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Where’s the body? Reconsidering the concept of pedagogical content knowledge through research in music education with Dutch specialist preschool music teachers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2020

Melissa Bremmer
Melissa Bremmer*
Affiliation:
Kattenburgerstraat 5, 1018 JA Amsterdam, The Netherlands
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article reports an investigation into the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of Dutch specialist preschool music teachers with regard to teaching and learning rhythm skills from an embodied cognition perspective. An embodied cognition perspective stresses the intimate relationship between body, mind and environment. Through stimulated recall interviews, video analysis tasks, notebooks and semi-structured interviews, the PCK of six music teachers was explored. Regarding the content, a new form of bodily based PCK was found in the data: instructional gestures, representational gestures and guiding gestures that facilitate the learning of rhythm skills of preschoolers. Regarding its nature, this study demonstrated that the music teacher’s PCK presents itself as a multimodal form of knowing, distributed over language, sound, gestures, body positioning and physical actions. This study raises the question whether the body is marginalised in current conceptualisations of PCK.

Keywords

pedagogical content knowledgeembodied cognitionspecialist music teacherpreschoolers’ rhythm skills
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Music Education , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 119 - 130
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2020

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