Dualities and contradictions in Music Teacher Education Programmes. From uncritical economic reproduction to social justice

Abstract

This article discusses the literature on music teacher education programmes for mainstream education in order to make a critical reflection on what we are doing and why in our university classrooms, what theories are implicit and what could be done to improve our programmes. After the process of analysis, we find an influence of the economic rationale on substantial aspects, manifested in apparent disjunctions between musical and educational aspects, as well as in formal issues, fundamentally due to the European Space for Higher Education. In the end, it is concluded that, without renouncing the economic aspects, the curricula should be more addressed towards the integration of pedagogical and musical knowledge, and the treatment of aspects related to social justice if we do not want an uncritical reproduction of rationalities that are often obsolete in the training of preservice music teachers.