Educating music teachers in the new millennium

We live in times when a row of factors influence music education. Among them, people’s most significant musical experiences are reported not to originate in music education at school ; and to an increasing degree, children and adolescents compose and share each other’s music on the internet. Furthermore, music teaching and learning is legitimated by drawing on a multitude of nonmusical values and musical experience becomes increasingly diversified in multicultural societies. This diversification inevitably challenges musical canons and other aesthetic values . All these various factors present vast challenges to music teacher education. They urge us to look closer into our notions of professionalism and the music teaching as a profession, as well as into teachers’ professional development. Furthermore they challenge our scope of music teaching by drawing attention to how students’ informal music learning affects and interacts with their music learning in formal settings. To face such challenges, several strategies may prove relevant. The present anthology reports from a research and development based project that addressed some of them. By trying out new organizational forms and practices, as well as looking critically into the more traditional ones, we directed our interest towards how such forms and practices can be described, analysed and developed. The project was called Music Teacher Education as Professional Studies Between the Institution, Practicum and Labor Market within the Multicultural Society (MUPP), and was carried out during 2006 to 2011 at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NAM)