Policy, Interculturality and the Potential of Core Practices in Music Teacher Education

Abstract

This chapter provides examples of current and promising practices in intercultural music teacher education, while highlighting how policy thinking can help construct empowering conditions and experiences. In contrast to current policy environments, where music educators are seen as the target of policy, we situate music educators as teacher-as-policy-maker as a guiding image for teacher preparation that need not and should not mean a distancing from practice. In this conception, music teachers are the generators of policies with others. In this chapter, we address how research in teacher-education core practices can be aligned with and facilitate learning about policy enactment in preservice music education. We demonstrate how core practices, as a pedagogical approach, identify learning how to teach as a “high leverage” practice to be developed. We end the chapter by articulating some core practices in intercultural teaching and policy that music teacher educators might implement to help preservice teachers develop, practice, and enact their own practices.