A Comment to Rhoda Bernard: Reframing or Oversimplification?

In an earlier issue of "ACT" (Number 2, 2005), Dr. Rhoda Bernard has presented a call for reframing music teacher education. Based on his experience as a leader of a Swedish longitudinal project about music teacher socialization since the late 1980s, the author discusses some problems with her call. In this article, he elucidates Bernard's use of the concepts "musician-teacher identity", "discourse", and her version of the central theoretical concept of "identity". He argues that her use of these concepts only obscures the discussion and that a clearer understanding of these concepts is needed. Her use of the term "discourse" is also misleading and does not point towards or account for the daily informal processes around the music teacher's identity construction that actually occur, as revealed by empirical research. The author concludes that music teacher education must have the mission of helping students develop a professional identity that will succeed in their professional lives--regardless of how the individual identity is constituted--because ever-new identities will arise when they meet new teaching contexts. (Contains 1 note and 1 figure.)