Abstract
Robert Frost illuminated, “I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” In a few words, the poet and lifelong teacher summarized the importance of mentoring and its implied but largely unpredictable value. The Society for Music Teacher Education (SMTE) has taken very seriously the “awakening” of graduate students soon to become colleagues and preparers of music educators. One such mentoring effort, the Graduate Research Forum, will illustrate SMTE’s commitment to the next generation of teacher educators.
Since 2005, SMTE has offered a Graduate Student Forum at each biennial Symposium for Music Teacher Education. To be involved in the Graduate Research Forum, graduate students submit research proposals involving teacher preparation. Editorial review board members of the Journal of Music Teacher Education (JMTE) then provide feedback regarding graduate students’ research, their posters, possible publication venues, and general information about research and publishing in our field. Participants receive experienced feedback, have a chance to discuss research involving teacher preparation with their peers, and enjoy a lunch provided by SMTE for the reviewers and student researchers. Graduate Research Forum participants also are invited to present their posters in one of the regular peer-reviewed Research and Best Practice Poster Sessions. Thus, they experience the feedback of JMTE reviewers and also gain the experience of presenting in a traditional research poster forum and interacting with all the researchers in attendance.
The most recent Graduate Research Forum at the 2015 SMTE Symposium attracted 50 graduate students, the largest number to date. Because of the large numbers of participants, I asked former JMTE reviewers and editors to serve as reviewers to supplement the current JMTE review board members so that each participant would get sufficient time with an experienced reviewer. As part of the application process, graduate students submitted abstracts. As JMTE editor, I asked each reviewer to peruse the list of participants and their abstracts and to choose four to five of particular interest. I then assigned posters to each reviewer, honoring their interests but avoiding students with whom they might have had prior contact. At the actual conference, posters were physically grouped so that each reviewer spoke directly with his/her group. This allowed for individual feedback as well as for interactions among the individuals in each small group. The list of reviewers for the 2015 Graduate Research Forum included the following:
Guest reviewers (prior JMTE editors or review board members).
We as a profession are extremely appreciative of the time, effort, expertise, and wisdom of these reviewers. And the participants themselves are grateful as well. Some participants emailed unsolicited comments, but to facilitate further reflection, I contacted all Graduate Student Forum participants after the Symposium for their thoughts about the experience. It is insightful to read the participants’ comments and what differences this experience made to their research and to their role development as future preparers of music educators. Participants remarked on their individual reviewers, on specifics that mattered to their particular study, on comments from other participants, and reported their general impressions of the forum. Participants’ own words appear below: The Graduate Research Forum was my favorite part of the SMTE Symposium weekend. I was fortunate to have Dr. William Bauer as my reviewer. He was attentive to each of the research projects in the group, asking us pertinent questions and challenging us to think deeper about our subjects. I appreciated the opportunity to hear about some other studies in more depth than in a typical poster session. Additionally, I made a connection with one of the colleagues in my research group when we discovered that our lines of research are similar and we may be able to collaborate in the future. (Jacqueline C. Smith, University of Hartford) Dr. Daniel Hellman was assigned to our group, and he led the group in such a way that we were able to ask new questions about our research. His question to me concerning how to connect the pedagogical implications of my work to applications for pedagogues made me reconsider and rearticulate my paper’s abstract in way that makes it much more usable and approachable for those in the field. (Rachel N. Brashier, Eastman) I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your conversation at the graduate poster session on Saturday afternoon. Your comment on my titular use of the word “hospitality” was helpful, and I will consider your comments carefully. Thanks too for coordinating the Graduate Poster Session. That was such a great format: to meet in a small discussion group with a supportive editorial board member. I am grateful for the opportunity to share my work, and am excited to put the feedback and positive energy into this dissertation! Looking forward to staying in contact, and to working alongside you in the profession soon! (Brian M. Sullivan, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) Dr. Suzanne Burton served as my mentor during the graduate research poster session. She gave me specific feedback concerning the validity of the instruments used in both my poster session and for a study I have in progress. Dr. Burton emphasized that attention to validity must be at the forefront of each research project. Without this attention, the study loses much of its meaning. The generous feedback from the mentors during the graduate poster session was one of the highlights of the conference! (Seth Pendergast, University of Utah)
Participants further noted the impact that being part of the regular research poster had on their learning.
I think the most important part of the conference for me was connecting with the other string education professionals who viewed my poster. They expressed pleasure that I had completed my research study, reinforcing the significance of my research. More importantly, they gave me valuable feedback regarding ways I could improve upon the presentation of the salient information. (Laurie Colgrove Williams, Texas Tech University)
Participants also remarked on the welcoming attitude and mentoring that occurred toward doctoral students throughout the conference, putting into writing what many attendees articulated during the conference: As a graduate student, I appreciated the mentoring that occurred throughout the weekend. I felt that all of the experienced researchers at the symposium took every opportunity to mentor us even beyond the Research Forum. In conversations in the hallway, or discussions during the ASPA (Area for Strategic Planning and Action) sessions, or in the poster sessions, they were generous with insights and feedback. (Jacqueline C. Smith, University of Hartford)
It is apparent that the inclusion of graduate students in a special forum and their treatment as equal partners throughout the conference is one of the unique and valuable characteristics of each of the Symposia on Music Teacher Education. Conversations with conference attendees and among executive committee members certainly raised such thoughts, causing me to consider two further questions: (1) What have been the growth patterns of Graduate Research Forum? (2) To what extent have past student participants become full members of the music teacher preparation community?
