About the MTIIS
The Music Teachers In International Schools (MTIIS) community aims to create solidarity and connectivity amongst music educators working in international schools around the globe. The community provides three main things:
- The podcast.
- A Facebook group.
- Curated and meaningful professional learning suited to the international school context.
We hope you can make new connections and find ways to develop your practice through this community. Enjoy!
Our Community Principles
MTIIS is a future-focused, community oriented organisation. We believe that international schools are unique sites for testing new innovations in music education. Our 9 community principles reflect this.
International school music teachers understand that:
- Music-making is deeply connected to community-building, within both the school and surrounding communities. We actively promote the participatory nature of music.
- We can leverage our role as the artistic face of the school (in collaboration with the other artforms) to reflect the historical place of the arts as the expressive heart of community.
- We should actively pursue connections with others, both locally and globally, to create bridges within a global music education community. This builds collegiality and professional learning, and reduces the impacts of geographic and curricular isolation.
- There are positive and negative forces of globalisation. We should explore the way that globalisation can unify people but can also lead to the homogenisation of identities. We respond by actively celebrating and upholding the richness of historical context and regional uniqueness of different peoples and their music.
- We can leverage the power of systemic freedom and fiscal advantages of privatised schooling consciously to adopt a reflexive & internationally-minded approach to music provision.
- We can be respectful of, but unrestrained by, Eurocentric music-making conventions. To this end, non-European music education pedagogies should be explored and pursued through professional learning and connections to culture bearers.
- Formal high-stakes examinations in music have a place for some students, but do not need to be the core focus of an international school music department.
- We can resist the forces of human capital theory, which suggests that music education is only valued according to its contribution to the economy or employment potential. Instead, music educators focus on the inherent value of music as an expressive and community-building force in society.
- We should be ready to embrace the complete realm of music-making technologies, both old and new. Musical Instruments are both digital and analogue entities.
What is an international school?
It is almost impossible to define what an international school is. Through an in-depth examination of current literature, we tend to align with Machin & Whitehead's (2020) definition in their book International Schooling: The Teachers' Guide.
"An ‘international school’ is one which provides a private, fee-paying education, undertaken in schools declaring themselves ‘international’ (whether implicitly or explicitly, in their name or mission), attended by full-time students, who study a curriculum (at least in some substantive part) that is not the national curriculum of the country in which the school is geographically located."
