American String Teacher

Teaching Strings in Today’s Classroom: A Guide for Group Instruction assists music education students, in-service teachers, and performers to realize their goals of becoming effective string educators. It introduces readers to the school orchestra environment, presents the foundational concepts needed to teach strings, and provides opportunities for the reader to apply this information. The author describes how becoming an effective string teacher requires three things of equal importance: content knowledge, performance skills, and opportunities to apply the content knowledge and performance skills in a teaching situation. In two parts, the text addresses the unique context that is teaching strings, a practice with its own objectives and related teaching strategies. Part I (Foundations of Teaching and Learning String Instruments) first presents an overview of the string teaching environment, encouraging the reader to consider how context impacts teaching, followed by practical discussions of instrument sizing and position, chapters on the development of each hand, and instruction for best practices concerning tone production, articulation, and bowing guidelines. Part II (Understanding Fingerings) provides clear guidance for understanding basic finger patterns, positions, and the creation of logical fingerings. String fingerings are abstract and thus difficult to negotiate without years of playing experience—these chapters (and their corresponding interactive online tutorials) distill the content knowledge required to understand string fingerings in a way that non-string players can understand and use. Teaching Strings in Today’s Classroom contains pedagogical information, performance activities, and an online virtual teaching environment with twelve interactive tutorials, three for each of the four string instruments. ACCOMPANYING VIDEOS CAN BE ACCESSED VIA THE AUTHOR'S WEBSITE: www.teachingstrings.online

This comprehensive K-12 string program curriculum is the first of its kind. A clear and concise scope-and-sequence makes this curriculum easy to use; more than 200 specific learning tasks make this curriculum comprehensive. Based on the outstanding teaching traditions in the field and the contributions of many earlier authors, educators, and researchers, this curriculum contains useful and practical information for string teachers from every level of experience.

The Oxford Handbook of Preservice Music Teacher Education in the United States identifies the critical need for change in Pre-K-12 music education. Collectively, the handbook's 56 contributors argue that music education benefits all students only if educators actively work to broaden diversity in the profession and consistently include diverse learning strategies, experiences, and perspectives in the classroom. In this handbook, contributors encourage music teachers, researchers, policy makers, and music teacher educators to take up that challenge. Throughout the handbook, contributors provide a look at ways music teacher educators prepare teachers to enter the music education profession and offer suggestions for ways in which new teachers can advocate for and adapt to changes in contemporary school settings. Building upon students' available resources, contributors use research-based approaches to identify the ways in which educational methods and practices must transform in order to successfully challenge existing music education boundaries.