Rachael Dwyer

This study sought to investigate and understand music educators' values and beliefs about music and music education. Specifically, it interrogated how four Queensland teachers' values and beliefs were influenced and shaped by institutions of music, music education and schooling, and how they were enacted in the teachers' classroom practice. The literature indicates that teachers' practice is shaped by their values and beliefs, and where these values and beliefs remain tacit they have the potential to be covertly reproduced. Despite widely held acceptance of this notion, the development of teachers' values and beliefs may receive little attention in many initial teacher preparation and professional development programs. My motivation for embarking on this study was underpinned by a desire to understand the ways in which the norms and values of Western music making influence the practice of classroom music teachers in secondary schools. There is evidence in the literature to suggest that classroom music can be disconnected with the musical lives and experiences of secondary school students, and that notions of talent as a necessary condition for music participation allow elitist and exclusionary values to inform curriculum and pedagogy. Working within the methodological field of narrative inquiry, data were generated through interviews with the four teacher participants, school principals and students, and through observing the four teachers' classroom practice. Through a recursive process of negotiation between the researcher and participants, these investigative data were then co-constructed into poly-vocal narratives of each teacher within their school context. The stories told through these narrative accounts were juxtaposed with those told in the literature, in an attempt to shed light on the congruencies and conflicts within and between them, which in turn, allow for deeper understandings of these issues to be developed. The findings of this study suggest that teachers' values and beliefs are shaped by a variety of forces, including their own experiences of music education and schooling, the school context and culture in which they work, and broader societal attitudes towards music and music-making. Importantly, it was found that the teachers, in some cases, actively resisted these forces, while at other times the absence of reflective thought allowed the teachers' tacit values and beliefs to be reproduced. Another significant outcome of the research was an increased level of cognizance demonstrated by the teachers with regards to their own values and beliefs and how they inform their pedagogy. This reinforces the need for pre-service and in-service music teachers to critically reflect upon how their values and beliefs are shaped by their own experiences of music education and schooling.