Professional music training in times of COVID-19 ::the impact of distance education on teaching methods and wellbeing at work

The COVID-19 crisis has heavily impacted the world of higher education. Universities and colleges around the world have had to rethink and redesign their teaching methods. Teachers have had to mobilise the digital tools at their disposal to pursue their training tasks. In this distance education context, unusual in Swiss and French higher music education institutions (conservatories, colleges of music, universities) until March of 2020, teachers and their students developed new modalities of pedagogical relationship adapted to the unprecedented circumstances. Our contribution presents a first assessment of this totally unforeseen period of distance education, looking at how it was seen by instrumental and vocal teachers, what advantages they perceived, and what difficulties they encountered, whether they observed changes in their pedagogy, and finally, what they noticed in terms of the impact of the distance education period on their wellbeing at work. Our paper is based on data collected through an online survey, responded to by N=56 higher education music teachers in France and Switzerland at the end of the lockdown period, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted with a sub-sample of three volunteers