Ideological processes and discursive tensions in Norwegian music teacher education

Abstract

This article investigates local curricular plans and job advertisements of institutions offering music in generalist teacher education (GTE) in Norway. The aim is to identify the values and ideologies represented locally in the music subject in terms of how content, learning outcomes, activities and assessment forms are prioritised and how working staff are recruited. By using elements from critical discourse analysis, we find that several ideological processes in the new five-year GTE programme lead to tensions in the music subject. We discuss such discursive tensions in the following five categories: 1) musical skills versus pedagogical skills, 2) activity orientation versus reflection orientation, 3) academic orientation versus artistic orientation, 4) research focus versus teaching focus and 5) future orientation versus tradition orientation. Despite the tendency of preserving traditions and values in the field of music, we find that the national guidelines for music in GTE are quite open and flexible in terms of changing the traditions and adjusting for the needs of the present and future. However, in 2020 when local plans were collected, we found only limited use of the potential the national guidelines offer for local adjustment and innovation. Job advertisements, on the other hand, show a tendency towards ideological mismatch between the institutional level, which lean mostly towards innovation for the future, and music staff, who lean mostly towards traditions.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• recruitment
• ideology
• discourse
• music teacher education

1. Introduction

Norwegian generalist teacher education (GTE) was newly reformed from a four-year bachelor’s degree to a five-year master’s degree. The reform aimed at meeting societal changes, international standardisation, strengthening the relation between theory and practice as well as strengthening the teacher students’ research competence. Studies of music teacher education across different countries show that despite of educational policy reforms, the music subject stays in old traditions and seems to have made itself almost resistant to change (Aróstegui, 2011; Sætre, 2014; Sandberg-Jurström et al., 2022; Väkevä et al., 2017). To better understand the tensions between progressive and conservative tendencies in the field of music teacher education, Knudsen and Onsrud (2023) recently critically analysed the national guidelines for the music subject in the new Norwegian GTE. They argue that the national guidelines largely contribute to upholding a certain school music ideology and a matching community of music educators. To get a deeper understanding of how such ideological mechanisms are shaped on an institutional level, we have mapped relevant documents from all institutions in Norway that offer music as a subject in GTE. The documents we have found to be relevant in this regard are 1) local curricular plans for the music courses in GTE, and 2) job advertisements addressed to future music teacher educators. We have investigated how such texts reflect values and beliefs regarding what is essential for the music subject in GTE.

In approaching the data, we have used elements from critical discourse analysis (CDA), which offers a lens through which to view values and ideologies in terms of discourse. We follow Norman Fairclough in “Discourse as an ideological practice constitutes, naturalizes, sustains and changes significations of the world from diverse positions in power relations” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 67). Fairclough defines ideology as representations of the world that contribute to establishing and maintaining power relations, domination and exploitation (Fairclough, 2003). Discourse can be ideological if it contributes to maintaining or challenging such power relations. CDA is critical in that it seeks to reveal the role that discursive practices play in preserving the social world, including social relations and power relations (Jørgensen & Phillips, 1999). It is therefore an effective analytical tool for understanding the values, ideologies and processes at play in the discursive construction of music as a school subject and music teacher education as a social practice.

We are asking the following research question: What imprints of values and ideological processes are represented in documents regulating the music subject in GTE?

According to Fairclough, meanings are produced through the negotiations and interpretations of texts within social settings. Texts may “bear the imprint of ideological processes and structures” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 57). When we have studied curriculum texts and job advertisements critically, our intention has been to address how ideology functions to effectively maintain or challenge dominant and ideology-based systems. We have also sought to search for traces of the various negotiations, struggles and scholarly positionings involved in the shaping of texts.

In the following, we start by contextualising GTE in Norway and investigating previous research on GTE, music teacher education and job advertisements. Secondly, we present our methodological approaches and considerations, before we present findings from our analysis. Finally, we discuss the discursive tensions identified in our analysis as 1) musical skills versus pedagogical skills, 2) activity orientation versus reflection orientation, 3) academic orientation versus artistic orientation, 4) research focus versus teaching focus and 5) future orientation versus tradition orientation.

2. The context of GTE in Norway

The political, professional and ideological climate of teacher education is contradictory, with often idealised visions and goals from a wide array of stakeholders and a strong focus on frequent reforms (Trippestad et al., 2017). In Norway, this climate has been marked since the 1970s by the implementation of new reforms for elementary schools roughly every decade, while reforms of GTE have occurred even more frequently due to new governments taking office (Trippestad et al., 2017). As a result of the reforms of the past 50 years, the teacher role, expectations of teachers and teacher education itself have changed. In Norway, as in many other countries, there has historically been a socio-cultural and ideological gap between elementary teachers and upper secondary or high school teachers. GTE provides preparation for elementary school teaching and has historically been located in university colleges, while teachers educated to teach at the upper levels have historically received their education at universities. Reforms have gradually led to a greater focus within GTE on in-depth disciplinary knowledge that is research-based and close to the practice of teaching (Dahl et al., 2016), with the result that GTE has gradually become more like the university education of teachers for the upper levels, culminating in the latest reform in 2017, when GTE became a five-year master’s degree programme.

Parallel to this educational change, a growing body of university colleges have become universities. In other words, the institutional foundation for a division into two kinds of teacher culture is fast losing its relevance, and the teacher role is under intense renegotiation (Dahl et al., 2016). There is a political interest and belief in the potential of higher education to meet the major challenges of the future, such as climate change, demographic and technological developments and changing global, economic and political centres of gravity. The Government in Norway is seeking to strengthen the quality of higher education to meet such future challenges (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017), and GTE reform is a part of this strategy. The reform also describes several other goals related to making Norwegian teacher education a master’s degree education, which shows that the intention is not solely to academise teacher education but also to professionalise it (Aam et al., 2017).

Concerns articulated by organisations such as the OECD (OECD, 2021) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) (UNESCO, 2015) about how education can meet global challenges have an impact on the organisation of the Norwegian educational system. In addition, all national framework documents for higher education in Norway are in compliance with the Bologna Framework (QF-EHEA) and the European Qualification Framework for Life-long Learning (EQF). The music teacher education programmes in Norway are all governed by national frameworks that dictate the learning outcome formulations for each course within a programme. By developing precise learning outcome formulations, it is possible to compare study programmes and make them compatible across the states in the EU network. The latest reform of teacher education in Norway is a direct consequence of the harmonisation across national borders aimed at the development of transparent, comparable and compatible education programmes.

3. Previous research

3.1. Studies of teacher education curriculum

After the latest reform of Norwegian GTE, a study on student experiences identifies challenges that resemble those that motivated the reform in the first place (Høgheim & Jenssen, 2022). The main findings are that 1) students are demanding more didactics and less focus exclusively on subject matter; 2) the programme is experienced as too theory-oriented, and 3) the practicum placement offers too little opportunity for progress during the five years.

