Learning to teach music: A collaborative ethnography

This paper is an exploration of the use of collaborative ethnography as a qualitative approach to research in music teacher education. A case study of a research project designed to explore the process of how novice teachers learn to teach elementary general music is used to discuss the interaction of theory and practice. Participants included 43 music education students concurrently enrolled in a teaching practicum, curriculum analysis class, and reflective teaching seminar. Emphasis is given to describing and representing the students' experiences through a constructivist framework; both study design, methods of data collecting and analysis are detailed though this framework. An emergent set of assertions is presented to illustrate students' initial images and beliefs of teaching. A profile of one student is presented to illustrate though interpretation, incidence, transformation, and metaphor a particular process of learning to teach music.