Conversation as meaning-making

As discussed in the previous chapters, music school teachers work at the intersection of traditions of different cultural and temporal provenances, each of them with embedded values, requirements, and standards of evaluation. It is also probably fair to assume that experienced teachers have developed their own convictions about right and good aims to pursue in music education and how to pursue them. In addition, each student arrives with a particular set of ideas about what constitutes good music and a flourishing life. According to MacIntyre, the two distinct types of good involved in educational progress are

the goods of skill and understanding at which each type of art and inquiry and the whole sequence of arts and inquiries aim. And there are the goods of individuals, who happen at particular times in their lives to be students or teachers or inquirers. (MacIntyre, 1998, p. 103).

We may expect, then, that traces and voices from a perhaps unprecedented number of sociocultural contexts are present as music school teachers make decisions about what to teach and how.

The classic strategy for understanding a complex situation better by ‘listening to’ the relevant considerations is conversation, deliberation, or dialogue, epitomised in the Socratic method. Interpersonal and intrapersonal dialogue about how to proceed in situations permeated by several and perhaps incommensurable values have been discussed by many authors. For example, in philosophy, although the authors differ in their theoretical outlooks and disagree about the possibility and desirability of achieving consensus and on the truth-value of what is agreed upon, there are resemblances in the concerns expressed by Gadamer for dialogical hermeneutics and elenchtic dialogues, Habermas for communicative rationality and deliberation, and in Benhabib’s elaboration of Habermasian communicative ethics.

Additional interpretations of how individuals as well as traditions communicate have been offered by dialogical theories that focus on interactional and contextual aspects of human sense-making (Linell, 2009). Dialogical ideas, Linell suggests, have been applied to so many areas of study that one might speak of a ‘dialogical turn’ in the human sciences. The description of sense- making in interaction offered by Linell bears a strong resemblance with Pinar’s ‘complicated conversation’ (see above, p. 74):

When people communicate in situated interaction, their dialogue is not only with their actual interlocutors. There are also ‘third parties’ of different kinds, and one could also talk about a dialogue with, not only within sociocultural traditions. While this might seem to be a metaphorical way of speaking, it can be concretized in such aspects of discourse as quotations from virtual participants . . . (Linell, 2009, p. 59). In this study, ‘conversation’ is understood in both a concrete and a metaphorical sense, both intrapersonal and interpersonal, and as expressed in words, actions, artefacts, and musical activity. Although sociocultural theory or theorists are not foregrounded in this study, the strategy is influenced by the central sociocultural

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idea that individuals are constituted by the social and, consequently, that the social is present in the individual. I argue that the ‘conversation’ described in this way is palpable in music school teaching and learning (see above, p. 10). As discussed earlier, the Finnish music school curriculum and its legal framework are in fact deliberately formulated in such a way that teachers are expected to engage in open discussion (see Heimonen, 2003, p. 160). The deliberations on goodness that are of interest to this study can be understood as ‘outer’ conversations as well as ‘inner’ conversations which take place, for instance, when a teacher seems to discuss a decision ‘inside’ his or her own mind.93

A related metaphor is used by Oakeshott (1959/1991, p. 489), who compares education to an initiation into the conversation of humankind, “a conversation which goes on both in public and within ourselves”. Quoting Oakeshott, Swanwick (1996, p. 44) remarks that music and musical sounds are important strands of this conversation; discourse is not limited to verbal language. Understood in this way, ‘talking’ can be done in person or symbolically, for example through sounds, spoken or silently remembered commentary, quotes, artefacts, or policy documents. Traces of culture influence both inner and outer conversation, verbal or musical, and musical sounds as well as “the word” are always “half someone else’s”; someone who cannot always be identified (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293).

For musicians and music educators, there is a concrete sense in which symbolic conversations as well as simultaneous and multivoiced presence of values are manifested. Musical instruments are excellent examples of the metaphorical kind of conversation between human and artefact described by Schön (1987): the instrument ‘answers back’ immediately and audibly to deliberate acts on the part of the musician. Robinson (2007) points out that what is in play in different musics are ruling metaphors from the particular cultures and times in which the music emerged. Moreover, music history is rife with examples of multilayered compositions where traditions and metaphors are deliberately combined and can be seen (and heard) as ‘conversing’ with each other.94

In his work on ethics, MacIntyre (e.g. 1981/2007, 1990) often insists that it is crucial to become aware that present-day human beings are living among fragments of traditions and contexts. As a consequence, our sense-making and ability to make judgments about the respective merits of different traditions are likely to be both limited and confused. According to MacIntyre (1990), understanding what is at stake in practices is important not just for making

93 _{See e.g. Dascal (2005); Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010).}

94 _{For instance, the medieval secular motet juxtaposes vernacular text and melody with}

Gregorian chant from the Latin Mass, and present-day digital remixes can include musi- cal influences from several decades or even centuries. An example of embodied multi- layeredness might be a contemporary violinist attempting to express, in gesture and sound, the sense of exquisite elegance and attentive politeness embedded in the 18th century string quartets by Joseph Haydn.