Another common issue in teacher education is the academisation of programmes to professionalise the teaching profession (Borg, 2007). Research-based professional practice is built on research-based teacher education, which enables teachers to make autonomous, rational and theory-based decisions and to integrate research and practice in a profound way (Afdal & Spernes, 2018). Recently, the academisation of teacher education has been problematised as both strengthening teachers’ professionalism and weakening their autonomy, as the ideal for teacher professionalism is being defined by outside sources (Larsson & Sjöberg, 2021).

In music education, the academisation of teacher education is viewed as beneficial, as a greater degree of research serves to enhance the subject (Holgersen & Holst, 2020). Simultaneously, the space for practising the musical craft has become more limited (p. 9). Ericsson and Lindgren’s study (Ericsson & Lindgren, 2011) also reveals that an academic discourse focusing on theory, reflection and textual production has pushed aside skills-based practice. Eidsvaag and Angelo (2021) similarly stress that the craft of performing music on instruments has traditionally been considered a cornerstone of music teacher education. Although their findings show that student music teachers and music educators still view such skills as important, the timetables in their study reveal few or no hours allocated to principal instrumental training in the Norwegian GTE. Nysæther et al. (2021), on the other hand, find that student music teachers in Norwegian GTE consider pedagogy and didactics to be a more valuable element of their education than, for instance, principal instrument training, but the student music teachers still value performative skills such as ensemble play.

Higher music education is also influenced by its academic history and heritage. A recent study claims that higher music education institutions “are deeply rooted in musical traditions and constitute socially homogeneous environments” (Moberg & Georgii-Hemming, 2021, p. 36). Similar tendencies were found in a mapping of four-year Norwegian GTE (Sætre, 2014), which revealed a mismatch between the re-organisation and new development of music teacher education and music teaching in schools. Music as a school subject and music in teacher education have responded differently to major societal changes such as digitalisation and media consumption habits. Bowman (2007) have addressed the tendency for music education to reproduce itself in terms of what musical ideals are considered to be, and claims that no one seems to break the cycle of reproduction. In a similar fashion, Aróstegui (2011) shows that educational policy reforms have had almost no impact on music teacher programmes. Thus, several scholars have articulated a need to find ways of breaking this cycle of reproduction, particularly as it affects music teacher education (Allsup, 2016; Kaschub & Smith, 2014). Developing teacher students’ agency has become one important suggestion (Allsup, 2015; Onsrud et al., 2022; Powell, 2019; Tucker, 2020). This is not an easy task, as Tucker and Powell (2021) illustrate in their study of music teacher education for instrumental teacher students. They found that professors hoped to inspire teacher students’ future agency rather than treat their adoption of positive perceptions of agency as tangible goals. Tucker and Powell’s study shows that clear definitions and common understandings are necessary to develop teacher student agency and change traditions and values.

3.2. Studies of job advertisements

Previous job advertisement studies can be sorted into the following three types: “those looking at specific types of positions, those analysing specific skills mentioned in the advertisements, and those studying more general issues” (Shank, 2006, p. 516). In our case, we investigate advertisements to fill a vacant position for a music teacher educator. Although we also consider the skills requested of the prospective teacher, skills are one of the many assets subject to analysis and, as such, the current study is of the first type, investigating a particular kind of position.

Studies on advertisements recruiting to higher education often describe the field of education as a field of tension, where conflicting interests pull in different directions, and where institutional and professional identities are being negotiated. Fairclough applied his theory of CDA in a study of job advertisements to address the marketisation of UK universities. By comparing job advertisements from three different universities at the text level, he was able to reveal the different orders of discourse between traditional universities and recently accredited universities. One finding was that “the marketization of higher education results in a restructuring of the order of discourse on the model of more central market organizations” at the university (Fairclough, 1993, p. 143). University discourse starts to resemble business discourse. Such a shift in discourse towards the entrepreneurial may lead to unstable institutional identities and a reconstruction of professional identities of academic staff, foregrounding personal qualities and self-promotion, he claims.

Ellis et al. (2012) sought to understand how persistent categories of spoken and written language in institutional texts and contexts support the cultural-historical production and re-production of teacher educators as a kind of academic worker. Within a sociocultural framework, their approach to job advertisements situates the advertisements as key cultural artefacts, not only for the recruitment process but also for conveying what it means to be a teacher educator. They conclude that contrary to the institutions’ tendency to promote their standing in terms of research performance, teachers rather than researchers are what are sought after for the vacant positions.

Departing from Ellis et al., Hales and Clarke (2016) investigate the characterisation of Canadian teacher education within its most fundamental public interface, between institution and potential employee, in job advertisements (Hales & Clarke, 2016, p. 321). Through a combination of document and content analysis, they sought to ascertain how the concept of teacher educator is being constructed in Canadian university job advertisements. Their study revealed competing and contradictory institutional aims in the work of teacher educators, being both teachers and researchers who navigate between scholarly forms of knowledge and the particular learning and supervisory needs of pre-service candidates.

There is a difference between what may be considered the “front end” and the “back end” of a recruitment process (Nuttall et al., 2013). The front end addresses the institution’s need to market its “brand” to others and themselves, whereas the back end outlines job requirements for potential applicants. These different purposes of communication are accomplished in job advertisements by an institution’s branding statements being placed at the ingress section of the text and followed by the back end that details the specifics of the position. The front end section may feature orders of discourse that seem foreign to educational discourse and align with Fairclough’s findings cited above. For the purposes of the current study, these two concepts of front and back end will be utilized as tools for structuring the analysis of the collected job advertisements.

4. Methodological considerations

4.1. Empirical data

The empirical data for this study consists of local curriculum plans and job advertisements collected from the 10 institutions offering music as a subject in the GTE (see Table 1 below). The data collection took place during the spring semester of 2020. The procedure involved collecting local plans from the institutions’ webpages and then contacting the institutions by email for verifications, clarifications and supplementary updates. To collect the job advertisements, the department leadership of each institution was contacted. We asked the department leaders for job advertisements for the previous five years (i.e. 2015 to 2020). In sum, the collection consists of 27 job advertisements, including nine that recruited personnel specifically for music in GTE. The other vacant positions relate primarily to other music teacher education programmes rather than to GTE. Table 1 shows the institutions included in the study.

