Preparation of pre-service music and dance teachers in colleges of education, Ghana

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine preparation of pre-service music and dance teachers in Colleges of education, Ghana. The study examined how effective the preservice teacher preparation was in Colleges of Education in some selected Colleges of Education in Ashanti Region. The study examined the adequacy of the course content, the areas of the music and dance Education curriculum that need much emphasis and what are overstretched, the instructional materials and pedagogical strategies that are appropriate for effective teaching and learning of music and dance in the Colleges of Education, find out the special competencies student-teachers of music and dance need for their preparation and to explore interventions to improve music and dance programme in Colleges of Education. The study was guided by the Constructivism theory by Jerome Bruner in 1966 (Olorode and Jimoh, 2016). The researcher used qualitative paradigm in conjunction with positivism point of view. The instruments used for the study were questionnaires, observation and document search. Purposive sampling technique was used to select fifty-two pre-service teachers while stratified sampling technique was used to select seven tutors and five principals for the study. The research tools were field notebook, Infinix mobile phone, digital camera, video footage and voice recorder. The study revealed some of the following findings; mandatory music content in the second semester of the first year (PRA 121) and the principles and methods of teaching the performing arts 1 (PRA 221) and (PRA 211) as elective for second year first and second semesters, the reduction of the workload on the pre-service teachers’ (from a total of 89 hours to 65 hours) in the 2014 DBE, reduction of the duration of teaching practice by one semester, unavailability of some instructional materials and facilities, not visiting of places relevant to music and dance, inappropriate use of assessment strategy for teaching and learning and inadequate melodic and harmony compositional technique. The study concluded that there was inadequate content knowledge, pedagogy knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in the pre-service music teacher preparation. It was recommended that the methodology aspect of the course should be made core but not optional in the second year. There should be formidable content knowledge with respect to the totality of what is to be taught to and learnt by students, the one credit hour should be increased to two credit hours to enable the tutors positioning themselves very well for both theory and practical work. There should be availability of instructional resources and use in the classroom, tutors should provide links with the contemporary classroom environment in various ways that do not require recent personal teaching experience, tutors should use variety of assessment techniques to determine understanding. Again, it was recommended that composition lessons should take as its the traditional view that one learns to compose by imitation.