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informed choices about what we will find worth our time and effort, but also in order to be able to participate in polemical conversations: to gain a better understanding of ‘who is speaking to whom’ in terms of the identity, continuity and presuppositions of different and perhaps rival participants (p. 196). “A living tradition”, MacIntyre (1981/2007) writes, “is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute the tradition” (p. 222). As suggested by Wertsch (1993), even in speeches given by one individual, “the informed ear can hear a polyphony of voices” (p. 64). I argue that a similar situation seems to exist in music and music education: fragments of traditions and their criteria of excellence continue to live and develop side by side. In many musical styles, synthesis, mixing and innovation are considered marks of ingenuity and creativity; ‘purity’ of traditions is not necessarily a priority in music. However, I am postulating that music educators who are in the process of scrutinising, developing and perhaps changing their work are participating in an ongoing conversation (both concrete and symbolic) about the musical and ‘extramusical’ values and goods that are embedded and defended in practices of music and music education. In this study, that conversation is made explicit and open for analysis.

Conversations on music education

Many traditions for improving teaching and learning involve the seemingly straightforward idea that teachers can learn from discussing their work with colleagues and other people who are relevant to their practice. In The Culture of

Education, Bruner (1996) emphasises that for school cultures, it is important to

create opportunities to think out loud and actively elaborate new suggestions in an atmosphere where ideas are treated respectfully and pragmatically (p. 77). Professional development among teachers, Muijs and Harris (2006) have suggested, is more successful and has more impact on student learning when collegial collaboration is the norm. Ways of working in which deliberate conversation constitutes an important part include classic and more recent versions of reflective practice, action research, teacher inquiry, practitioner inquiry, teacher research, collaborative research, collaborative learning, teacher learning, mentoring, peer mentoring, peer learning, expansive learning, network learning, professional learning conversations, and continuing professional development (CPD).95

In music education, ways of developing teaching through reflective practice and similar approaches where conversation is involved have been described in a number of research reports and other scholarly texts. Examples include edited volumes by Burnard and Hennessy (2009); De Baets and Buchborn (2014);

95 _{The literature on these and related traditions in education and educational research is}

vast (for some recent overviews, see e.g. Avalos, 2011; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Craig, 2009; Earl & Timperley, 2009; Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon, 2014; Kooy & van Veen, 2012; Lyons, 2010; McNiff, 2013; Noffke & Somekh, 2009; Rönnerman & Salo, 2014).

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Odam and Bannan (2005) reporting on the Reflective Conservatoire project; and, in Finland, Juntunen, Nikkanen and Westerlund (2013). More than twenty case studies of collaborative learning and reflective practice in higher music education have been described in an edited volume by Gaunt and Westerlund (2013). Roulston et al (2005) describe mentoring and research in a group involving university educators and elementary music teachers. Cain (2008) has reviewed and analysed 24 action research projects in music education. Deliberation and critical reflection with explicit reference to the Aristotelian connection between praxis and phronesis are prominent in the theoretical work of e.g. Bowman and Regelski (see e.g. Regelski & Gates, 2009, Music education

for changing times). Cain (2007) and Haddon (2009) have studied mentoring for

trainee music teachers. Burnard and Björk (2010) have examined the potential of teacher-student dialogue and pupil voice for improving music teaching and learning.

One challenge in music education research which involves conversation is that part of what constitutes meaning for teachers and students comes in musical shape, not as words or numbers. For musicians and music teachers, evaluation of quality often takes place as more or less conscious benchmarking against a great number of memories of sound (see Schippers, 2007). What these sounds mean and how their qualities are to be assessed is notoriously difficult to put into words. Although it has been argued (Zandén, 2010) that music educators need to make efforts to retain and develop a professional and collegial evaluative language, not everything important there is to express about music can be captured in words. My understanding is that in practice development, music teachers cannot rely solely on verbal conversation.96 Similarly, since much of what music teachers are attempting to accomplish has to do with sound, research on teacher practice in music education needs to pay attention to musical as well as verbal expression.

Referring to the discussion so far in this chapter, the main criteria for choosing a design for the present study have been that the research would (1) involve practice development in which conversation about questions of values and aims is a part, (2) be relevant to the participants as well as to the researcher, (3) allow for iteration and flexibility during the research process, and (4) elicit rich, multilayered data where music or at least references to musical sound can be included. Epistemologically, the knowledge that is aimed for builds on “how and why people make meanings in particular contexts” (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2014, p. 440). Among the traditions mentioned above, the most promising alternative for this study seems to be collaborative research with elements of practitioner inquiry. The theoretical background for such a method is examined in the following section.

96 _{Words are only one medium for ideas, Dorschel (2010) asserts in his Ideengeschichte;}

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