School and conservatoire music teachers’ ‘vocational habitus’: lessons for music teacher education

This chapter explores music teachers’ professional knowledge as a form of embodied know-how specific to, and constructed within, particular workplace contexts. Beginning with an argument for thinking of professional knowledge as socially constructed know-how, we evoke a sociological frame of reference that includes the cultural practices of teachers’ workplaces, their vocational cultures, and their active and negotiated identities. Following Britzman (2003), we argue that teaching is about coming to terms with particular orientations towards knowledge, power and identity. We know, for example, that instrumental teachers construct their identities and teaching practices in response to the dominant values of their workplace (Triantafyllaki 2010a). In this process, certain definitions of know-how are adopted by teachers and subsequently enacted, re-constructed and developed. In the first part of the chapter, we examine the nature of this socially constructed know-how and the ways in which teachers take it up and negotiate it in accordance with their biographies, circumstances and workplace cultures