Pre-service music teachers' teacher and musician identities and their associations with professional plans

The purpose of the present study is two-fold. Firstly, it attempts to explore teacher and musician identities of pre-service music teachers; and secondly, to analyze whether the aforementioned identities of pre-service music teachers significantly predict their professional engagement and career development aspirations or not. The research study employed the mixed research method and the consecutive sequence design. While the qualitative dimension of the study was formed through the grounded theory; the quantitative dimension was formed through the predictive correlational design. In the qualitative phase of the study which was carried out in the 2016-2017 academic year; the data were collected from 45 third and fourth grade pre-service music teachers enrolled in the Faculty of Education, Department of Music Education at Marmara University, Gazi University, Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University and Trakya University. On the other hand, in the quantitative phase of the study, the data were collected from 1065 first, second, third and fourth grade pre-service music teachers who were enrolled in Faculty of Education, Department of Music Education of eleven universities of in total. The qualitative phase of the study employed the purposeful sampling method, and the quantitative phase employed the simple random sampling method. The data collection tools of the study consisted of; "Teacher and Musician Identity of Pre-service Music Teachers Scale" developed by the researchers, and "Professional Engagement and Career Development Aspirations Scale" (Watt and Richardson, 2008) and "Career Choice Satisfaction Scale" (Watt and Richardson, 2007) translated into the Turkish language by Eren and Tezel (2010). In light of the findings of the present study; MANCOVA and ANOVA analyses were performed to determine whether the demographic variables have possible effects on the variables of the study in the preliminary analysis or not. In the process of performing a content analysis for the first research question of the study; a correlation analysis and structural equation modeling analysis were also performed for the second research question. In conclusion, the results of the reteach study revealed that; a) in general terms, teacher identities of the pre-service music teachers can be explained by two main themes given as musician identity and teacher identity; b) the categories concerning the these themes can be generalized with a larger sample in a valid and reliable manner, and c) the factors that comprise the musician and music teacher identities are significantly and selectively correlated with pre-service music teachers' professional engagement and career development aspirations with one exception (i.e., leadership aspirations).