From Coursework to Classroom: Preservice Music Teachers’ Application of Equity-Centered Classroom Management in Practicum Settings

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Curricular Perspectives in Music Teacher Education

Abstract

This study follows three preservice music teachers (PMTs) from a Summer 2025 Classroom Ecology for Music Educators (CEfME) course into their Fall 2025 practicum placements to explore how they perceived and experienced implementing the course’s core ideologies in their teaching. The CEfME course was grounded in race-conscious, equity-centered, trauma-informed, and critically caring practices—frameworks that researchers have found PMTs often support in theory but feel underprepared to enact in practice. Data sources included weekly reflection journals, in-class assignments, and individual interviews, which illuminated both the successes and challenges these students encountered while applying justice-oriented approaches in supervised classroom settings. Findings highlight tensions in translating theory to practice and offer implications for course design, fieldwork structures, and equity-centered music teacher preparation.

Author

• Daniel Taylor, Vanderbilt University