The cultural sustainability of the master-apprentice-master cycle and communities of artist-teachers: are they an endangered species?

The area of applied or private studio music instrument teaching is a significant one, given there are conservatoria, universities, and colleges the world over that specialize in the training of advanced musicians. As a global sector of education, therefore, there are thousands of music instrument teachers engaging in high-level instruction, responsible for the shaping of the skills of developing musicians who seek to pursue a career in this area. The instruction and guidance these teachers provide is most often in the form of one to one lessons and our recent body of work has led us to deeply examine this community across nine different countries. Firstly, we inquired about some of the ways in which teachers describe themselves, in terms of their beliefs about their identity and their talent (Authors, in review). We investigated why they choose to teach and perform in higher education, studying what motivates them using the Expectancy-Value framework (Authors, in press). We chose to also explore their reflections about their own learning experiences and their teachers. We have found that while they believe they hold two identities, as performer and teacher, these artist-teachers see teaching and performing differently in terms of their careers. They are motivated to teach primarily because expect they can be good teachers, but they hold higher interest value beliefs about performing and enjoy performing more than teaching. The effort put forth to be a good performer is worthwhile to them, but more importantly, the most salient reasons for wanting to teach were being inspired by a teacher whilst a student and then wanting to share their knowledge with developing musicians. Their recollections of learning as a student are also illustrative of the impact their own teachers made on them. The ways in which their teachers motivated them to join this community were not only through pedagogical methods but via an interwoven socialization process. It is very cyclical in nature. In the current economic climate, the instrumental teachers in higher education are at risk from a variety of factors. There is a trend for conservatories to be absorbed into University departments and as such, the cost of one-to-one lessons is in some cases too high for universities to support. The one-to-one teaching paradigm holds a valued place in arts education and the cycle of master-apprentice-master may not continue if teachers are not supported in their identities, their performing, and in their teaching. This cycle may struggle to continue to be sustainable given global financial challenges and threats to education. This proposal aims to review the findings of our body of work and give recommendations for keeping the cycle renewed and refreshed in the context of 21st century learning in higher education