Care as technology for exclusion

In this article, we explore and problematise admission tests to specialist music teacher education in Sweden from a governing perspective, where higher music education is considered a discursive practice. It illustrates how power operates in legitimating the tests. The study uses stimulated recall in jury members’ talk about assessing applicants for music teacher education programmes, and uses Foucault’s concept of governmentality to reveal entrance tests as something regarded as generally good for all. This operating discourse is built on governmental rationality and processes that make it possible to reach conclusions about the applicants’ personalities and prospects for learning and developing in the future. Through care as technology of power, failing applicants are excluded from becoming music teachers and at the same time they are rescued from struggling in the future. The results are discussed in relation to issues of democratic music education, ethics and requirements for widened access to higher music education.

Reaching to Transgress: A Critical Self-study of a Teacher Education Program

Teaching to transgress, according to bell hooks, entails educators moving beyond an assembly-line approach to embrace integration of the mind, body, and spirit, and engaging in ways that honor the uniqueness of all students. The purpose of this study was to evaluate our music teacher education program in order to critically analyze how our practices may or may not transgress. In keeping with principles of S-STEP (Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices), we share the provocation for the study and its multiple overlapping stages. We present themes from the S-STEP process resulting from the data, and then reconsider those data using scholarly literature. Findings include the intellectual and spiritual growth of students and educators, and the challenges inherent in teaching to transgress within an online environment.

Visions for intercultural music teacher education in complex societies

This article presents a synthesis of findings from a large-scale research project, the Global Visions Through Mobilizing Networks—Co-developing Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Finland, Israel and Nepal ( https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/globalvisions/home ), and conveys its theoretical and practical explorations and insights. By envisioning 21st-century music teacher education from the perspective of interculturality and through transnational collaboration, Global Visions has engaged with international societal changes and struggles related to the rising tides of xenophobia, populism, and social disharmony, by focusing on what happens at the boundaries, in dialogue, and in conflict when difference is encountered, experienced, and reflected upon. While the dominant culturalist view presents music as neutral and diversity as tied mainly to ethnicity, Global Visions has recognized, analyzed, exemplified, and increased understanding of the complex politics of diversity. Resulting in envisioned music teacher education programs as innovative game changers, the project has enhanced professional reflexivity through considering the responsibility and moral aspects of music teacher education. Six main focus areas of the project are presented with recommendations for future research and practice in music teacher education: (a) research education and research as intervention; (b) reflexivity and professional learning in intercultural encounters; (c) the capacity to aspire in music teacher education; (d) the development of intersectional praxis; (e) intercultural music education as a political engagement; and (f) transcultural professional development and international professionalization.

Values, Agency, and Identity in a Music Teacher Education Program

Many view music teacher education as a locus for socially just transformation of music education through the development of preservice teacher agency and identity development. However, few have directly examined values in music teacher preparation programs, and values are implicit in agency. The purpose of this exploratory, intrinsic case study was to investigate the visible values in music education courses at one institution to add a new dimension to research and practice. We collected data from four instructor and five undergraduate participants through observations, interviews, and syllabus review. Themes of critical thinking, agency, student centeredness, positive teacher-student relationships, and skills and knowledge for teaching emerged from the data. Findings indicate that values may be relative in practice despite shared language among preservice teachers and music teacher educators. We provide guiding questions for program review and future research through the lens of values.

Interrogating intercultural competence through a “pedagogy of interruption”: A metasynthesis of intercultural outreach projects in music teacher education

Highlighting the need for teacher education programs to respond to rapidly diversifying societies, this article reports a qualitative metasynthesis of intercultural outreach projects in music teacher education, conceptualizing these projects as a “pedagogy of interruption.” Results show that such outreach projects interrupt the individualistic frame of music teacher education, the known difference, the logic of teaching, and the understanding of what intercultural teacher competence is, rather moving toward letting the context teach. The complex relational work involved in intercultural outreach projects can be seen to establish spaces for framing learning within professional self-reflexivity, embracing uncertainty and trusting relational becomings through an investment in the political and moral aspects of teacher education and intercultural theorization. The article argues that intercultural outreach projects and theorization can be taken as a healthy test for contemporary music teacher education to rethink what competence and its own education is for in the 21st Century.