Abstract
Preservice teachers enrolled in a choral music methods class were asked to write journals about their field experiences in local schools. To foster reflective practice in a peer-supported environment, the students chose classmates to serve as collaborative journal partners. These narrative accounts of the students’ field experiences and the participants’ interactions were later collected as data for this study. Emergent themes included the development of pedagogical thoughtfulness and tact (Van Manen M, The tact of teaching: The meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness, Althouse Press, London, 1991; The tone of teaching: The language of pedagogy. Althouse Press, London, 2002 AU: As per standard convention, the citations in the abstract are replaced by the respective references. Please check.) as the students considered not only their own actions but also the experiences of the students in their classrooms. In addition, students gained the “gift of confidence” (Mahn H and John-Steiner V, Learning for life in the 21st century, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002) as they provided a safe place for exchanging both joys and concerns. By seeing the “teacher” in the other, the students enabled a sense of “becoming” that supported their own emerging teacher identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Moon (1999b) refers to these as “dialogue journals.” Hatton and Smith (1995) refer to this type of journaling as corresponding with a “critical friend.”
- 2.
Emphases in all excerpts are original.
- 3.
“Homeward Bound” by Marta Keen, arranged by Jay Althouse. Alfred Music Publishing (AP.7846).
- 4.
By “in the zone,” Amanda is referring to the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978).
- 5.
In Blair (2009), I discuss more extensively the relationship between competence and confidence in terms of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.
- 6.
These students had previously taken courses with me in psychology of music learning, elementary general music methods, and secondary general music methods. As part of these courses, students had engaged in fieldwork and written reflective journals about their experiences in the field. These and previous journals were required and were returned with comments, but were not given a formal grade.
- 7.
A second strand of representation within narrative inquiry is narrative construction, as described by Barone (2007), who draws upon the work of Polkinghorne (1988). In this type of representation, the author constructs a narrative based upon extensively researched stories of lived experience. Exemplars include Barone’s (1989) Ways of Being at Risk: The Case of Billy Charles Barnett and Barone’s (2001) Touching Eternity: The Enduring Outcomes of Teaching, and Coles and Coles’ (1978) Women of Crisis; Lives of Struggle and Hope.
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Blair, D.V. (2012). Collaborative Journals: Scaffolding Reflective Practice in Teacher Education. In: Barrett, M., Stauffer, S. (eds) Narrative Soundings: An Anthology of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0699-6_11
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