Addressing the challenges of teaching music by generalist primary school teachers

Many Primary school teachers believe that the teaching of music to children is outside their available expertise. Although Primary teachers enjoy music, they often express a sense that music is a ‘specialist’ subject that requires some kind of advanced competence on a musical instrument. Underlying this perception is (i) a lack of confidence in their own musicianship, often linked to the mistaken belief that innate human musicality is unevenly distributed in the general population, and (ii) a lack of knowledge of how to bring music into their everyday teaching. In order to address these concerns, we initiated a specially designed cross-curricular course that sought to link music to other areas of the curriculum where teachers were required to demonstrate everyday expertise, such as in the promotion of children’s language and mathematical development. The article reports the integrated research-based design of the course and the subsequent experiences of student teachers using an action-research model that linked university-based sessions with work in school.