Proceedings of the 5th Triennial ESCOM Conference 8-13 September 2003, Hanover University of Music and Drama, Germany 178 ISBN 3-931852-67-9 ISSN 1617-6847 R. Kopiez, A. C. Lehmann, I. Wolther & C. Wolf (Eds.) ABSTRACT This paper describes some preliminary indings from the Teacher Identities in Music Education (TIME) project, which is investigating how the attitudes and identities of intending secondary school music teachers develop during the transition from music student or musician through postgraduate teacher education and into their irst teaching post. It is also exploring how students on undergraduate teacher education courses might differ from those in university music departments and specialist music colleges in their attitudes toward, and preparedness for, teaching secondary school music as a career. Some preliminary indings are that students from all of these different kinds of institution rate their teaching self-eficacy as higher than their musical self-eficacy: and that although secondary postgraduate certiicate in secondary education students in music have traditional ‘classical’ qualiications, they regard ‘teaching skills’ such as communication and time management as being just as important as speciic musical skills. They also value music education for its social and extra-musical/personal beneits more than as a foundation for a professional musical career. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Musical identities and musical contexts The concept of ‘musical identities’ has recently been introduced and elaborated by MacDonald, Hargreaves and Miell (2002), and forms the theoretical background to this research. Hargreaves et al. (2002) make the distinction between ‘music in identities’, which refers to the ways in which people use music to express aspects of personal identity such as gender identity, national identity and youth identity: and ‘identities in music’, which refers to the ways in which individuals also construct identities within music, for instance, as a performer, teacher, listener or critic. The importance of ‘identities in music’ vary considerably between different individuals: music is salient to a greater or a lesser extent in different people’s lives, so that the ‘musical self- concept’ is far more a part of a professional musician’s general self-concept, for example, than in that of a non-musician. Our interest here lies in the role of music educational institutions in the development of musical identities. The extent to which schoolchildren see themselves as ‘musicians’ has been found to depend strongly on situational and institutional factors such as whether or not they take instrumental lessons (Lamont, 2002), and these kind of self-perceptions can be just as important in their subsequent motivation to develop musical studies as their actual abilities (see O’Neill, 2002). In England at least, there is a widespread view, and some evidence, of problems with school music, particularly at secondary level. A good deal of lower secondary school music is seen as unsuccessful, unimaginatively taught, and out of touch with pupils’ interests, and this may contrast with music in the primary school. The view that there exists a ‘problem of secondary school music’ was given considerable impetus by a large-scale project carried out for the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and the Arts Council of England (Harland et al., 2000). This project drew on four different sources of qualitative and quantitative evidence about art, drama and music in secondary schools, including ive school case studies, some of NFER’s existing self-evaluation data from 152 schools, a survey of 2269 Year 11 pupils, and interviews with employers on the perceived values of the arts, although the data on music which is presented in the main report draws largely on quotations from the case studies. The report concludes that music is ‘the most problematic and vulnerable art form’ at GCSE (General Certiicate of Secondary Education) level, and that the vast majority of GCSE pupils display an absence of ‘enjoyment, relevance, skill development, creativity and expressive dimensions’ in music (Harland et al., 2000: 568). This research brings together these two issues of identity and teaching quality by attempting to explain the putative problem of secondary school music in terms of the congruence between the musical identities of pupils and teachers, and focusses in particular on the latter. For pupils, two critical determinants of musical identity are likely to be contexts and genres . Many are likely to make a strong distinction between ‘school music’ and ‘out of school music’, and these are likely to be bound up with the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ styles, even though the latter can now form an integral part of ‘school music’. For music teachers, these issues of context and genre are also likely to be important in the construction of their own identities as their careers develop. Many will have been educated within the Western classical tradition, in which music-making is seen as the domain of the professional performing musician. Might this give rise to conlicting identities, namely between ‘performing musician’ and ‘classroom music teacher’? The Teacher Identities in Music Education (TIME) project is approaching this question by investigating how the attitudes and identities of intending secondary school music teachers develop during the transition from music student or musician through postgraduate teacher education and into their irst teaching post. It is also exploring how students on undergraduate teacher education courses might differ from those in university music departments and specialist music colleges in their attitudes toward, and preparedness for, teaching secondary school music as a career. Data collection on the TIME project is currently under way, and this paper reports an interim view of the progress so far. THE IDENTITIES OF MUSIC TEACHERS David J. Hargreaves 1 , Graham Welch 2 , Ross Purves 1 , Nigel Marshall 1 1 Centre for International Research in Music Education, University of Surrey Roehampton, UK 2 Institute of Education, University of London, UK