The Discomfort of Intercultural Learning in Music Teacher Education

Abstract

Recognizing and ethically engaging with the inherent diversity of music education contexts demands a continuous interrogation of the norms and values underpinning policy and practice in music teacher education. In doing so, teachers and students in higher education are challenged to question why and how students are socialized into particular music education systems, traditions, or perspectives and to consider alternatives. In this chapter, we explore such reflexive processes, employing a theoretical reading analysis through Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, and doxa. The data consists of group reflections and interviews with student-teachers that the authors conducted as part of an intercultural arts education project between Finnish masters students and two Cambodian NGOs. Based on our analysis, we argue that stepping outside of one's cultural, musical, and pedagogical comfort zone is a necessary component of constructing and (re)negotiating teacher visions in music teacher education. However, this renegotiation may be discomforting for student-teachers, unsettling deep-seated visions of what good music education is and ought to be-the taken-for-granted doxa of music teaching and learning. Therefore, for music-teacher education to become transformative and reflexive, there is a need for such educational experiences that engage with processes that are related to the art of living with difference.

Bourdieu and the Quest for Intercultural Transformations

“…At the time and in the aftermath of Oberg's (1954Oberg's ( , 1960) original conceptualization, "culture shock" has often been associated with individual adaptational stress and personal misfortunes (Furnham, 1993;Lombard, 2014;Pedersen, 1995). However, other voices have long pointed out that experiences of "culture shock" also offer transformational opportunities (Kallio & Westerlund, 2020;Montuori & Fahim, 2004;Saether, 2020;Zhou et al, 2008) which may coincide with more or less (dis)comforting processes of intercultural capital realization (Pöllmann, 2016). Bourdieu (1986) influentially distinguished between embodied cultural capital in terms of people's incorporated cultural knowledge and know-how; objectified cultural capital as manifested through literary or musical productions, sculptures, paintings, machinery, or tools; and institutionalized cultural capital, such as the official degrees and certificates provided by educational institutions.…”

“…At the time and in the aftermath of Oberg’s (1954, 1960) original conceptualization, “culture shock” has often been associated with individual adaptational stress and personal misfortunes (Furnham, 1993; Lombard, 2014; Pedersen, 1995). However, other voices have long pointed out that experiences of “culture shock” also offer transformational opportunities (Kallio & Westerlund, 2020; Montuori & Fahim, 2004; Sæther, 2020; Zhou et al, 2008) which may coincide with more or less (dis)comforting processes of intercultural capital realization (Pöllmann, 2016).…”

Higher Education as Context for Music Pedagogy Research

“…He was described as someone who challenged and annoyed his colleagues by always questioning the paradigms of Western art music and Western-oriented music philosophy. By pulling his colleagues out of their comfort zones, like Kallio and Westerlund (2020) described, he was seen as a force that moved students into unknown musical and pedagogical grounds. He is, by putting the students in these situations, giving them an opportunity to surrender to a de-territorialisation of the existing syllabus.…”

Co-constructing an intercultural professional learning community in music education

“…As several music education research studies point out (e.g. Brøske, 2020;Kallio & Westerlund, 2020;Saether, 2010;Westerlund, Partti & Karlsen, 2015), being placed in an unfamiliar environment intensifies learning about oneself and one's professional boundaries. Working in a new context demands critical thinking and new kinds of problem-solving, encouraging the development of unaccustomed solutions, and this effectively invites one to challenge the foreground contextual presumptions of music teaching and learning (Westerlund, Karlsen & Partti 2020).…”