Table 1. An overview of institutions offering music as a subject in general teacher education

Institutions	Abbreviation	Music as 30 or 60 ECTS unit	Music as master’s subject
Western Norway University of applied sciences	HVL	x	x
Oslo Metropolitan University	OsloMet	x	x
Innland University of Applied Sciences	INN	x	x
Nord University	NORD	x	-
Norwegian University of Science and Technology	NTNU	x	x
University of Agder	UiA	x	-
University of South-East Norway	USN	x	-
Norwegian Arctic University in Tromsø	UiT	x	-
University in Stavanger	UiS	x	-
Norwegian Teacher Academy	NLA	x	-

Thirty-two local curriculum plans were collected for analysis. Five-year teacher education is organised in two cycles. Cycle 1 takes place during the three first years, while Cycle 2 takes place during the two last years. Cycle 1 consists of four music modules, each of 15 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) units, while Cycle 2 consists of 45 to 60 ECTS units in music and 30 to 45 ECTS units for writing the master’s thesis. As shown in Table 1, only four of the ten institutions offer music as a master’s degree subject (OsloMet, HVL, NTNU and INN), which means that students can choose to study music during all five years of their education, including both Cycle 1 and Cycle 2. Among the other institutions, four offer only 30 ECTS units in music (UiA, UiS, UiT and NLA) and two offer 60 ECTS units (Nord and USN), which means these are only for Cycle 1. The institutions offering music in Cycle 2 were about to start their first master’s students in the autumn of 2020, hence their plans for Cycle 2 had not yet been implemented in practice.

Supplementary to our core data is our email correspondence with the institutions, which gives us a glimpse into the implementation of the plans, such as documents that tell us how the programme is organised and how content is scheduled from week to week each academic year. Also, the National Guidelines for Norwegian GTE (Universitets-og høyskoleloven, 2017a) and the National Curriculum Text for Elementary School (LK20) (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020) help to contextualise the local plans. Even international documents, from the EU and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have an impact on Norwegian GTE and serve as supplementary sources. Lastly, national regulations and laws are important in order to shed light on the conditions for GTE. In the following section, we outline the analytical framework of our investigation.

4.2. Analytical approach

We view the data as cases of language in use (Fairclough, 2010) and use elements from CDA in our analytical approach. In CDA, Fairclough suggests that each case of language in use is a social event of three dimensions: 1) the social event – in our case local plans and job advertisements—which are written words, but which could also be speech, pictures or a mix of the linguistic and visual; 2) the social practice, which is where the social event is produced and consumed, such as within the teaching, or- within the hiring processes; and 3) the social structure, which refers to societal macro relations, such as economical structures, power relations and bureaucracy (Skrede, 2020, p. 32). Fairclough’s three-dimensional model is a dialectic approach to the interplay between social structures, social practices and social events (Skrede, 2020, pp. 46–47) that we draw on in our analysis.

In the analysis of each individual text as a social event, Fairclough identifies several semiotic resources in use. One of these is the genre of the text, which can be defined as the characteristics of the text that can be recognised in other similar texts. Secondly, Fairclough looks for discourse in the text, defining discourse as representations of possible worlds that are different from the factual world (Skrede, 2020, p. 35). Discourse takes part in moving society in certain directions. Relations between discourses are therefore a semiotic element of relations between human beings: they can complement each other, compete, or even dominate each other (Fairclough, 2003, p. 124). Texts also have different styles, which means semiotic ways of being, or certain ways of using language. The different styles of curriculum plans and job advertisements show us how they communicate differently. The order of discourse is a concept Fairclough borrows from Foucault and refers to as a certain stability in social practices which makes discourses recognisable. Unstable discourses, however, have the potential for change by drawing on concepts from other orders of discourse, which Fairclough refers to as intertextuality, interdiscursivity and recontextualisation. Intertextuality encompasses all the possible ways in which texts can connect, either manifestly or latently. In CDA, it is important to assess what effect different intertextual connections can potentially have and what ideological interests they can serve (Skrede, 2020, p. 52).

In our analysis we are inspired by the way Fairclough looks for discourse in text through content, style and use of language. We identify semiotic resources used in the two text genres. We also look for intertextual elements that may have interdiscursive connections with other texts and become recontextualised in the texts we are investigating. Additionally, we draw on the interplay between the three dimensions Fairclough describes and see our texts (social events) in relation to the social practice as well as the social structures that surround them. In the presentation of the analysis of the main documents, certain examples are highlighted to illustrate discursive elements we find interesting for further discussion of how discourses in GTE complement each other, compete, or even dominate each other. These examples may be representative of tendencies in the data material, or on the contrary, they represent interesting cases by diverging from the norm.

4.3. Researcher positioning, scientific and ethical considerations

Since the educational institutions are public, we have not anonymised the local documents or job advertisements. Nevertheless, for ethical reasons we have treated the institutional information and differences in a respectful and nuanced way. According to the Norwegian Guidelines for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and Humanities (NESH, 2021), public institutions have a duty to make information available for research. On the other hand, it is stated that researchers have a duty to collect and store such research data in an ethically responsible way. We found the institutions to be helpful with sharing information, and we are serious about our ethical responsibility in respect of collecting and storing the data. As educators at one of the institutions included in the study, we are not neutral researchers but stakeholders in the results. The analytical tools help us to handle this dilemma by providing us with a certain distance from the field and allowing us to regard it from a different perspective than our usual one (Christophersen, 2010). As Christophersen suggests, closeness can make you blind and lead you to state the obvious rather than problematising it (p. 36). Our transparency about our biases gives the reader an opportunity to read our analysis critically in view of our position. Analysis is always situated, which implies both advantages and disadvantages. The fact that we are well informed about generalist music teacher education, including both its history and its current state, can be perceived as a strength; however, such knowledge can also create limitations when it comes to our interpretations. As Hastrup has stressed, the subjective experience can be an important starting point for a cultural understanding, but it is not enough in itself (Hastrup, 1998, p. 47).

5. Analysis

In the following analysis, we go into the main texts as social events (the first dimension of CDA) and try to understand them in relation to the other dimensions. In the analysis of local plans, we focus on style and content, differences in language use, and intertextuality. In the analysis of the job advertisements, we draw on the front end and back end sections of the texts to consider what orders of discourse influence the content of each section. As in the analysis of local plans, we focus on language use, content and occurrences of intertextuality.

5.1. Local plans as social events

5.1.1. The style and content of local plans

Local plans are curriculum texts whose common characteristics locate them in the same style and genre. Many formulations are copied directly from the National Guidelines for GTE (Universitets og høgskolerådet, 2017a), which again is modelled by the quality framework of QF-EHEA and EQF. With this interdiscursive connection, the plans do not look very different from each other. They are built up according to a certain structure, consisting of the same main parts. The first part describes the core content of the course, followed by bullet points listing the knowledge, skills and general competence that students should have upon completing the course. Another part describes study forms and ways of teaching in the course, such as lecturing, group work and ensemble play. Mandatory assignments are highlighted and specified, as students must pass these in order to take the exam. Yet another part describes how the exams will proceed and how students’ learning outcome will be assessed. All the institutions use mostly traditional assessment forms, such as written and oral exams on campus. In some modules home exams are used, and in a few cases even portfolio assessment is used to map students’ development over time and how they reflect upon their development.

