{"id":34013,"date":"2023-05-17T10:37:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T16:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/suzukiassociation.org\/?post_type=journalarticle&p=34013"},"modified":"2024-09-12T09:35:00","modified_gmt":"2024-09-12T15:35:00","slug":"suzuki-pedagogy-in-music-teacher-education","status":"publish","type":"journalarticle","link":"https:\/\/suzukiassociation.org\/fr\/journalarticle\/suzuki-pedagogy-in-music-teacher-education\/","title":{"rendered":"La p\u00e9dagogie Suzuki dans la formation des professeurs de musique"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My career, indeed, my musical life, has taken a number of turns that I didn\u2019t expect when I set out for music school. I\u2019ve written before in the ASJ about how as a young orchestra teacher I thought I had it all figured out and how learning Suzuki pedagogy in graduate school changed both my teaching and my disposition towards students for the better (Saccardi, 2022). Recently, I faced another change in my musical life that I hadn\u2019t anticipated: not teaching music as often. In my role as a faculty member at the Louisiana State University School of Music, I now function in part as what many in higher education call a Music Teacher Educator. In this capacity, I am responsible for training undergraduate music education majors in the methods and elements of effective teaching. This role allows me numerous opportunities to talk about music as I help prepare the next generation of music teachers, but less in the way of actually doing music as I once did as a full-time classroom orchestra teacher and studio bass teacher. As I settled into this role, I\u2019ve thought about how Dr. Suzuki\u2019s pedagogy and principles could be applied to music teacher education and implemented in my university methods courses. Despite not engaging with music making as often as I once did, I can model Suzuki principles for my students and encourage them to adopt those same principles in their own classrooms. What follows next are a few of the ways I\u2019ve translated Dr. Suzuki\u2019s principles to music teacher education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beautiful Heart, Beautiful Tone<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps one of Dr. Suzuki\u2019s most enduring principles is that of bringing up children as \u201cnoble human beings\u201d (Suzuki, 1969). This was a priority above all others to him, even more than developing musical excellence. In his mind, the development of musical skill was a means towards cultivating one\u2019s enduring humanity. While my students are already adults when they arrive at the university, the concept of Beautiful Heart, Beautiful Tone guides both my classroom work with them and the identity I encourage them to cultivate as young teachers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I get to work with pre-service teachers throughout their time at the university. I first interact with them in my Introduction to Music Education course, where the goals are to provide students with their first guided teaching experiences, learn the elements of effective teaching, begin to shift their identities from music student to music teacher, and prompt their thinking towards a personal philosophy of music education. The last goal often results in multiple days of rich discussion about what students believe and why they are in music school. Many of my students chose to become music educators because of a profound connection they have felt with music, but what we often uncover after several class discussions is that what truly led them to their degree program was the sense that music was a place where they felt they could belong, a place where they fit in. For many, music class was the place where they felt the most seen as a human being and could respond to that care and compassion musically. This leads me to share with them one of the guiding principles of my own philosophy: I teach people and the subject is music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We often identify ourselves as a violin teacher, an orchestra teacher, or even as a Suzuki teacher, but how many of us identify as someone who teaches people? The shift I try to prompt orients my students\u2019 thinking in a way that they will be working with living, breathing humans, not empty vessels to be filled up with their musical knowledge. These young teachers are encouraged to address the humanity of their future students as highest priority, only then to be followed by their students\u2019 musical development. Beautiful tone follows beautiful heart. We have these discussions relatively early in the degree program because it is important to me that they carry this disposition throughout their methods courses, field experiences, and into their student teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Talent Education<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are aspects of Talent Education that may seem too late to address when a student is college aged. For example, my students are already experienced musicians, not very young beginners. They are typically proficient readers, who have to meet a certain threshold of musicianship to gain admission to the School of Music. Parents are not typically a part of the learning process in college; students are figuring out frequently how to be adults at the same time they are learning how to teach. But there are other aspects of Talent Education that transcend age or experience and can apply to any setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the middle years of their degree program, music education students typically take methods courses organized around different instrument families. I teach the course in String Methods, which provides a semester-long overview of the technical and pedagogical aspects of teaching stringed instruments to kids. Rather than split the course into several units where all the students learn every instrument in a clinical, sequential order, I\u2019ve chosen to structure the course much like I used to teach my beginning orchestra students. The only difference is that at the end of every lesson, we debrief and discuss what and how I approached that lesson, which almost always includes discussing salient aspects of Talent Education. Here are some points regarding Talent Education pulled directly from the SAA website and how they\u2019re applied in our methods courses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n