Resonance of relevance: Music teachers’ perception, understanding, and assessment of artistic expression

Description

This presentation is based on an ongoing postdoc project, exploring the phenomenon of artistic expression (AE) in the context of Swedish upper secondary school music program. AE appears in the syllabus in the courses Instrument and song 1-3 (Instrument och sång) and Ensemble and choir 1-2 (Ensemble och körsång) (Skolverket, 2011). However, no definition is provided in the documents and initial conversations with teachers and music teacher students point towards a lack of consensus regarding the meaning of the concept, how a teaching situation may foster relevant skills, and how such quality can be assessed.

Based on qualitative interviews with music teachers, the study uses a grounded theory approach to unpack the varieties of ways of talking about this topic.

Unlike the tangent concept of musical expression (also included in the syllabus) the empirical material highlights a lack of established terminology when it comes to discussions of AE. However, with one exception none of the informants describe any difficulties in recognizing AE as a dimension of a performance. In other words, there seems to be a non-verbal, embodied understanding of AE that is hard to translate into words. Dissonance – if any – arise when this form of knowing meets the demands of the formal school setting through collegial conversations, grading, discussions of equal educations, scientific grounding, proven experience etc. In short, AE seems to be an evasive and inconsistent concept, hard to define and pin down according to any fixed criteria.

In this presentation I will explore a less tangible, underlying aspect of AE which is persistent throughout the interviews: AE as a quality of resonance entangled with the musical event and with the relationship (i.e the history of interaction) between the teacher and the performer.
Expression – as one informant describe this aspect – is dependent on impression. In this way, I hope to reframe AE as something more complex than a quality or skill of the student, but no less present and without surrendering to mystification.

To do so, the categories emerging from the initial coding and categorization is understood through Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory, which is further supplemented with aesthetic theory (i.e Nielsen, 2002) and ideas presented by scholars working within the enactive framework (Brinck, 2017; Noë 2004; Noë, 2021).

This project, I hope, can contribute to the discussion on scientific grounding in relation to art education as well. Furthermore, the path of inquiry presented here may serve as a tool in order to elevate the status of – what is sometimes referred to as – tacit knowledge among art educators.

Period	2024 Mar 7
Event title	NERA 2024: Adventures of Education: Desires, Encounters and Differences - Malmö Universitet, Malmö, Sverige
Event type	Conference
Location	Malmö, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International