Based on this common structure, we could say that a local plan in teacher education is a genre that conditions the possibilities for local variation. In particular, the learning outcome formulations for students’ knowledge, skills and general competence at the end of each course have a strong impact on how local plans are formulated. Variations between different institutions’ plans are mainly to be found in their descriptions of content.

The plans for Cycle 1 (four modules) have a practical focus on both music and pedagogy, such as how to make music in the classroom, how to take leadership of musical activity and how to facilitate and assess pupils’ musical activities. The first module starts by focusing on the development of preservice teachers’ musical skills, whereas in the following modules there is more focus on pedagogical work and reflection. The last module in Cycle 1 focuses more on research competence, particularly at those institutions where students can write a research and development thesis on music. At the institutions that offer music only in Cycle 1, the responsibility for the research and development theses is placed in other subjects. The local music plans at these institutions are formulated differently than at the institutions offering music as a master’s degree subject, in that the former are more practical and skills oriented. This is evident in the way course content is described in the local plans. This can also be seen in the course schedules collected from some of the institutions, where the schedules were filled mostly with practical and/or musical activity and didn’t include lectures or discussions of music educational theory. In these cases, the Cycle 1 syllabus is dominated by textbooks, songbooks and manuals for how to master various practical and musical issues. Some of the institutions do include research literature and music education theory, particularly in the third year, but these are mainly the institutions that offer music as a master’s degree subject. The plans for Cycle 1 at these institutions have been formulated to also provide an academic basis for writing a research and development report in the third year and to write a master’s degree thesis during the fifth year.

The plans for Cycle 2 include theory of science, research ethics and methods as well as orientation in the field of music education research. These subjects are combined with more practical and performative modules, but the focus of these varies among the institutions. In 2020 when we collected data, HVL’s practical focus was on the production of school concerts, supplemented by a written reflection, while OsloMet focused on musicology and the production of a concert lecture. NTNU offered training on a principal instrument and music production with digital technology, while INN focused on advanced classroom pedagogy in music. These are the plans that show the largest degree of variation between the institutions.

5.1.2. Different language use

Since most of the local plans adhere closely to the form and language of the national guidelines for GTE, concepts in the national guidelines that reflect certain values in the music subject are adapted in the local plans. Examples of this include “children’s culture”, “youth culture”, “digital tools” and “national and international heritage”. As Knudsen and Onsrud (2023) point out in their analysis of the national guidelines, such concepts stand out as presuppositions in the plans, which means that they imply certain understandings without clearly stating them or that they present ideas as natural or self-evident when in fact they may be contestable or ideological (p. 7). In the following, we focus on what stands out as differences and variations between the national guidelines and the local plans.

Most of the courses have been assigned an alphanumeric course number, such as MGBMU101. In addition, four of the ten institutions have given their courses a title, which may communicate something about the institutional profile or at least what the institutions want to highlight in the different parts of their teacher education programme. At INN, for instance, an institution offering programmes in cultural studies and whose teaching staff have special competence in this field, this is reflected in several course titles, such as “Musical Children and Youth Culture” and “Music as Social Practice”. These concepts are referred to in the national guidelines, but their use in course titles indicates that they are more important than other concepts and items. In addition to emphasising its institutional profile, INN focuses on music as a school subject in Cycle 1 and music education as a research field in Cycle 2. The focus on music as a school subject can also be found in the course titles at UiA and NTNU. In addition, NTNU gives half of their courses titles with language that implies musical practice, such as “Create, Experience and Perform”, “Principal Instrument”, “Composition” and “Musical Production in Collaboration”. This shows that different discourses dominate how music may be taught in different institutions. While texts from INN indicate that the students will be educated in reflection and awareness of musical contexts and conditions for music education in school, texts from NTNU indicate a stronger focus on the craft of producing, composing and performing music. This illustrates how musical skills and an orientation towards musical activity can seem to dominate one institution, while pedagogical skills and orientations towards reflection can seem to dominate another.

In Cycle 2, NTNU, for example, has a course titled “Research in Arts Education”, which probably aims to prepare students to write their master’s degree thesis. One might wonder, however, why it is drawing attention to research in arts education rather than in music education or to music in school. A possible explanation is that the course is run together with students from other arts subjects. Nevertheless, it gives the impression that the institution has a particular focus on music as an art form. In this course students are intended to achieve “an understanding of research in and with the arts, with a focus on arts-based and practice-led research, as well as theory-driven, critical and decolonial research”. This explicit focus on certain forms of research and theoretical approaches serves to differentiate this institution’s profile from that of the other institutions, which discuss research in more general terms but stay close to practice and school relevance. Further interesting formulations in the “Research in Arts Education” course include the learning outcome formulation whereby students will gain “insight into art as a social agent for change” and will “experience how research in arts education can be developed, made available, and contribute to processes of change”. This stands out as something different from the other institutions and shows that the authors of this plan have interpreted and adapted a formulation from the national guidelines about innovation, change and flexibility in their own way to suit their institutional profile.

In its descriptions of Cycle 2 course content, OsloMet stands out for using more innovative and future-oriented language than in the national guidelines or any of the other local plans. The institution articulates concepts such as “music education for the 21st century”, “diversity and inclusion” and “power perspective on musical performance”, to name but a few. Its inclusion of concepts taken from current social justice theory and debates shows that the authors of the local plans are adapting issues at the forefront of the international research community to music educational research. This illustrates how the order of discourse represented in this institutions’ plans comes from the research field. It also shows how “research-based teaching” is concretised and reflected in the plans. The concept of “education for the 21st century” echoes, for instance, international OECD documents regarding 21st century skills and illustrates how intertextuality occurs in local plans and can contribute to change the social practice of teaching music in GTE. In the following section, we will offer more examples of intertextuality in the plans.

5.1.3. Intertextuality

We found several intertextual elements from the national curriculum for primary and secondary school in the local plans for GTE. This shows an interdiscursive relation between the music subject in teacher education and the music subject in schools. The words “musicking”, “listening” and “composing” marked the core elements of the music curriculum for primary and elementary school until 2020 when a new curriculum was implemented (LK20). These words were still being used by most of the institutions in their local plans for the music subject in GTE when we were collecting the plans. In this case the intertextual element from the former curriculum for school (LK06) shows lack of change in GTE or updating of local plans according to changes in the curriculum for school. The exceptions were three institutions (INN, USN and NTNU), which had already implemented the new core elements of the music subject from LK20. These new core elements are referred to as “to play music”, “to create music”, “to experience music” and “cultural understanding”. These core elements of both the previous and the new curricula are formulated as verbs and are thus associated with action and activity. Consequently, practical work, as opposed to theoretical work, has become a common way of talking about the music subject (Onsrud, 2013, pp. 115–116).

