Cecilia Ferm Thorgersen

Teaching for Learning or Teaching for Documentation? Music Teachers' Perspectives on a Swedish Curriculum Reform.

This study analyses 10 Swedish music teachers’ descriptions of how a new music syllabus and a new credit scale have influenced their practice. In the new curriculum, grading is introduced in year 6 ...

Music teacher educators’ visions of music teacher preparation in Finland, Norway and Sweden

In this study we investigated the visions of 12 music teacher educators who teach pedagogical courses called instrumental pedagogy and classroom music pedagogy in three music academies in Finland, Norway and Sweden. The data were collected through individual, semi-structured qualitative interviews. Drawing on Hammerness’ concept of teachers’ vision we concentrated on the educators’ visions of good music pedagogy teaching, an ideal graduate, and visions of their subject as a whole, as well as how those visions can be extended to denote some characteristics of the teaching traditions at play. The results indicated that visions were personal and not necessarily consistent between educators or across institutions. Rather, they were strongly related to, steered, and limited by established teaching traditions. We suggest that vision might constitute a functional concept in music teacher educators’ reflections on their work and that clear programme visions should be formulated in music teacher education institutions through collective collegial efforts.

Music as Art – Art as Being – Being as Music: A philosophical investigation of how Music Education can embrace the Work of Art based on Heidegger’s thinking

Martin Heidegger claims that a Work of Art contains an intrinsic power to open the space of Being. If a Work of Art can be a musical Work of Art, then music possesses the power to strike us and hence throw us into Being. The chapter communicates an investigation of the philosophical thinking in Heidegger’s book The Origin of the Work of Art and what consequences that thinking could generate for music educational practice. The chapter presents an examination of Heidegger’s thinking in relation to the new Swedish syllabus for the subject music. To structure the philosophical investigation two lines were drawn; one investigating Art as an opener to Being and the other line investigating the inescapable nexus of how the Artist makes the Work of Art simultaneously as the Work of Art makes the Artist. The results show that there is an overrepresentation of phenomena connected to what Heidegger refers to as Earth and an underrepresentation of what he refers to as World. According to Heidegger, the phenomenon of art will not reveal itself unless both Earth and World are present, connected to each other through strife; a state of tension where Being comes forth. Being, in the Heideggerian sense, has the power to change history and hence constitute history on both a collective and an individual level. Although not explicitly stated in the music syllabus, our results suggest that there are possibilities for art as Being to be expressed in the subject of music.

From a Dualistic Toward a Holistic View of Dance Knowledge: A Phenomenological Analysis of Syllabuses in Upper Secondary Schools in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article examines how dance knowledge is seen through syllabuses in Swedish upper secondary schools. A starting point is life-world phenomenology. A phenomenological way of thinking allows that human beings are intersubjective, linked with and within the world, which influences the view of dance knowledge and how research is elaborated. A basic rule and starting point for research within phenomenology is to turn toward the things themselves and to be adherent. Dance knowledge constitutes the phenomenon studied, as revealed in dance syllabus steering documents. Spiegelberg’s philosophical method is used as a base for phenomenological text analysis. The study is limited to syllabuses from two different curricula, labeled by The Swedish National Agency for Education as Lpf94 and Gy11. The analysis results in two images of how the essence of dance knowledge is manifested. Finally, the different constitutions are discussed and related to a life-world phenomenological view of dance knowledge.