The Social Representations of Music, Musicality, Music Child and General Teachers

*** Background *** Studies on music knowledge of music teachers have been based on different theories and methods : personal construct , professional role identity , social construction, discourse analysis. This paper deals with the concept of music knowledge and our hypothesis is that music knowledge can be investigated as a social and psychological construction as described by the Theory of Social Representations. According to this perspective, music knowledge could have its development in the crossroads between the different Social Representations of music. In a previously paper we discussed the social representations of musical child held by university students studying to become general teachers in primary school. *** Aims *** The aims of this paper is to study the social representations of musical child held by both university students in music education and music teachers in two different countries and continents: Italy and Brasil. *** Method *** An open questionnaire was submitted to the university students at the beginning and end of the course of Music Education in Italy and in Brasil. The same questionnaire was submitted to music teachers.The subjects were asked to complete some sentences (Music is..., Musicality is...) and answer some questions about the musical child, the concept of music education and the professional profile of music teacher. We first classified the answers into different categories. Then the frequency of the words and the multiple correspondence analysis were carried out by means a specific software. The multiple correspondence analysis was made to analyze the co-occurrence of words. *** Results *** We found different concepts of musical child: The Natural Child, The Gifted Child, The Educated Child, The Able Child, The Creative Child, The Enjoying Child. The multiple correspondance analysis show interesting correlation between the concept of musical child and the concepts of music, musicality, music education and teacher competencies. *** Conclusions *** The results analyzed so far show the richness of the vocabulary and of the use of the words, in relationships with both the concepts of music and musicality, and the prototypes of musical child and music teacher. Next step is to analyse by the same method the answers of the Brasilian subjects and to compare the results. The correlations between the concepts of musical child, music, musicality, music education show that the implicit music knowledge could affect music education practices. We believe that by making explicit their own SRs of music, the students will have a better awareness of their own future professional role.