Social media has led to new opportunities for learning music. In less formalized settings, a whole new arena for learning music has developed. The aim of this article is to investigate student teachers’ experiences of learning to play an instrument with the Internet as a teacher. The investigation was done as an action research study where twelve beginning teacher-training students were given the task to use the Internet to learn how to play an instrument. The students were organized in peer groups to help each other. Documentation of the progress happened through logbooks. The project lasted for half a year in 2011 and had a triple intention: to provide the students with experience about learning how to play by help of the Internet, for the students to learn to play a second instrument, and to investigate if and how learning practices for learning an instrument aided by the Internet could be useful in music teacher training.
This article aims to present how music teachers in Sweden used the facebook group Musiklärarna in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic (March andApril, 2020) to cope with challenges related to teaching music. The study is based on Biesta's perspective on the teacher profession. With the consent of the participants, we have analysed the 303 posts (and their comments) that directly addressed the COVID-19 situation during that period. We found that the group works as an important collegial forum and that the teachers pragmatically use the group to solve educational problems; further, the posts concerning work-conditions get the most engagement. The most frequent types of posts concerned how to design teaching situations under the new conditions. Specifically, asking questions, sharing material, asking for material and letting off steam were the most common types. Music teachers seem to be loyal, collegial and intent on solving any challenge to facilitate students' learning as regulated in the syllabus. We hope this article can motivate other researchers to perform similar studies or build on our results. We conclude by speculating about what the new normal will be for music teachers when the pandemic is over.
An important feature of music is its ability to affect people in unpredictable and deep ways. Music has therefore been used to oppress and (mis)lead people by dictatorships, religious leaders and supermarkets amongst others, and to help lure people into acting in ways that are beneficial for the manipulators. Such forms of ethically dubious musical manipulation happen because of the sublime potential of music to do something to people, and in such a way that they have few ways to defend themselves against it. Thus, the power of music is also the reason people seek out the unforeseen affects and effects in their encounters with the arts. Building on a theory of aesthetic communication, and seeking support from Deleuze and Guattari (1994), Dewey (2005) and Spinoza (Spinoza & Lagerberg, 2001), the aim of this article is to propose the term manipulation as a tool in music education or as a vehicle for teachers and researchers to help frame activities in music education as meaningful for aesthetic communication. I argue that manipulation is a necessary component of all art and aesthetic communication, that, despite its usual negative connotations, manipulation is an act that can be used for good or bad purposes, and that music education has a duty to educate pupils in artistic manipulation. Manipulation is considered action, and as such, it is argued that it can take on any value from good to bad depending on the intentions and effects it causes. This article invites a discussion of possible ways of designing music education that revolve around tinkering with aesthetic communication, and wherein desirable manipulation plays a vital role, and outcomes-based curricula are replaced with an alternative more compatible with the arts.
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