Sidsel Karlsen

Reconceptualising Musical Learning: New Media, Identity and Community in Music Education

Societal and technological progresses have created a multitude of new ways for people to engage with music, and as a result music can nowadays be learned from an ever-expanding variety of sources. In this article, we engage in a theoretical exploration of the underpinning societal forces that have enabled this expansion, as well as its significance for the development of musical identity and knowledge. The exploration proceeds through sociological theories of modernity and theories of sociocultural learning. Examples from a recent ethnographic study of the Finnish online music community Mikseri provide insight into how musical identities can be constructed and maintained in web-based reality, as well as how online music sites may function as communities of practice where the members, through sharing and discussing their own music, develop music-related knowledge. A discussion about the implications of the current media-musical situation for music education practice and research is provided.

BoomTown Music Education and the need for authenticity – informal learning put into practice in Swedish post-compulsory music education

The article reports on a 2-year higher education music programme for young rock musicians in Sweden called BoomTown Music Education. The pedagogical philosophy behind this programmeisdevelopedfromthefindingsoftwoSwedishmusiceducationresearchers,and the programme exemplifies how knowledge about popular musicians’ learning strategies in informal contexts can be utilised when designing post-compulsory music education. The aim of the article is to problematise the BoomTown environment in relation to its informality and authenticity. In addition to a description of the programme, the author’s experiences from visiting this education programme are laid out in order to provide the ground for such a problematisation.

Immigrant Students' Development of Musical Agency--Exploring Democracy in Music Education.

In this article, we argue that the musical schooling of immigrant students could be seen as forming a healthy test for any educational context in terms of how democracy is enacted. We engage in a discussion linking music education, agency, pluralism and democracy. In our theoretical reconstruction of multicultural music education we first make a review on how music education literature has approached the cultural and musical schooling of immigrant students. We then attend to sociological theories to discuss why development of musical agency may be of particular importance to first generation immigrant students and how agency-enhancing music education may be connected to the development of sound democratic practices in the 21st century schooling.

Festivals in the Barents Region: Exploring Festival‐stakeholder Cooperation

Abstract The paper reports from a multiple case study investigating three music festivals located in the Barents region, namely the Festspel i Pite Älvdal (Piteå, Sweden), the Festspillene i Nord‐Norge (Harstad, Norway) and the Jutajaiset Folklorefestivaali (Rovaniemi, Finland). The aim of the reported study was to investigate how these festivals cooperated with actors in their surroundings. Furthermore, the purpose was to explore the study’s data through the perspectives of network and stakeholder theory. The data consisted of field notes from observations of 58 festival events; 10 in‐depth interviews with festival administrators and official representatives of the festivals’ host municipalities; and documentation. The data was analysed using meaning condensation and structuring displays. Through the theory‐related exploration of the study’s data, three themes emerged: first, the festivals cooperated with multiple stakeholders, who assumed multiple roles; second, the festivals and their stakeholders would sometimes enter into a state of symbiosis; and third, the festivals were seen to engage in long‐stretched, “loose” and glocal networks. The three themes appeared as interrelated and could all be understood as strategies, which the festivals employed in order to increase their sustainability. The findings could also be connected to a typology of festivals in the context of institutionalization.

Using musical agency as a lens: Researching music education from the angle of experience:

In this article, the author suggests a route for music education research in which the notion of musical agency is proposed as one possible lens for investigating music education practices from the angle of the learner’s experience. A review is made of how the notion of musical agency is used within music education and related fields. Moreover, the phenomenon is described as found within the sociology of music and even more particularly in the works of Small (1998), DeNora (2000), and Batt-Rawden and DeNora (2005). Next, the different aspects of musical agency as found within these works are categorized and explained in more detail. Finally, this sociologically-inspired understanding of musical agency is visualized as a lens and proposed as a tool for ethnographically-inspired music education research.

Multiple Repertoires of Ways of Being and Acting in Music: Immigrant Students' Musical Agency as an Impetus for Democracy.

