DANIELLE SIREK & TERRY SEFTON
Danielle Sirek instructs in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor, Canada, where she teaches arts education classes to undergraduates and preservice teachers, and graduate-level courses in language. Prior to teaching in higher education, she taught preschool through grade 12 music in Canada and Grenada, West Indies. Sirek received her PhD from the Royal Northern College of Music, UK. She also holds a Bachelor of Music from Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada), and a Master of Music from the University of Toronto (Canada). Her teaching and research interests include teacher education, intersections between music education and ethnomusicology, and arts education for social justice.
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Terry Sefton has performed as a chamber musician in Canada, the US, Britain, and France. She works with contemporary composers and artists in developing and performing new works. Dr. Sefton is Associate Professor at the University of Windsor where she teaches music and arts pedagogy in the Bachelor of Education program; and qualitative and arts-based research theory and methodology in the graduate programs. In addition to her performance-based creative work, she has published in academic journals and books. Her research interests include institutional ethnography, identity of the artist, the arts in higher education, music education, and sociology of the arts.
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Control, Constraint, Convergence: Examining the role of Generalist
Teacher Music Educators
Teacher Music Educators
This research explores the effects of institutional constraints on instructional practices in general elementary music teacher education programs in Ontario. We illuminate the multiple points of constraint in which teacher education instructors operate; and the ways in which ‘official’ documents such as course outlines activate institutional expectations and relations of power. We explore factors that influence our curricular choices, pedagogical strategies, and occasional acts of resistance. The paper concludes with an introduction to our action research project emerging from this inquiry, in which we explore factors that influence teacher confidence and engagement with teaching music in the elementary classroom.