Music Teacher Education Research: Where We Have Been, Where We Are, and Where We Are Going

Killian’s chapter goes on to share that in the very first issue of the journal, there were conflicting views regarding the nature of a journal devoted to teacher education. In the same 1991 JMTE that included the Leonhard essay quoted above, Irma Collins, the first Chair of Society for Music Teacher Education, stated that the JMTE “is not a research journal per se; rather it is an exploration of the Society’s thoughts and feelings about teacher preparation” (Collins, 1991, p. 1). I published my first article in the JMTE 6 years after the start of the journal in 1997 (Conway, 1997). It was a description of an innovative (for the time period!) assessment practice I was using in an undergraduate brass methods course. I would call it a “promising practices” paper in today’s terms. Since that time, I have had the opportunity to see the journal grow from needing to search for invited authors to send something about teacher education to now being considered a key empirical research journal in our field with an acceptance rate of just 35%—meaning that 65% of the papers submitted to the JMTE are not published.