Deep learning and cross-disciplinary themes are two of the main new concepts in the new national curriculum for school. They are included in the general part of the curriculum, which was published a year before the plans for each subject were published in 2020. We found that some institutions had already implemented these concepts in their local plans in 2020. At UiT, for instance, we found the following formulations of learning outcomes—“the student has knowledge about deep learning in the music subject” and “the student has knowledge about the cross-disciplinary potential of music” – which shows that the general part of the new school curriculum was considered in the formulation of the local plan.

Another new demand of LK20 is that pupils learn disciplinary concepts from the disciplinary language of music. This should, of course, affect language use in the local plans for music teacher education, but so far, we have found this in plans from only three of the ten institutions, which indicates that most institutions need more time to implement changes that appear in discursive practice, not only in the written curriculum but also in the practiced curriculum of music teacher education. The lack of intertextuality between LK20 and most of the local plans we collected the same year as LK20 was implemented, shows how interdiscursive mismatches appear when policy reforms are not synchronised between the different educational levels.

5.2. Job advertisements as social events in the community of music education expertise

Three white papers by the Government of Norway (Ministry of Research and Education, 2015, 2017, 2019) comprise regulative frameworks for the academic institutions to adhere to. These may influence which qualification criteria will be considered the most important in the qualification processes for academic positions. The white paper on quality in higher education (2017) expresses the Government’s expectations concerning institutions’ efforts to improve quality and the measures that the Government will implement in order to realise these expectations. Of particular relevance to our study are the aims to raise the status of educational activity and to recognise teaching competence to a greater extent than was the case at that time. The white paper says that more emphasis should be placed on teaching qualifications and teaching experience when appointing and promoting staff. The Government revised the regulations for appointments and promotions in combined teaching and research positions such that a minimum requirement for basic pedagogical competence and teaching experience must be taken into account in recruitment processes. Those who do not meet such criteria would be required to obtain the competence within a year of being employed.

The local curricular plans for music as a subject in teacher education are revised and maintained by staff at the individual institutions in adherence with the overarching national guidelines. From this perspective, the recruitment of academic staff can be considered a process which favours the selection of those whose privilege allows them to exert their influence over the interpretation and implementation of curricula (Goodlad, 1979). Such a recruitment process can be analysed and understood in view of a selective tradition (Apple, 2018), which suggests that admission to academia is a selective process that is always influenced by values and conceptions of ideology.

5.2.1. Front end: branding statements through discourse

As in the analysis of the local plans, the job advertisements are considered in terms of genre and style. We draw on a distinction that Nuttall et al. (2013) make between an advertisement’s front end and back end, which refers to how advertisements typically consist of branding statements for an institution in the top section of the text, followed by a description of the job position and the qualification criteria, in what we call the back end. This genre mark of a division between a front end and a back end is represented in all of the items analysed in this study.

In the front end of the job advertisements, we find examples of statements that serve to communicate the institutions’ overall brand identity. Within these statements, we find the occurrence of discourses that are common across our samples and discourses that stand out by being represented only at one institution. Below, we show specifically how the discourse “having a global outlook” and the discourse “innovation for the future” are represented in the front end. This may serve to illustrate how job advertisements draw on discursive networks that go beyond education in itself and how such statements may reveal value-laden opinions and dispositions.

The sample “NORD 148,337” is one of six advertisements in the data collection published by Nord University over a 2-year period. The front end has evolved from the earliest samples, featuring little information, towards becoming a section with elaborated institutional statements. Hence, this advert is selected for the purpose of analysis. The Nord University aligns itself with the discourse on resolving global issues by claiming that they are resolved “at local, regional and global levels”. Value-laden words such as the university’s focus on “blue” and “green” growth suggest that the order of discourse at the level of the university connects with major discourses that are universally embraced and stand high on the political agenda: climate change, sustainability and global challenges. The global perspective is also represented in what may be considered a branding statement in the front end section of one of NTNU’s three advertisements, sample NTNU 189,308, in that the university claims to “create knowledge for a better world” and “solutions that may change daily life”. The intended impact of its activities may have a global reach. Although global outlook can be expressed in sentence structures that resemble branding statements, the “global” is more often represented indirectly through other word choices, such as “international” and “international networks”. Several institutions use the front end to express their ambition to perform and achieve at a “high international level” and to participate in “international research networks”, statements which are found in the advertisements from HVL.

Words and clauses such as “innovation” and “new insight” (NORD) suggest that the institution is in favour of change and challenges the current state of affairs. By using words such as “relevant” and “future-oriented”, the university aligns itself with language associated with entrepreneurship, borrowing words that belong to a discourse order more often associated with business communication (Fairclough, 1993). Along with describing itself as “young”, NORD differentiates itself from what may be traditionally connotated by universities, such as historical sites with a glorious academic past that nurtures present activities. Similarly, HVL claims an identity in which it is “a force for development”, and NTNU communicates its ambition to be inventive as a site “where knowledge is created”. The latter epistemological stance is echoed by UiA, which claims to be a site for the “co-creation of knowledge”. The front end sections across the samples cited above share a commitment to creating and delivering relevant knowledge. From an epistemological point of view, these claims suggest that the universities see knowledge as emergent in nature, and not a static commodity. Rather, knowledge is a product of the individual institutions’ research based undertakings.

5.2.2. Back end: diverse knowledge domains in teacher education

The back-end sections of advertisements from the same institution use equally formal framing for vacant positions, typically referring to legal obligations, recruitment policies, job benefits and the like. In our analysis, we addressed the parts detailing the specifics of the vacant positions. Taking the policy white papers referred to above as a reference point, we were on the lookout for discursive statements that could be seen as representative descriptions of the music teacher educator’s professional knowledge.

In the total sample of job advertisements, there was some variation in the wording used to label vacant positions, such as “vacant position as associate professor in music”, where “music” is the term labelling the knowledge domain that the applicant will teach. The wordings used are listed here, followed by the number of occurrences in parentheses: “music” (10), “music performance” (1), “music didactics” (5), “music pedagogy” (8) and “community music” (3). This indicates that there is no uniform approach to labelling music as a school subject in GTE, and the differences in the labelling may suggest what aspects of music as a subject in TE is given priority at the different institutions.

