Monica Lindgren

The conditions for establishment of an ideological dilemma: antagonistic discourses and over-determined identity in school music teaching

This article presents an analysis of video documentation of music teaching in Swedish schools. The article is based on a larger research project, funded by The Swedish Research Council, the purpose of which has been to study how market aesthetics and students’ everyday culture are applied to the teaching of music. The introduction presents a background for the studys focus on music teaching in relation to issues of student influence. Next, the theoretical and methodological starting points are presented. With discourse psychological microanalysis as a point of departure, the ideological dilemma that has emerged in the analysis of the videos is then identified and discussed. In addition, the different types of subject positions contained in the studied discursive practice are problematized. The article concludes with a discussion of a number of factors that contribute to the establishment of ideological dilemmas in school practitioners of music education.

Struggling for integration: universalist and separatist discourses within El Sistema Sweden

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the El Sistema programme, which started up in Sweden in 2010 with the objective to deal with segregation problems typical for Swedish urban areas. The purpose of the article is to examine how promoting integration through music and music education is constructed within El Sistema as a way to help children growing up in multi-ethnic suburbs participate in Swedish society. The empirical material used derives from two different ethnographic research studies conducted in Gothenburg and Malmö. The results show that integration is constructed through two antagonistic discourses competing for hegemony. In the first, the idea of integration is based on a rhetoric of similarities between people playing music together, a rhetoric drawing on the modernist idea of humans as universal and alike. In the second, integration is articulated through a rhetoric of differences related to cultural affiliation.

Crossing the Boundary from Music outside to inside of School: Contemporary Pedagogical Challenges.

Music education in formal settings has the last decades been characterised by informal methods borrowed from outside school. In this study we analyse situations in Swedish secondary school where pupils’ experience of music outside school becomes visible in music class. Pedagogical challenges in these situations are identified that concern how to (i) coordinate perspectives on music in classrooms when arenas for learning music is increasing in number, (ii) make space for new musical movements in school, and (iii) consider the situated nature of learning that complicates the transfer from musical experiences outside to inside school.

Navigating between an emic and an etic approach in ethnographic research. Crucial aspects and strategies when communicating critical results to participants

ABSTRACT There is a fundamental tension in ethnographic research between trying to understand participants from within their own perspective and viewing them with greater distance. With this in mind, the aim of this article is to describe how a reflexive communication model was developed during the study of El Sistema Gothenburg, and to discuss aspects and strategies that are crucial when navigating between an emic and an etic approach. It is argued that by reflexive communication, researchers can make their results useful for participants and that reflecting upon the relationship is even more important when communicating critique. With the help of this model, communication of critical results was facilitated by the establishment of an integrative approach that combined the insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives and was based on the formation of a strong relationship between the researchers and the participants, as well as by the participants’ own cultivation of theoretical understanding.