‘There is no right or wrong answer’: Swedish preschool teachers’ reflections on the didactics of death

This study is part of a larger project with the general aim of developing the ability of preschool teachers to reflect critically on questions, topics and theories related to different understandings of death(s). The article is based on three focus-group interviews with a focus on how preschool teachers reflect on what, how, why and when they teach about death and death-related issues. The results show that preschool teachers consider that it is important in early childhood education to teach about death because death is a fundamental aspect of life in daily reality, and they consider it to be their task to comfort a child in grief, as well as care for the well-being of the group. However, much of the time, they avoid teaching about biological death relative to concrete goals that the children are to achieve in understanding what death implies. Instead, they use child-responsive, improvisational teaching that is intended to calm and comfort the children. The content of the teaching arises at the intersection of expert knowledge in talking about death as an irreversible outcome of natural processes and the preschool teachers’ own beliefs and ideas about death, dying and an afterlife. As a consequence, the biological conceptions of death coexist with the teachers’ own beliefs in an afterlife, reflecting a dualistic thinking within which culturally constructed beliefs coexist with biological views.

Teaching repertoires and pedagogical improvisation in music teacher practices

In this article, we describe the characteristics of repertoires in music teaching and discuss how these repertoires are related to pedagogical improvisation. The empirical background for the article is classroom observations and interviews with two experienced music teachers. Video-taped examples of teacher repertoires and improvisational teaching practices are included in the article, where we argue that repertoires should be viewed as emerging practices. They can be identified and categorised as ‘techniques’ and ‘teaching acts’ performed by the teachers in constant interplay with the pupils within the context of overall learning activities in the music classroom.

The School of Abbé Vogler

Chapter 1 tracks a line of improvisational influence that issued from the organ playing and theoretical teachings of Georg Joseph (Abbé) Vogler, whose most famous students were Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Although Vogler was in many respects a product of eighteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical dispositions, he also had a progressive, even experimental streak that manifested itself in his improvisations. He anticipated the figure of the modern virtuoso by touring and playing organ concerts that featured dramatic improvisations depicting biblical narratives. Most important, he made keyboard improvisation an integral part of his pedagogical method, requiring students to improvise simultaneously with him and with each other. While Vogler instructed his students in thoroughbass methods, his improvisational teaching featured freer types of contrapuntal and figural elaboration that influenced their performances and compositions. Vogler’s approach to improvisation encouraged harmonic experimentation that influenced Weber’s and Meyerbeer’s expanded use of tonality.