Multiple repertoires of ways of being and acting in music: immigrant students' musical agency as an impetus for democracy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore how immigrant students experience and enact musical agency inside and outside the music lessons in three Nordic lower secondary schools. The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnographic study and the data were collected in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo through classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. The 19 interviews made with a total of 30 students are especially focused in this article. The findings show that the student interviewees possessed multiple repertoires of ways of being and acting in music, and also that the forms and aspects of musical agency exercised and emphasised inside and outside music lessons were quite different ones. Furthermore, much of the students’ musical competence was not recognised within the school setting. These findings are discussed with respect to what special needs immigrant students may have in a music education situation, and the students’ multiple repertoires are viewed in relation to their potential for constituting an imperative resource for building of future, democratic educational practices.

Keywords:

• multicultural music education
• music education and democracy
• music education and immigrants
• musical agency
• sociology of music education

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgements go to the Academy of Finland for financially supporting this work.

Notes

1. In 2010, the representation of individuals with immigrant backgrounds in the Norwegian population was 11.4% (Statistics Norway n.d.), and in Finland and Sweden similar numbers were 3.1% (Statistics Finland n.d.) and 14.7% (Statistics Sweden n.d.), respectively. While the number of immigrants is not counted exactly in the same way in each country, these numbers represent an approximate overview of the situation.

2. The project was not designed as a comparative study. Rather, the countries’ demographic variation (see endnote 1) was seen as an opportunity to access classroom practices in which the ‘state of multiculturalism’ differed. Hence, in partial accordance with broader, national tendencies, in the Finnish classroom 33% of the students had foreign backgrounds, in the Norwegian classroom the number doubled to 67% whilst all the students were of foreign origin in the Swedish classroom.

3. Other, recent Nordic research confirms that playing in a band that played mainly popular music constitutes a large part of the lower secondary school general music education (see Georgii-Hemming and Westvall 2010; Juntunen 2011). As is the case for example in the UK, through the Musical Futures movement (Musical Futures n.d.), much school-based music education in the Nordic countries involves popular music styles and genres which the students are already familiar with and committed to, and the instruction is also often based on these musics’ related modes of learning. Such approaches have been prevalent during at least the past 25 years (Karlsen 2010; Väkevä 2006; Westerlund 2006).

4. Generally, the instruments described were band instruments. While the students in the Stockholm classroom described the most systematic schooling in band playing, all of them were learning the basics of keyboard, bass, guitar, drums as well as singing, these instruments also dominated the descriptions given by the other students.