Responding to the challenge: giving pre-service classroom teachers a musical language and understanding

Pre-service teacher degree programs are increasingly crowded with subjects covering the wide gamut of knowledge a teacher requires. Ensuring musical knowledge and language for classroom teaching poses a difficult problem for teacher educators. This article examines the challenges of including in the pre-service classroom teaching program a music sequence of learning that successfully imbues an understanding of music. It demonstrates how music education has been carried out at Charles Sturt University on the Albury-Wodonga campus over the last five years. It also discusses the difficulties of retaining successful music learning in the new cross-campus degree, due to external limitations and cross-campus facilities.