Competency nomads, resilience and agency: music education (activism) in a time of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

The article seeks to find ways to re-imagine music-educator professional self-understanding beyond tendencies and constraints created and imposed by neoliberal politics. This involves exploring the conditions for music-teacher professionalism in the Nordic countries today through the position of competency nomads, as well as searching for theoretical frameworks through which the current circumstances can be understood and unpacked, by looking into the relationships between resilience, subjectivity, agency and neoliberalism. Given that the current professional situation for music teachers might potentially be understood as characterised by instability and uprootedness, the article proposes an activist approach as one possible way of keeping professional agency and imagination intact and alive. Such an approach requires both the embracement of individual and collective vulnerability and an acknowledgment of our fundamental and mutual interdependency, locally and globally. Towards the end of the article, examples of what this might mean in music-education practice and research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• agency
• competency nomads
• music teachers
• neoliberalism
• resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sidsel Karlsen is professor of music education at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and docent at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. She has published widely in international research journals and is a frequent contributor to international anthologies and handbooks. Her research interests include, among other things, cultural diversity in music education, the interplay between formal and informal arenas for music learning, and the sociology of music education. Currently, she is one of two PIs of the research project Global visions through mobilizing networks: Co-developing intercultural music teacher education in Finland, Israel and Nepal (funded by the Academy of Finland 2015–2019). She is also one of the researchers working within the project The social dynamics of musical upbringing and schooling in the Norwegian welfare state (funded by the Research Council of Norway 2018–2022).

Notes

1 While neoliberal ideology seems to be having an impact on education worldwide, it manifests itself differently from nation state to nation state, also within the field of music education. In this article, I have chosen to focus specifically on the Nordic context, from which I originate and with which I am familiar, still being aware that challenges are similar, if not exactly the same, in other parts of the world. Describing how neoliberal politics impacts on North American music education, for example, Horsley (2015) notes that it entails ‘standards, accountability, and competition’ (66) and Allsup (2015) that it assumes that ‘universities and schools are markets like any other’ (253). These traits are also recognisable in the Nordic countries, but I have here chosen to foreground other aspects which perhaps are more specific to this particular context.

2 For other conceptualisations of ‘the nomad’ or ‘the nomadic’ within music education scholarship, building on the same theoretical framework, see for example Gould (2005).

3 As acknowledged above, Johansson (2012) also employs the concept of competency nomad within the context of higher music education research. However, since her focus is more on the situation and education of musicians rather than that of music teachers, I choose from here on mainly to build on the work of Nielsen and Westby (2012) who are primarily concerned with the latter.

4 Discussing the relationship between profession and identity, Heggen (2008) makes a distinction between ‘professional identity’ (profesjonell identitet), which denotes ‘the personal identity formation connected to the performance of the professional role’ (324, my translation), and ‘profession identity’ (profesjonsidentitet), a term which designates the dimensions of collective identity connected to being a member of a specific profession.