The preparation of the pre-service music and dance teachers in colleges of education- Ghana

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the preparation of the pre-service Music and dance teachers in Colleges of education: Ghana. The study examined how effective the pre-service 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 learning and teaching of Music and Dance in the Colleges of Education, find out the special competencies student-teachers of Music and Dance lack in their preparation, and to explore interventions that can be adopted to improve Music and Dance programme in Colleges of Education. The Theoretical Framework has been conferred from the Ghana National Teacher Education Curriculum Framework (MoE-NCTE, 2017) and National Teachers Standards (GES, 2016). The researcher used mixed-methods approach and implemented the descriptive survey strategy. The instruments used were questionnaires, observation and document analysis. Purposive sampling technique was used to select sixty-four participants (fifty-two pre-service teachers, seven tutors, and five principals) in the Colleges. 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 89hours to 65hours) 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 learning and teaching 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. The study recommends 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 materials and facilities 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, the study recommends that composition lessons should take as its the traditional view that one learns to compose by imitation.