Kristen Pellegrino, recipient of the 2024 Christopher Kendall Award from the SMTD Alumni Board, presents a guest lecture with support from the Department of Music Education.

Many researchers have found connections between (a) developing a strong teacher identity; (b) building connections among themselves, their subject, and their students; and (c) positively affecting student learning and teacher satisfaction/ resilience. I will briefly share how I became interested in studying music teacher identity and my process of reframing how to study it. Then, I will spend most of the session sharing what I have learned about college music education majors’ music teacher identity development, and public-school string teachers’ and music teachers’ experiences, beliefs, teaching practices, and identities.

KRISTEN PELLEGRINO, Professor of Music Education at the University of Texas at San Antonio and Past-President of American String Teachers Association, has 40 scholarly publications. In addition to international and national research journal articles and book chapters, Kristen was co-editor of two Oxford University Press books (2019, 2023). She is currently co-authoring a third book, Conway Publications’ Journeys of Becoming and Being Music Teachers (forthcoming, 2025). Pellegrino’s degrees are from the University of Michigan (Ph.D. in music education; M.M. in violin/chamber music performance) and the Eastman School of Music (B.M. in music education; B.M. in violin performance).