The aim of this article is to explore how immigrant students experience and enact musical agency inside and outside the music lessons in three Nordic lower secondary schools. The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnographic study and the data were collected in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo through classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. The 19 interviews made with a total of 30 students are especially focused in this article. The findings show that the student interviewees possessed multiple repertoires of ways of being and acting in music, and also that the forms and aspects of musical agency exercised and emphasised inside and outside music lessons were quite different ones. Furthermore, much of the students’ musical competence was not recognised within the school setting. These findings are discussed with respect to what special needs immigrant students may have in a music education situation, and the students’ multiple repertoires are viewed in relation to their potential for constituting an imperative resource for building of future, democratic educational practices.

Immigrant students and the “homeland music”: Meanings, negotiations and implications

This article builds from a multi-sited ethnographic study on immigrant students’ musical agency, conducted in three lower secondary school classrooms in the capital cities of Finland, Sweden and Norway. The focus of the article is twofold, and concerns what kinds of meanings the participating students ascribed to the music from their own or their parents’ homelands as well as how this music was negotiated within music classrooms and the wider school contexts to which these students belonged. The findings showed that students’ ascribed meanings and performed negotiations were rich and complex, and this is taken as a point of departure when discussing these findings’ potential for informing teachers’ practice in multicultural music classrooms.

Exploring democracy: Nordic music teachers’ approaches to the development of immigrant students’ musical agency

In this article, a multi-sited ethnographic study was taken as a point of departure for exploring how Nordic music teachers, who work in multicultural environments, understand the development of their students’ musical agency. The study was based on theories developed within general sociology and the sociology of music, as well as in previous writings on multicultural music education. The data was collected within three lower secondary school music education practices in the immigrant areas of Helsinki (Finland), Stockholm (Sweden), and Oslo (Norway). The findings show that when the teacher interviewees’ accounts of development of musical agency are understood and analyzed in context, the main themes comprise aspects such as shaping identity, regulating the self, expanding social understanding, creating cohesion, and affirming competence. These themes are considered in relation to theories of pluralism and democracy.

Teaching as Improvisational Experience: Student Music Teachers' Reflections on Learning during an Intercultural Project.

This qualitative instrumental case study explores Finnish student music teachers’ experiences of teaching and learning as participants in an intercultural project in Cambodia. The Multicultural Music University project aimed at increasing master’s level music education students’ intercultural competencies by providing experiences of teaching and being taught abroad in traditional music and dance programs run by two Cambodian NGOs. The article suggests that beside the importance of learning new music and dance traditions, the student music teachers regarded the learning experiences gained through peer-teaching in an unfamiliar context as significant, as these experiences provoked them to step out from their pedagogical comfort zones and to engage in a deep reflection on the nature of teaching and the purpose of music education. Rather than perceiving their teaching as individual achievements the student teachers’ reflections proceeded towards an increasing emphasis put on the quality of joint interaction and the benefits gained from having to spontaneously create the structure of lessons in fast-changing situations. Based on the analysis of individual and focus group interviews and other research data, we discuss the concept of teaching as improvisation and its implications for teacher education.

The Academisation of Popular Music in Higher Music Education: The Case of Norway.

ABSTRACT With a hundred years (1912–2012) of Norwegian master’s and doctoral theses written within the field of music as a backdrop, this article reports from an extensive study of the academisation of popular music in higher music education and research in Norway. Theoretically, the study builds on the sociology of culture and education in the tradition of Bourdieu and some of his successors, and its methodological design is that of a comprehensive survey of the entire corpus of academic theses produced within the Norwegian music field. On this basis, the authors examine what forms of popular music have been included and excluded respectively, how this aesthetic and cultural expansion has found its legitimate scholarly expression, and which structural forces seem to govern the processes of academisation of popular music in the Norwegian context. The results show that popular music to a large extent has been successfully academised, but also that this process has led to some limitations of academic openness as well as the emergence of new power hierarchies.