ABSTRACT
Current research shows a strong positive relationship between successful professional learning communities and creating a positive school culture. All of the chapters in this book explore creative learning opportunities on offer to primary school teachers in the development of an effective professional learning community. Individually and socially constructed values and beliefs guide teachers no matter where they work or in what endeavour. In schools, the learning culture and the creative learning community 1 interact to make up the context of the specific work place setting where teachers can focus, engage and develop their practice of teaching creatively. As Wenger puts it:
Education, in its deepest sense and at whatever age it takes place, concerns the opening of identities – exploring new ways of being that lie beyond our current state. Whereas training aims to create an inbound trajectory targeted at competence in a specific practice, education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of the self. It places students on an outbound trajectory toward a broad field of possible identities. Education is not merely formative – it is transformative.
(Wenger, 1998, p. 263) All of the chapters in this book represent thinking about the importance for attention to relationships and the possibilities for transforming primary music teaching (and learning). In reflecting on Wenger’s definition of ‘education’ as where theory enriches practice, throughout this book we see ‘the opening of identities’ resonating well with the realities of children’s experience and questions about everyday life in classrooms, and for teachers’ ideals and aspirations about their own creativity to be released and realised through engagement in meaningful learning communities.