Thorolf Krüger:

The epistemology of music teaching

The article accounts for a study of how two music teachers construct music teaching. The study is an epistemological one the way it focuses upon knowledge and upon premises of knowledge in the everyday teaching. In this study, what the music teacher does when teaching music, is seen as a cultural practice and as a process of construction. It is also seen as a weaving together of different discourses that generate and fashion certain types of didactic strategies and constitute a space within which certain experiences can be made while others cannot. The empirical part of the study was organised as two case studies of music teachers at work. The focus was upon the commonplace practices of their everyday teaching and upon the structure of the verbal language when they reflected upon their everyday experiences. The study showed that the discourses formed a complex web that structured didactic issues and choices and gave shape to the curricular practice of the teachers in significant ways. They made some choices and actions seem normal, reasonable, and legitimate while others were not. Finally, the results of the study are extended into a more general discussion that makes problematic traditional ways of dealing with issues of knowledge