The back-end section of the advertisement NORD 148,337 describes the particular areas of teaching that pertain to the vacant position. The advertisement does not specify the music courses the position is linked to, but it may serve as an indication of the knowledge domains that the institution views as necessary for a music teacher educator: “theoretical subjects”, “workshop-related subjects” and “related to practice”. The term “workshop-related” is noteworthy, as it is not a term commonly used within GTE, yet it may serve as a general term that the particular institution uses to capture what cannot be sufficiently described as “theoretical” or “practice-related”. Six of the institutions stress in the wording of their advertisements the practical aspects of teaching music in GTE. This is communicated by using the term “practical-pedagogical competence” in reference to the applicant’s required background. This formulation can be interpreted as extending formal pedagogical knowledge by adding “practical” as a prefix to capture the activity dimension. It can also be read as a referral to the specific Norwegian one-year study programme in practical-pedagogical education (PPU) offered by the institutions in the sample. The wording is ambiguous in the Norwegian context, but its intention within the context of a job advertisement may be to capture the activity dimension of music as a school subject.

Regarding the further diversification of tasks pertaining to the vacant position in NORD 148,337, this particular advert specifies in more detail what topic domains may be of relevance for the applicant. The list features four items: “music pedagogy”, “music didactics”, “musicking” and “music theory”. Apart from musicking, the other three domains are what has become established as core areas of concern within music teacher education. “musicking”, however, may be regarded as another choice, in terms of vocabulary, intended to capture the practical and performative dimension of the music subject. In Norwegian, “musisering” has become a commonly used term, denoting the practical involvement of practising, playing and performing music. As an intertextual feature of this particular job advertisement, it does cover the practical dimension of the domains constituting music as a subject within teacher education. The term may be an example of an item of vocabulary that supports an intertextual link by making a connection between word choices in job advertisements and in local curricular plans for music teacher education. As it is present in samples of both text types, it may suggest that there are examples of a unified representation of music as a school subject in advertisements and in the curricular domain. On the other hand, a gross difference in representation may suggest a discrepancy between qualifications sought in job advertisements and the way in which the music subject is organised in teacher education.

The diversity of knowledge domains in music teacher education also finds expression in the sections of advertisements relating to the institution’s desired research practice. In advertisement NTNU157272, NTNU states that the research associated with the vacant position will be directed towards “relevant subject areas for teacher education”. It is being debated to what extent artistic research without any didactic component is of relevance for teacher education. However, when detailing the outreach element of the job position, NTNU makes a distinction between “dissemination of research” and “artistic performance”, pinpointing two distinct areas of practice. The University and University Colleges Act (2017b) treats research on equal terms with artistic and subject-specific developmental work. NORD, on the other hand, positions research in music at the intersection between pedagogy and artistic research. Their advertisement draws on this regulative discourse in that the advertisement makes explicit reference to the formulation of the above-mentioned act when detailing the research focus of the vacant position: “artistic development activities are equivalent to research, ref. Act”. One can argue that, in the two advertisements from NORD and NTNU, tension is present between the emphasis on research activities being profession-oriented and close to the field of practice, on the one hand, and, on the other, research being devoted to the artistic dimension of music as a school subject. The tension becomes more evident when one investigates the field of discourse and the intertextuality between the advertisement and what Fairclough calls the social practices in the field.

5.2.3. Front end vs back end: discourse on profession orientation and closeness to field of practice

In the front end section of the advertisements, where the focus is on faculty level, research activities are frequently described as “profession-oriented and close to the field of practice”, implying an aim to develop the professional field that the students will take part in. The job advertisements draw on the current discourse among institutions in higher education in Norway, as set out in the national guidelines for GTE and as requested in the policy white papers.

The ongoing process of merging teacher education institutions into larger units has also given rise to policy discourses on what identities and values should be at the core of the new, larger university units merging diverse knowledge domains that formerly existed independently in separate knowledge domains. Former university colleges that were profession-oriented and provided profession-specific education are now merging with different units to become universities with close links to the professions. NORD suggests the identity of a “young university” steering towards becoming a “profession-oriented university”, an ambition that other institutions share. HVL’s strategy speaks of becoming a university with a “professional and work life-oriented profile”.

The discourse “being relevant for the profession and professional practice” has already been introduced in the front end of the advertisement for NORD. At the faculty level, the advertisement claims that the motivation for research activities is to contribute to developing the field of practice by being “oriented towards the profession” and being “close to the profession”. At the back end, this discourse reappears in the description of tasks related to the position. Here it is stressed that “the candidate is prepared to take on research problems oriented towards the profession”. This requirement exists in an intertextual relationship with the overarching guidelines governing teacher education, as it is explicitly stated that the integral master’s degree thesis is “profession- and practice-oriented” (Universitets- og høgskolerådet, 2017a, 2017b).

6. Discussion of ideological processes and discursive tensions

In the descriptions of the social structure of teacher education, as well as through the analysis of local plans and job advertisements, we find several ideological processes going on at the same time, as different reforms have had different starting points. When different ideological processes are parallel but have different starting points, a lack of synchronisation between reforms in teacher education and schools and what the institutions ask for in their job advertisements appears and contributes to discursive tensions. From our readings of local plans and job advertisements, we have found several discursive tensions, which we elaborate on and discuss below. We organise our discussion into the following five categories of discursive tensions: 1) musical skills versus pedagogical skills, 2) activity orientation versus reflection orientation, 3) academic orientation versus artistic orientation, 4) research focus versus teaching focus and 5) future orientation versus tradition orientation. These dichotomies help to keep the discursive order of music teacher education together. It is somewhat difficult to write about them separately because they overlap. In the following, we intend to clarify how we see these discursive tensions and discuss how they can be productive for and/or act as obstacles to the development of music teacher education.

6.1. Musical skills versus pedagogical skills

GTE is intended to provide training in both musical and pedagogical skills, but given the time and resource limitations, it can be all too challenging to balance these skills. Although the national guidelines for GTE show a balance between developing students’ musical and pedagogical competence, local plans and schedules reveal that musical training is prioritised on campus, while more general pedagogical training is left for the teacher practicum in schools. The schedules from institutions that do not offer music as a master’s degree subject show that musical activities such as singing in a choir, playing in a band, and composition are prioritised on campus, while classroom methods and music pedagogical theories are left for students to read about on their own and/or work on within colloquium. This is the result of inadequate teaching resources in the programme. GTE is not dimensioned for musical training in the same way as conservatories. Nevertheless, some institutions continue to teach as if the music subject in GTE were the same as at a conservatoire (Sætre, 2014), which takes time away from teaching and training in pedagogical skills. Earlier research has also found that students in music teacher education often expect more training in musical skills than pedagogical skills (Bouij, 1998), and they often identify more as musicians than as teachers (Ballantyne et al., 2012), particularly at the beginning of their education. Such findings strengthen the impression of a discursive tension between musical and pedagogical skills in music teacher education more in general.

