provocation for the study and its multiple overlapping stages. We present themes from the S-STEP process resulting from the data, and then reconsider those data using scholarly literature. Findings include the intellectual and spiritual growth of students and educators, and the challenges inherent in teaching to transgress within an online environment.

Inservice Music Teachers’ Vernacular Practices: A Self-Study of Curricular Application

“…In music education research, music teacher educators have used self-study designs to examine aspects of their own programs. Researchers have explored the practice of teaching graduate students (Conway et al, 2016), the cooperative innerworkings of improving college students’ improvisation and composition skills (Pellegrino et al, 2019), and the critical analysis of a music teacher preparation program (Dansereau et al, 2022). A common thread between these studies was the qualitative, collaborative nature of reflection among the respective authors.…”

“…Although informal music learning appears to be of interest to music teachers and researchers (Green, 2008;Hess, 2020;Kastner, 2014;Moir et al, 2019), additional accounts from inservice music teachers are needed to clarify how vernacular music practices are playing out in school music programs. Furthermore, as music teacher educators continue to explore curricular reform (Isbell, 2016;Kladder, 2020;Randles, 2019), periodic self-reviews (Conway et al, 2016;Dansereau et al, 2022;Pellegrino et al, 2019) could become an important, evaluative step in considering the durability of such coursework. Currently, there are no known self-studies on inservice music teachers' vernacular practices as they relate to previous university coursework.…”

“…The inquiry-driven focus (Kitchen et al, 2020) was determining the extent to which a vernacular music course might have made a difference in the ways that program alumni approached music-making in their own classrooms. In contrast to previous music education selfstudies that featured qualitative techniques (e.g., Conway et al, 2016;Dansereau et al, 2022;Pellegrino et al, 2019), the current self-study was based on questionnaire data that reflected program alumni's teaching practices. This form of data collection allowed for a breadth of responses from a range of alumni across several years, provided descriptive information on alumni's unknown teaching approaches, and represented an initial step in conducting a curricular review.…”