Growth patterns of the Graduate Research Forums were quite easily accessible. The programs for each of the past six symposia are available online at http://smte.us, including a listing of all Graduate Research Forum participants, their affiliations, and their paper titles. These data allowed me to draw the following conclusions: Growth of the Graduate Research Forum has been explosive, beginning in 2005 with 8 individuals representing 5 institutions, compared with 2015, when there were 50 individuals from 22 institutions. One would be hard-pressed to say whether the growth from 8 to 50 graduate participants was the most important measure, or if the fact that 22 different doctoral-granting institutions were represented in 2015 might be the more important finding. Clearly, the SMTE Symposia have increased in value to those students preparing to be music teacher educators, and their words indicate that the Graduate Research Forum seems to be an important part of that value. The detail that 22 institutions sent doctoral students to this most recent conference means that SMTE is reaching both doctoral students and the faculty members who encourage them to attend and participate. Table 1 displays the growth in the number of participants and their affiliated institutions in all six SMTE Symposia.
Number of Graduate Research Forum Participants, Schools, and Publications
Note. JMTE = Journal of Music Teacher Education.
My second question involved to what extent the Graduate Research Forum participants become productive members of our profession. I asked the productivity question because it seems to me that if SMTE encourages graduate participation, deliberately mentors such students, and welcomes them as working members of Areas for Strategic Planning and Action (ASPAs), then it would be worthwhile to find a measure of the effectiveness of this mentoring. Publication records might be one measure of productivity, although I am fully aware that there may be many other ways to gauge productivity among early-career professionals. Some such measures might include participation in SMTE after graduation, nonpublished presentations, workshops, clinics, or other individually defined scholarly and creative activities, and current positions in higher education or elsewhere. For example, of the 10 participants in 2007, 9 now are teaching in higher education and 1 is teaching at the high school level. The list of publications, however, seemed to me to be the most accessible and comparable measure. To examine publication productivity, I entered each participant’s name as it appeared in the applicable SMTE program into the Music Education Search System (MESS), an online index established by Edward Asmus (former JMTE editor) listing author names and publication titles for 25 music education research and practitioner journals. Details are available at http://208.52.166.203/mess/. The data presented are limited to those individuals publishing in the 25 MESS indexed titles. I recognize that participants could have published in journals not indexed in MESS, their names could have changed, and that no articles that are In Press or in OnlineFirst are included in MESS. Thus I would anticipate that actual publication numbers would be higher than those listed in Table 1. Each participant was searched by name and his/her number of publications noted. Individual publication numbers were totaled for each conference, yielding the Total Publications column in Table 1. Any JMTE publications were also noted per conference year among Graduate Research Forum participants as a measure of their scholarship within teacher preparation. I also included the number of participants who had zero publications for each year. Finally, I included the average number of publications for each year for comparison purposes among years.
Number of publications seemed to vary across years. The most productive year was 2007 with 42 publications, 10 of them published in JMTE, and only a single 2007 participant had no publications. Thus the 2007 cadre appears to be an extremely productive group. Not surprisingly, the publication productivity declined across the two most recent symposia, perhaps indicating how long it takes for a manuscript to be published in our field.
Other questions certainly could be asked, How long does it take before graduate participants take leadership roles in SMTE? Was the 2007 cadre an anomaly of particularly productive people? Do some schools produce more students who successfully publish? Which schools participate in the Graduate Research Forum? For example, the data indicate that five schools were represented in 2005 and four in 2007. Of those nine schools, however, only a single school sent students both years.
I attempted to note which participants now hold offices in SMTE. I am less confident of my accuracy about these data, so I limited my leadership examination to the 2007 participants, recognizing that I could certainly be unaware of some offices and thus might inadvertently omit some positions within an individual ASPA or within a particular state, so, again, my reported results will be low. Of the 2007 Graduate Research Forum participants, 8 of 10 were 2015 SMTE Symposium participants, 3 were ASPA chairs, 1 is a JMTE review board member, and 2 hold positions on the SMTE Executive Board as ASPA coordinator and Communication Chair. In short, I think I can be confident in concluding that the 2007 cadre of doctoral students have gone on to become active and contributing members of SMTE and of music teacher education.
To me, this is the most important conclusion. SMTE deliberately provides structured mentoring for graduate students, a fact that appears to be much appreciated among current prospective teacher educators based on their own words. It is no wonder that the number of doctoral students participating in SMTE symposia continues to grow. It is apparent that SMTE provides significant value for the graduate students who participate. I think I can speak for all of those involved in JMTE and the Graduate Research Forum process when I say that we are excited to be involved in such an important way in the preparation of the next generation of teacher educators.