Dr Luan Shaw is Director of Postgraduate Studies (Music) at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, UK. As RBC’s first Head of Pedagogy (2011-2018), she led the significant expansion of instrumental music teacher education across the RBC curriculum.  As a clarinettist, Luan maintains a range of performer–practitioner roles that directly inform her work at RBC, and her passion for helping students to launch their portfolio careers and inspire the next generation is reflected in her research. Luan was recognised for her commitment to music education and her championing of instrumental music teacher training in 2023, with a National Teaching Fellowship from Advance HE in the UK.

Luan is interested in the challenges involved in developing the music education workforce in changing times; institutional and industrial perspectives on instrumental teacher education, and the role of alumni in supporting and mentoring the next generation of music educators.

Conservatoires have a responsibility to contribute to the development of the future music education workforce, ensuring their graduates are best equipped to support musical learning in children and young people.  However, teaching is often perceived as a career for 'failed musicians', and it can be difficult to challenge the status quo. Luan's research challenges this long-held notion. Informed by conservatoire academics and employers across England, and students and alumni from her own institution, her doctoral thesis, completed in 2021, explored how undergraduate conservatoire students can develop pedagogical knowledge. It demonstrated that, through specialist modules, professional placements and mentoring, students can develop transferable skills, qualities, awareness, behaviours, values, and a sense of social responsibility to nurture the next generation of musicians, thus building on Shulman's Pedagogical Content Knowledge model by introducing two new constructs (Transferable Content Knowledge/TCK and Values-Based Knowledge/VBK).