Equipping in-service music teachers to undertake creative music-making activities in Hong Kong secondary schools: Implications for teacher education

Many music teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools have ignored creative music making. In order to encourage creativity and imagination in music education, the Hong Kong Education Department is undertaking an education reform in which creative music making is advocated. However, recent studies reveal that many music teachers do not have relevant and sufficient training in these activities. This paper reports a study of designing and implementing a new teacher education module, which aims to equip in-service music teachers to undertake creative activities in school teaching. Results indicated that the trainees preferred learning more existing teaching packages to learning theories in creativity. Owing to the poor discipline and other contextual constraints, some of the trainees expressed a negative attitude towards creative activities. However, the lack of discipline-based knowledge and composition skills of the trainees was one of the major reasons leading to the negative attitude. These results imply that theory and practice should be closely related when preparing teachers to understand why and how creative projects should be delivered, with a number of teaching strategies derived from the study. The discipline-based knowledge should be more emphasized, which should be well integrated with pedagogical skills in teacher education programmes. Copyright © 2004 International Society for Music Education.