Music and Generalist Teachers Faced with Interdisciplinary Material: There's No Substitute For Experience!

We are living in a time of constant changes and reflecting on the needs of pre-service teacher training. This change is set within the context of the European Higher Education Convergence processes. In this context, we investigated the idiosyncrasy of the music specialist teachers' profile versus that of the generalist teacher, and its relation to both the generalist and the specialist teachers' initial training speciality and their experience once graduated. This paper reports on a pilot study with four groups of participants (in-service music teachers, in-service generalist teachers, preservice music teachers and pre-service generalist teachers) when faced with an open ended creative activity utilising unknown material which encouraged them to use their senses and their imagination. The aim of this research was to analyse and compare a) their reactions, b) their applications within the classroom and c) their evaluations on the relevance of such an activity within the Spanish curriculum. The findings indicated that there was a greater difference between experienced graduated teachers and the less experienced pre-service teachers concerning their ability to apply these activities into a classroom context, but there was little difference in the ability of specialists and generalists to articulate their responses to this challenge. We finally discuss the consequences of this pilot study in relation to the initial teacher training.