Student teachers’ views of their own musical skills to teach the National Core Curriculum in Finland

Abstract

As in many other countries, Finnish primary school teacher education has reduced substantially the amount of music studies during recent decades. From the perspective of the National Core Curriculum, there is a reason to reflect on teacher education and primary school student teachers’ skills to teach music. The present study investigates 392 student teachers’ musical skills in five different teacher training programmes in Finland. The data, mainly based on students’ self-assessment, was collected through a quantitative questionnaire. The results reveal significant shortcomings of music education in teacher training. For example, many key content areas such as singing or composing, are addressed extraordinarily little. Only 4% of the students fully agreed with the statement that primary school teacher education has given them good musical skills to teach music. It seems obvious that some skills have already been acquired from students’ previous musical activities. The results of the study show that primary school teacher education may be graduating teachers who are at risk of not meeting the National Core Curriculum goals in music.