Var får instrumentallärarna sina pedagogiska idéer ifrån? : Om bakgrunden till didaktiska ställningstaganden

Abstract

During my time as Director of Studies at the Municipal Music School of Lund, Sweden,

I have had several discussions with teachers, students, parents, municipality civil

servants, and politicians. I have concluded that in general, culture schools and music

schools are looked upon as institutions where parents safely can send their children

convinced about that they get a qualified education regarding the instrument of choice.

Even if one sees the above as an affirmation of education within the cultural sector the

question arises as to which influences affect the educational and didactic positions of

teaching staff. In other words, where do the pedagogical ideas come from?

Consequently, as a professional teacher of instrumental music, I ask the following

questions: What education and what teaching do we deliver, and what is the teaching

philosophy that create the pedagogic ideas of the teachers? The questions lead to the

title of the thesis: “From where do the pedagogic ideas of instrumental teachers

emanate”?

The principal aim of the thesis is to define and illuminate factors which are

antecedentents to the development and meaning of the teaching philosophy of the

instrumental teachers.

The theoretical points of departure are based upon the fundamental questions of

didactics: what is taught, how should it be taught, and what is the purpose of teaching.

The empirical data consist of eight interviews with instrumental teachers from four

municipal music schools in South Sweden. The interviewees told life stories concerning

adolescence, university education, and contemporary conditions.

The findings show that the teachers are not explicitly conscious from where they have

got their pedagogical ideas. The ideas emerge from the context in which the teachers

were growing up, and the social context has had a great impact. The person who was the

first instrumental teacher of the teachers intervieweed, irrespective of whether he or she

was a professional teacher or not, has had a large impact. It was also found that the

methodological education that the teachers have received, had not served as the base

that the teachers probably needed when the started their professional career.

It is possible to make a categorization based on the differences of mind sets of pedagogy

of the interviewed teachers. The categorization contains the following categories:

didactics, pedagogs, and musicians. Together the categories relate to a spectrum of

different learning styles connected to different apprehensions of learning: spanning from

formal learning, in which the pedagogic ideas of the teachers are approaching formal

learning to a learning style in which the teacher’s ideas are in line with informal

learning. Between these two categories there are the pedagogs, embracing both formal

and informal leaning.

The categorization, which is a result of an empirically based development of concepts,

has to be tested further empirically as well as theoretically. The discussion about the

categories and their connection to different theories of learning, forms the theoretical

contribution of the thesis.

It is my ambition that this thesis may contribute to further discussions about pedagogy,

based both on praxis and science, that would help all of us, who are involved in music

education, to defend and develop our pedagogical ideas in a professional way.

• author: Andersson, Ruben
• supervisor: [unknown] [unknown]
• organization: Malmö Academy of Music
• publishing date: 2005
• type: Thesis
• publication status: published
• subject: Music
• keywords: musikskolan instrumentalmusik lärstilar didaktik pedagogik lärare municipal music schools instrumental music learning styles teachers teaching methods didactics
• language: English
• LU publication?: yes
• id: 81a7db13-b079-4e4e-ae4a-e3045d1b20ce (old id 538174)
• date added to LUP: 2016-04-04 11:11:00
• date last changed: 2021-08-11 10:33:10