Müzik Öğretmeni Yetiştiren Kurumlardaki Piyano Öğretim Programları Üzerine bir Araştırma

When we consider human life to cover a period of sixty to seventy years, a person lives through several phases as a biopsychic being. Resulting with the shaping of behaviour patterns, a human being is subject to various effects of the physical conditions, the family structure, the way he has been raised, and of the cultural and social environments within these phases which could be listed as babyhood, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senectitude. These behaviour patterns determine his personality, the social environment he belongs to, his cultural perception, and his position in life. It could be argued that the changes in a person‘s life permanently shape his behaviour patterns. However, they are not entirely volitional for an individual since they are originated in the physical, social, and cultural environs where the individual‘s life begins in. Thus, because of the fact that the parents are responsible from the period until when the individual make his own decisions, the changes in behaviour patterns are only volitional after then. In this process an individual aspires to gain volitional behaviours of both his family and his own, which would maintain the social and cultural environments he achieved and would provide him especially with a statute that determines his position in his career. The main efficient behind all of these behaviour patterns and changes in them from the beginning of life until the end is education. Education has been defined in different ways within different philosophical systems and psychological approaches. Most of these definitions have attributed education with a purpose. Idealists have taken education as all activities attaining God, while Realists as raising individuals due to the principal values of the society, Marxists as involving in production with minimum variance, Pragmatists as a process of creating volitional behaviour changes in each person via experiences, Existentialists as the process of taking human beings to their boundaries. The advance in sciences but particularly in genetic engineering makes it available to create and code learning as biochemical reactions as a result of physical stimulations in human brain. The instrument education within professional music education is a realm where the individual could find the chance especially to present his all professional abilities. That is why programming instrument education process is equally important as raising qualified individuals. In order to achieve the objectives in instrument teaching programs, the elements and the contents of the program should be universal and should include worldwide-recognized teaching methods and techniques. The piano teaching is a must course within the scope of instrument teaching in any education institution. Particularly, since 2006-2007 academic year, the piano education period in Music Education Departments of Fine Arts Education in Faculties of Education has been extended from six semesters to eight. Consequently, piano education has been embedded into a fouryear process. This reveals how important piano education is in music teacher training institutions, and correspondingly how important it is to improve piano playing abilities of music teachers. In order to achieve their goals, it is of great importance for music teacher training institutions to carry on piano courses, which are directly related to all of the other professional courses,according to a well planned and programmed curriculum in a disciplinary way. For this reason, the contents and all elements of piano teaching programs have to be prepared with a mentality that follows worldwide recognized piano teaching techniques and universal methods. Unfortunately, when we have a look particularly on music teacher training institutions, we observe that the education programs cannot go beyond course definitions. It requires a considerably hard and a long process to learn an instrument with its universal techniques. Performing an instrument at the universal artistic levels cannot be expected to come out of an education that is as short as six semesters after the age of eighteen. That is why training a performing artist and training a music teacher are held with quite different programs. The educators taking part in any of these programs have obviously been trained according to different programs, and have been formed up with different qualifications. Thus, it is essential to discuss the piano education again with respect to these differences and to formulate programs serving the purposes. It is apparent that we are training different music teacher candidates with different goals and purposes in different schools. Thus, when the need for standardization is considered too, the necessity of a piano teaching program including all elements becomes evident. In this research, the state of current teaching methodology for piano teaching in Music Education Departments of Fine Arts Education in Faculties of Education is assessed. This study, which is based on the necessity to approach the education programs as planned processes as well as on the indispensability of applying contemporary teaching methodologies, is thus of vital importance for revealing the current state. As is known, the curriculums of teacher training institutions are executed within a common curriculum that has been prepared by the Council of Higher Education in Turkey. Yet, this common curriculum is not capable of going beyond presenting course lists and defining the contents of those courses. However, lacking a specific undergraduate course curriculum (and not being able to define such a curriculum) while at the same time offering courses such as ―curriculum preparation‖, ―curriculum evaluation‖ and ―curriculum analysis‖ at the graduate education levels of the same teacher training programs is noteworthy. This situation has been attempted to fix at some of the Faculties of Education in Turkey in order to set an internal order, and the deficiencies of the curriculums has been attempted to overcome through some internal procedures. In this manner, 26 piano teachers from different institutions with a variety of experience were given a structured interview to survey the state of current piano teaching methodology. After the pre-research interviews, it was discovered that most teachers were not implementing any structured teaching program or methodology. Those following a program failed to include the teaching elements in their program‘s curriculum. This revealed that they had been using a descriptive program.