A follow-up question connected to the job advertisements is whether music teacher education institutions advertise for advanced, experienced musicians or pedagogical and practice-relevant experience and expertise? We do not have the data to establish what institutions prioritise if they do not have candidates who have both musical and pedagogical experience and high-level skills. In the advertisements for staff within teacher education, we have seen that the emphasis is on closeness to the profession, competence in disciplinary didactics, and teaching experience. The vast majority of these use established terms ranging from “lecturer” to “professor” for job titles. Three samples, however, used the title for the vacant position to indicate that the job involved performance-related musical activities. This suggests that prioritising performative musical practices is the exception rather than the norm. In other words, teaching experience and research qualification are sought more often than performative musical qualifications.

6.2. Activity orientation versus reflection orientation

The language for the music subject in elementary schools has long centred on practice and activity as opposed to theory. This practice and activity orientation seem to be a strong value, even an ideal, in the music subject. This is not particularly a phenomenon in Norway but a common tradition in Western schools (McCarthy, 2004). We have seen how the verbs “musicking”, “listening” and “composing” in previous national curriculum texts have only merely been exchanged for other verbs in the newest curriculum while making the same references to musical activity: “to play music” and “to make music”. The two other new core elements in the national curriculum (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2020), “to experience music” and to develop “cultural understanding”, may not be activity-oriented to the same degree. We can talk about listening activities, but we do not connect activity to experience in the same way. “cultural understanding” also stands out as different, as it is a noun representing a condition such as wisdom, knowledge or competence. Activity is an ideal not only in music education but in educational theory in general (Von Wright, 2005). Von Wright indicates that the opposite of activity is passivity; where the first promotes learning, the latter hinders it. This dichotomy maintains activity as something positive and important for education. We can see it in the names of the different parts of the local plans, such as “forms of activity” and “learning activities”, which are not characteristic solely of plans for the music subject but for all subjects. Six institutions emphasise in their job advertisements that practical competence is a requirement for prospective teacher educators by prefixing the required pedagogical competence with “practical-”. However, when activity receives this kind of emphasis, other valuable conditions for education may be neglected.

An unbalanced focus on activity can, for instance, limit the time available for reflection and extended thinking, which could come into conflict with the ongoing academisation of GTE. Although music as a school subject is practice- and activity-oriented, does this mean that the music subject in GTE must be similarly activity-oriented? It seems unclear where the division should be in music as a school subject, in contrast with music as a teacher education subject (Borgen et al., 2020).

6.3. Academic orientation versus artistic orientation

In our analysis we have identified the demands for academic knowledge both in teacher education and for staff at the institutions. The academic orientation at the institutional level is, for instance, connected to the claims of a university’s profile or to ambitions to become a university. In teacher education, the concept of research-based knowledge has become strongly associated with the understanding of the academisation of teacher education. This includes the recent change in teacher education from four-year bachelor’s degree studies to five-year master’s degree studies. As important as “research-based” is the concept of “profession-orientation”, which is stressed both in teacher education and on the institutional level. In our data, the young universities emphasise that they are profession-oriented universities “close to the labour market”. Afdal (2017) questions the forms of knowledge activated when discourses such as “research-based” and “profession-oriented” become basic preconditions of national curriculum change processes in teacher education and engineering education in Norway. She points to how knowledge about specific professional problems and about theory-based decisions are considered equally important in teacher education, in contrast with the more procedural knowledge and innovative capacity highlighted in engineering education. This profession-specific knowledge is also sought after in job advertisements, which emphasise both the importance of prior work experience in compulsory school and a prior academic record in terms of publications and research experience.

In the local plans we have seen little focus on research-based education in Cycle 1, particularly at institutions that do not offer music as a master’s degree subject. Academic demands are more prominent at institutions where the research and development thesis in the third year is placed in the music subject. The same institutions offer music as a master’s degree subject, and the modules for Cycle 2 are for obvious reasons focused on research in various ways. The latest GTE reform has made the challenge of balancing the relationship between practical skills (both musical and pedagogical) and academic skills (such as theoretical knowledge, methodological knowledge, academic writing skills and research-related ethical competence) more visible. Arguably, the academisation of teacher education feeds tensions that already exist in the field of music teacher education (Sætre, 2014). According to Larsson and Sjöberg (2021), the academisation of teacher education has some paradoxes. Teacher autonomy is, on the one hand, emphasised as an important part of teacher professionalisation, while, on the other hand, “teachers are constructed as practitioners that need to be managed and professionalized by others” (Larsson & Sjöberg, 2021). Holgersen and Holst (202), on the other hand, find that the academisation of music teacher education strengthens the field with more research and development work in collaboration with the practice field (p. 142), despite the limited scope for practising musical craftsmanship, which is addressed in the same report (p. 9) as well as in other Scandinavian studies (Eidsvaag & Angelo, 2021; Ericsson & Lindgren, 2011).

6.4. Research focus versus teaching focus

Critique of educational research has traditionally been directed towards the relevance, or lack thereof, of the research outcome to the field of practice. This relates to how universities and compulsory schools can be perceived as two separate systems in which research and development activities are guided by different goals and purposes. A common critique of educational research is that the services provided are not immediately applicable beyond the scientific domain itself or within the compulsory school system (Rasmussen et al., 2007). Educational research may fulfil the norms of rigour and reliability that regulate the scientific systems, but it may not meet the needs for relevant knowledge about “what works” in the context of schools. This tension between the research community’s focus and the needs addressed in the field of practice is addressed discursively in the selection of job advertisements. Through the back-end sections the institutions signal that they profile themselves as “profession-oriented”, “work-life-oriented” and “close to the field of practice” and claim to have, for instance, a “profession-based and profession-oriented approach to research”. It remains to be seen if professional programmes at university colleges will change when the latter become profession-oriented universities.

Even if the emerging Norwegian profession-oriented universities attain a profession-oriented profile for their research activities, some challenges may still remain as regards music in GTE. Music as a school subject builds a three-dimensional model encompassing ars, scientia and craft dimensions (Nielsen, 1998) and reflecting the forms of knowledge within the scope of the base subject on which the school subject rests. This may, however, be the source of tensions over what kind of research focus can be considered “profession-oriented” and “close to practice” within a subject spanning not only artistic but also pedagogical activities. To what extent can an educational researcher deal with artistic development as a research focus and still claim to be profession-oriented and close to the field of practice? In the local plans for cycle 2, only one institution stands out with a clear and explicit focus on arts-based research. This indicates that there might also be a discursive tension inside the research focus about the space for arts-based research as a relevant research form in teacher education.

