With the intent of informing music teacher education practices and developing more culturally responsive and relevant teachers, the purpose of this research was to explore pre-service music teachers’ understandings of culture and diversity, and to examine the impact of a short-term cultural immersion field experience on pre-service music teachers’ beliefs, assumptions, and understanding about music teaching and learning with students whose cultural backgrounds differ from their own. Research questions guiding this study were as follows: 1) What are pre-service music teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions about music teaching and learning with students whose cultural backgrounds differ from their own before participating in a short-term cultural immersion field experience? 2) In what ways do pre-service music teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions regarding music teaching and learning with students whose cultural backgrounds differ from their own change during their participation in a short-term cultural immersion field experience? 3) How does the cultural immersion field experience shape their beliefs and understandings of music teaching and learning in educational contexts that differ from their own cultural backgrounds after participating in the experience?This was a case study of pre-service music teachers’ experiences with music teaching and learning in a short-term cultural immersion field experience. The setting purposefully was selected as one that could provide participants with an experience in a setting whose culture would be unfamiliar to them, and serve as a catalyst for transformative learning toward cultural understanding. Dearborn, Michigan is home to the largest concentration of Arab and Muslim Americans in the United States. Given the current political and socio-cultural relevance of misperception and discrimination toward Arab and Muslim Americans, this immersion experience proved especially timely. Nine undergraduate music education students participated in this project, which consisted of three different components. Data were collected from each component. Weekly pre-immersion orientation meetings took place on campus for eight weeks before the cultural immersion field experience. The meetings oriented participants to the immersion field experience setting and provided context for issues of cultural diversity in education. Following the orientation course, participants spent one week in a cultural immersion field experience in Dearborn. They observed and taught in two music classrooms in Dearborn schools and engaged in community activities to immerse themselves in the community culture. Participants lived and spent leisure time together throughout the immersion week. A few weeks after we returned from the cultural immersion field experience, I conducted post-immersion interviews with the group and each individual participant in order to probe how the cultural immersion field experience impacted their perceptions and worldviews about music teaching and learning with students whose cultural backgrounds differed from their own. Participants in this study did not immediately notice cultural difference in the music classroom. By engaging in experiential learning in the music classrooms and by having disorienting experiences (Mezirow, 1991) as cultural outsiders, participants developed a deeper understanding of their own beliefs and assumptions and of the importance of understanding culture in the music classroom. Their experience led to greater understanding of Arab and Muslim students, and they developed a deepened understanding of the impact of culturally responsive teaching in the music classroom.
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