Music Teacher Identity: Reflecting on past experiences
Why did I decide to pursue a career in teaching? How do I want students to view me as a
teacher? How have experiences from my interactions with teachers as a student impacted my
teaching identity? These are all questions that unfortunately I was not directly guided to explore
during my teacher education program. Dolloff’s (1999) study on Imagining Ourselves as
Teachers: the development of teacher identity in music teacher education has opened my eyes to
the importance of reflecting how my experiences have shaped my teaching identity.
I decided to pursue studies in STEM education because I want more girls and women,
especially racialized women, to enter these fields. I reflected on my experience as a student and
the wonderful mathematics teachers I had, who even though I could not directly relate to as they
were white males, they successfully instilled in me a passion for the subject which led me to pursue
a career in engineering and now to become a certified mathematics and STEM teacher. As stated
by Dolloff (1999) I unconsciously internalized the recollection of teachers who positively
impacted me and adopted those aspects in my own teacher identity.
In reflecting specific about my school music education, my experience with my middle
school music teacher was all but encouraging. I greatly relate to Ursula who in Dolloff’s (2019)
study describes their music teacher as “wonderful, but also terrifying” (p. 191). Wonderful because
my band teacher was a musical genius and the feedback we received from parents and staff after
band concerts was truly inspiring. However, the behind-the-scenes process of band class made me
very anxious, and I did not enjoy it. I had recently migrated from Colombia and English and the
North American musical notation was something I struggled with. My music teacher never seemed
to care or even attempt to get to know me to help me overcome these barriers. Instead, during
class, he always praised students who were excellent, and who coincidentally mostly took private
instrument classes outside of school. Meanwhile, I was afraid when asked to play solo in class and
was ashamed by the disheartening feedback received from my teacher. I had little music support
outside of home as my parents knew very little about music and were recent immigrants and could
not afford to enroll me in private music lessons. Lastly, I lost interest in band because it was one-
hundred-percent teacher centered, with the teacher being the authority and dictating what boring
“white” classical songs we were to learn next. Furthermore, he never showed any concern on how
his constant negative feedback impacted me and he did not seem to care that I was thinking of
dropping out of band in grade 8, which I sadly did and later came to regret.
I do have an innate passion for music, and I continued to practice flute and guitar and I took
private lesson again as an adult. As a music teacher, I want to create a safe space where students
can be creative, with student-centered curricula that will engage students and encourage them to
develop a life-long relationship with music. I really enjoyed reading Bell’s (2015) article on
decolonizing music education through Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). I would like to
implement more of this accessible software like BandLab in my music teaching. However, I need
to be mindful that DAW is not the most culturally relevant software, as women are
underrepresented in DAW, and the main developers and the target audience are white males. I look
forward to learning more about how I can implement DAW to include music from other cultures
and encourage girls to pursue this activity through music projects of their interest.
References
Dolloff, Lori-Anne. (1999). Imagining Ourselves as Teachers: the development of teacher
identity in music teacher education. Music Education Research, 1(2), 191-208.
https://doi.org/ 10.1080/1461380990010206.
Bell, Adam. (2015). DAW democracy? The dearth of diversity in ‘Playing the Studio’. Journal
of Music, Technology and Education. 8. Retrieved February 19, 2022, from
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284355503_DAW_democracy_The_dearth_of_
diversity_in_'Playing_the_Studio'