6.5. Future orientation versus tradition orientation

At the social structural level of teacher education, there is an order of discourse according to which education should meet global challenges such as climate change, digitalisation, political conflict and migration issues. This order of discourse suggests that educational institutions can adapt knowledge production according to global needs. On the other hand, educational institutions are expected to preserve established knowledge and values—an old tradition and the most typical task of an educational institution. Though education may have to perform both tasks, the two orders of discourse form a dichotomy that reveals a discursive tension.

The guidelines for teacher education include a learning outcome formulation that takes account of future challenges and needs for change: “the student is capable of contributing to academic change processes by placing emphasis on innovation, change and flexibility in his/her own role as teacher”. This formulation was not reflected in many local plans at the time we collected them. INN is an exception with the formulation—“the student can contribute to disciplinary processes of change through innovation, change and flexibility in his/her own teacher role” – quite close to the formulation in the guidelines. While INN maintains a focus on change in the teacher role, we have seen in the analysis that NTNU connects the concept of change to research in the arts: that art is an agent for change and that art can contribute to change. This stands out as a way of thinking about knowledge creation for change in music teacher education that we do not find at the other institutions. Apart from OsloMet, which has included 21st-century skills in its local plans, most of the institutions have cut and pasted from the national guidelines, or even omitted the national guidelines formulation. On the other hand, key concepts such as “digital tools” and “cultural diversity”, which are a focus in the local plans of all institutions, may reflect a future orientation, as the future is often associated with more advanced digital tools than today and with more diverse societies due to the growth in migration around the globe. The inclusion of youth culture and children’s culture in music teacher education may also be associated with a future orientation, as adolescents and children are the future, and their cultural expressions change rapidly and challenge music teachers to stay up to date. On the other hand, many songs and cultural expressions associated with youth and children are part of cultural heritage and thus something that educational institutions strive to preserve. Thus, this is more complex than either a future or tradition orientation. Most local plans also focus on preserving certain activity forms, genres and cultural heritage. The different opinions about how these two sides of the dichotomy should be balanced in music teacher education can create tensions in the field.

The analysis of job advertisements has revealed different views of knowledge at the different institutions. Knowledge can mean conservation or innovation—the development of new knowledge. Most of the institutions demonstrate a dynamic view of knowledge: “Knowledge for a better world” (NTNU) and “Co-creating knowledge is our common vision” (UiA). This is also close to how knowledge is reflected in the new Norwegian curriculum for schools. Furthermore, the university ambitions of several of the institutions may in and of themselves be preservative and build on old traditions. Those institutions presenting themselves as “young universities” may therefore mark a different set of values than the “old universities” by leaning towards the future and not being understood as preservative.

7. Concluding remarks

The intention of this article has been to give a picture of how ideological processes constitute the music subject in the new five-year GTE in Norway. We have seen how these ongoing processes generate tensions in a field where discourses to some degree compete and in other cases complement each other. This gives us insights into some of the obstacles for implementing the aims of the teacher education reform into the music subject, as well as ongoing renewal and possible changes for the time to come. We have addressed a conflict between the institutional focus on musical skills and musical activity and performance inside the music subject and the more general aims of the GTE reform to strengthen the teacher students’ research competence as well as the connection between theory and practice. These findings indicate that the teacher education institutions need to find ways to balance these different interests and demands. In addition, preservation of traditions seems important for the field of music but can also hinder renewal of the music subject to stay relevant and adjust for the needs of new times. This is another challenge for the teacher education institutions to balance in changing times. Our analysis has shown that the social structure of teacher education in Norway is, like many other countries, governed by international harmonisation of higher education across national borders. The reform of Norwegian GTE into a master’s program is one of the direct results of such harmonisation. Our findings have shown what consequences this can lead to, which can be learning points not only for Norwegian GTE, but also for other countries going through similar processes.

Since we collected documents at an early stage of the implementation of the new teacher education reform, we may have found less variation between the institutions than would perhaps have been the case at a later stage, when the institutions would have had time to revise their plans according to institutional interests and values. One explicit intention of the national guidelines for GTE was to create space for local institutional priorities. To obtain deeper knowledge about the institutional variation, it will be necessary to conduct more research on revised local plans, particularly once there are students who have completed all five years of the newly implemented five-year approach to teacher education. The same could be said about adjustments according to the new national curriculum for primary and secondary school (LK20). The lack of interdiscursive connections between the local plans and LK20 found in our analysis will be important to follow up as the teacher education institutions have been given time to develop changes that meet the new demands for primary and secondary school.

When using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model for critical discourse analysis, we have only had data for giving insight into two of these dimensions; 1) the social events (texts) and 2) the social structures (the conditioning context of the social events). We have not collected data that gives insight into 3) the social practice (production and consumption of text). Our analysis therefore lacks insight into this dimension of the music subject in GTE. The influences of ideological processes and the discursive tensions that we have identified in the researched documents would have been interesting to follow up in the everyday practice of the music subject in teacher education. More research is therefore needed on how music teacher education and its conditions are experienced by both teacher educators and preservice teachers.

For future research it would further be useful to see if findings from our study are comparable with findings from other countries going through similar processes as the Norwegian GTE. It would also be of relevance to compare with other subjects in GTE to see if they struggle with similar issues as the music subject, or if some challenges are particular for the music subject. We have shown in this article that music education research from several countries reveal that the music subject has had a resistance to change despite policy reforms in teacher education. This resistance is partly recognisable in our data, though bearing in mind that the data collection was done at an early stage of the implementation of the reform. On the other hand, we also find space for innovation and possible change through our analysis. Though there are discursive tensions in the documents, and some resistance towards the national policy for changes on the local institutional level, we also find potential for development and change for the music subject. This gives hope for keeping the music subject relevant for GTE towards an unknown future.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council and developed within the research project “Music Teacher Education for the Future” (FUTURED 2019-2022).

Disclosure statement

We wish to confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest associated with this publication and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd [288436].

Notes on contributors

Silje Valde Onsrud

Silje Valde Onsrud is a full professor in music education at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. She teaches music in generalist teacher education and manages Ph.D. courses in arts education. Her research interests include critical perspectives, such as gender issues in music education, critical pedagogy and pedagogy of discomfort in music education. Of empirical interest is both musical material and musical practice. Onsrud has edited a scientific anthology for Routledge and published in several international journals.

Øystein Kvinge

Øystein Kvinge is an associated professor in music education at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. He teaches music in generalist teacher education and a Masters program in Arts education. His research interests include music technology, didactic improvisation and arts-based research practices. He regularly performs with his salsa orchestra and his jazz trio.