Interaktion och kunskapsutveckling : en studie av frivillig musikundervisning

• Main Authors: West, Tore, Rostvall, Anna-Lena
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Centrum för musikpedagogisk forskning (MPC) 2001
• Subjects: music teaching; music learning; music education; music school; micro-ethnography; critical discourse analysis; interaction; power; musicology; institution; cognitive schema
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-73704; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:91-88842-25-8

In a joint dissertation project, 11 brass instrument and guitar lessons, with 4 teachers and 21 students aged 9-35 years, were videotaped, transcribed and ana­lyzed. Two were group lessons and 9 were private lessons. The object of the pro­ject was to study how music teaching and learning can be under­stood from an institutional perspective by describing, analyzing and in­terpreting musical in­strument lessons. The lessons were viewed as social encounters in which the action of participants creates and re-creates social orders at different institutional levels, by means of communication rou­tines using speech, music and gesture. Data were derived from micro-ethnographic transcriptions of speech, gesture and music of a total of five hours of videotape, supplemented by text analyses of 14 method-books. The transcripts were analyzed as text from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. At the analytical level the study applied the cognitive concepts of experiencing and learning music, as well as those of educational gen­res of speech and music use. The analyzed data were interpreted and discussed from the per­spectives of interaction-theory and institution-theory. The results show how the music during the lessons was broken down into sepa­rate notes, as read from the score. Music was not addressed as phrases, rhythms, or melodies. Expressive qualities of music performance were not ad­dressed. The characteristics of the interaction were found to be asymmetric, with the teacher being the one controlling the definition of the situation. Student at­tempts to take initiative were ignored by teachers. This asymmetric pattern of interaction had negative consequences for students’ as well as teachers’ opportu­nities to learn. The organization of the teaching situation as well as teaching methods is discussed from the perspective of institution-theory. A major conclu­sion is that the way instrument teaching is organized leaves little room for stu­dents and teachers to discuss and reflect on the teaching process.