KULTURELL (UT)BILDNING - En intervjustudie med kulturskollärare

Abstract

Aim: During the last decade, the School of Modern Arts (SoMA) has gone through major changes. To adapt to societal changes and municipal wishes, it has opened its doors to more students, more subjects, and perhaps also to new ways of teaching. The aim of this study is to view the music education at a SoMA through the teacher´s eyes by investigation the impact of possibilities and limits their new conditions has given them. Their role as teachers, their teaching and their mission is studied on three levels of discourse. Theory: Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a qualitative analytical approach for critically describing, interpreting, and explaining the ways in which discourses construct, maintain, and legitimize social inequalities. In this study, CDA serves as both theory and method and is implemented according to Fairclough's three-dimensional model. Method: Data for this qualitative study was produced through semi-constructed interviews with 16 music teachers at one SoMA during December 2023. The interviews were recorded with aid of computer and phone and analysed with Fairclough´s three-dimensional model starting with the text as object of linguistic analysis. The second step is the discursive practices containing the production, distribution, and consumption of the text. Finally, the last and third step is the social practice, the power relation, ideologies, and hegemonic struggles that discourse reproduce, challenge or restructure. Results: The result of the study shows that the discourse order of the SoMA contains several discoursive practices. Most of them are reproductive, and shows little or no transitivity, although a variety in subjects are shown. The first research question about possibilities and limits of the role as music teacher in a SoMA shows practices about personal development as a possibility, and municipality´s requirements and the society´s expectation as limits. The second research question asked for differences and similarities in teaching between the teachers. Here, the discourses of differences either spoke of different ways of responding to students or having difference in lesson plans, while the similarities amongst the teachers was a student focus in teaching. The third research question asked what the teachers thought about the future role of the SoMA. The answer contained two levels of social practice: institutional level and municipal level. On institutional level, the role was to promote the student´s personal development, on 3 municipal level, the most important for the SoMA was to continue the school development to adapt to fit in the changings in society. During the work, three discursive fields of tension was noticed and unfolded in the discussion part of the study: teacher in music vs. recreation instructor, tradition vs. renewal, and wide or advances education. What the teachers agree on is the importance of preserving the role of the teacher in the School of Modern Arts as it is, and to emphasize that the school is an educational institution with focus of both tradition and renewal. No matter if the purpose is to educate professional musicians, a leisure activity or for personal development with the music as a means, the School of Modern Arts still has an important role in society.