The Importance of Context, Reflection, Interaction, and Consequence in Rural Music Education Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that aesthetic music education philosophy, which undergirds many current music teacher education programs, textbooks, practices, and networks, fosters assumptions that are not applicable to rural settings. I outline and critique the main principles of this philosophy and demonstrate the ways in which music teachers' habits and assumptions, informed by aesthetic music education philosophy, might change due to doubts and reflection incurred by experiencing the structural and dynamic realities unique to rural music education practice. My viewpoint is derived from my personal experiences, conversations, and observations as a music educator in rural British Columbia over a sixteen-year period. I explore the themes common to Aristotle's conception of praxis, pragmatist philosophy, and praxial music education philosophy that might better inform British Columbian rural music teachers' practice and inquiry, and teacher education programs. I specify the ways in which rural music educators, by adopting a praxialist orientation, might consciously interact, deliberate, and make imposed structural and attitudinal boundaries more porous and less potent (Doll, 2006), thereby setting the stage for the ongoing transformation of their educational practice to better suit their rural context. Finally, I suggest that music teacher education curricula adopt a praxial music education orientation that will assist music teacher candidates to comprehend the notion of enabling constraints, the importance of developing relationships and networks, and the vital role of community in rural education.British Columbian one-year teacher education programs attempt to transform university music students who, for the most part, conceive themselves primarily as accomplished musicians, into capable secondary music educators, able to inspire and share their musical knowledge with secondary students. Some universities also offer music education courses as part of an undergraduate music degree, assisting students to determine early in their program if teaching music at the secondary level is truly their vocation.All British Columbian universities with teacher education programs are located in communities of over 70,000 people; most are in the Greater Vancouver Area (population 2.5 million). Teacher education programs usually place secondary music education teacher candidates in urban1 settings-in this paper, I use the terms urban and rural strictly in a geographical sense-for their practica so that supervisors connected to the university can assist and oversee student progress. Thus, music education teacher candidates are exposed to both an urban undergraduate and an urban teacher education experience. However, the job reality is such that, if a teacher education candidate specializing in secondary music wishes to obtain a full-time continuing contract upon graduation, that candidate might need to move outside the urban environment to secure a position. Over half of British Columbia's 4.5 million people live in the Vancouver area; another million live in smaller cities, dotted throughout the province, with populations between 70,000-250,000 people. The final million reside in communities that are often geographically distant from other centres and generally have fewer than 35,000 people2. Some of the posted continuing contract positions are located in these distant, smaller communities. Teacher candidates must decide whether to move to a small community with fewer resources, activities, and people to gain full employment and financial security, or pursue teacher-on-call possibilities in the urban environment, hoping that their diverse, but financially uncertain, experiences in several schools will eventually lead to more permanent employment.Regardless of where they choose to pursue their career, it is possible for new teachers to gain insights into teaching and learning through their teaching experiences and ongoing self-reflective3 practices, thereby becoming perceptive, caring, and effective teachers over time. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".