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Having the possibility to experience meaning in artistic settings is a human right. However, several studies show that structures and norms may prevent human beings from participating in artistic and cultural activities. Moreover, it is not given that all forms of participation offer meaningful experiences, something which puts a great responsibility upon organizers of artistic events. The current study is based in a project where elderly people were given the chance to participate in processes of development and performance of collaborative contemporary dance. The specific aim of the study was to describe and analyse the phenomenon of the meaningful body based on a phenomenological approach. To get access to the dancers’ lived experiences, six participants were interviewed. The transcribed interviews were analysed in a phenomenological manner. The analysis resulted in three themes, which together describe the phenomenon of the lived body, namely: the intertwined body, the border-crossing body, and the body feeling at home. The themes are related to phenomenological philosophy regarding aging, awareness, existence, and aesthetic experience, as well as to art education situations and societal norms. Keywords: elderly dancers, meaningful body, phenomenology, intertwinement, border-crossing, joy Webpage photo: Anders Larsson

Taking experiences from a contemporary multi-arts dance project as a starting point, this article explores how such a project can offer opportunities for being and becoming among older amateur dancers. The article takes a phenomenological approach, in which holistic experience and sharing of experiences are central. The phenomenon of the investigation is self-conceptualisation. The artistic process and context constitute an adult educational situation. To come close to the lived experiences of the dancers, the rehearsals and performance were observed and documented. Six of the participants were also interviewed. The material was analysed in a hermeneutical phenomenological manner, and Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking regarding ageing was used as a theoretical lens. The results show how the self-images of the participants change during the course of the project. The dance activities seem to give the older participants opportunities to remain themselves, even as they allow themselves to change. They learn to know themselves, each other, and the world.

This article communicates a study on dance for people over 65 in Sweden. Earlier studies on dance for elderly people have primarily focused on treatment and wellbeing. The current study centers on the right to make oneself heard in and through contemporary dance as an artistic form of expression, regardless of age, gender, or geographical context. The specific aim of the study is to describe and analyze the experiences of women aged over 65 in a rural area, who participated in contemporary dance workshops as a form of arts learning. The workshops, which were observed and documented, constituted part of an EU-financed project, Age on stage. Participants also shared experiences through informal chats and e-mails. The material was analyzed in a narrative manner. The results show that the workshops created a safe space for dance as a dwelling place, where dance was discovered, and at the same time developed, collaboratively. The results also highlighted the importance of this type of artistic participation for elderly women in terms of developing an understanding of themselves and coping with life.

The aim of the study was to describe and analyse what aspects of musical learning constitute the process of developing a collective artistic performance among twenty amateur dancers over 65 years old. In focus is how the musical learning proceeds throughout the project, where a series of workshops, consisting of training, choreography and improvisation, leads towards a common performance built on the participants’ life stories. The study takes Heidegger’s existential phenomenology as a starting point. Workshops, rehearsals and performances were observed, and video recorded regularly for one year. A sample of the participants was also interviewed. Generated material was analysed in a hermeneutic phenomenological manner. The results imply that the elderly people become themselves through movement in different musical situations. Crucial factors seem to be how they get to use themselves, each other, their bodies, their stories, their personal artistic forms of expressions and their imaginations, in interplay with music.

Recent studies of female guitar students in upper secondary school ensemble education suggest that girls behave, and are encouraged to behave, in more immanent ways than boys. They seem to receive less encouragement to stretch their bodies and become full musical human beings. Instead they become the second musical sex. During the course of my work with the problem of how to create space for girls playing the electric guitar in educational settings, I have continually found myself wondering how to create educational spaces and relations in ways that let all pupils, independent of sex, realize ideas, transcend as musical bodies, and become what they already are. If teachers and pupils are interrelated bodies, teachers must be aware of how they use their bodies when it comes to creating space for all pupils to develop and stretch out their bodies. The actions of the music teacher, as a musical body, must be balanced in relation to the other musical bodies in the room, as well as to physical preconditions, goals, visions, and expectations of the students. In this article, I want to delve into the subject of bodily interaction, teachers’ responsibilities, and questions of intentional educational bodily relations. The aim is to share my close reading of Young’s philosophical thinking regarding gender structures and especially female comportment, motility, and spatiality, and develop a set of prerequisites for intentional bodily (music) educational relations. With a starting point in research-based inspiration and motivation for conducting the current philosophical investigation, I share my close reading of Young’s theories regarding female situated bodies. Continually I relate to excerpts from two interviews with female guitar students, exemplifying musical body-relational experiences. Finally I share and reflect upon a developed thinking about mindful bodily (music) educational relations.

This article explores the meaning and function of streaming media as a potential facilitator of musicalBildung. Taking the affordances of streaming media technologies as a starting point, the article thusfocuses on the formative and cultivating dimensions a music streaming service such as Spotifymight offer. The specific aim of this article is to describe and analyse how musical Bildung may evolvewithin a Spotify context from a user perspective. To address the aim from the point of view of musiceducation, Spotify users’ activities and experiences of streaming media interactions were accessed,inspired by internet-related ethnography. Stimulated recall interviews, focusing on the participants’experiences as well as their actual use of Spotify’s streaming service, were conducted, recorded, andtranscribed. The generated material was subjected to co-operative hermeneutic content analysis.The results illuminate how Bildung evolves in users’ encounters with the service and with art mediatedvia Spotify. Relevant topics occurring in the human-art-technology relationship of Bildung from aHeideggerian perspective were Being-possible, the ability-to-be, and Spotify as the Other. In sum, itcan be stated that Bildung evolves when Spotify exceeds the thingness of the Other, becoming a workof art in itself, throwing the user into Being.

This study sheds light on dance as democracy among people 65+. The article presents a study that is part of the project Age on Stage, in which elderly people were offered to express themselves thro ...

Music educational researchers in the Nordic countries have pointed out how municipal arts schools are organised based on, and tend to reproduce, anthropocentric values and approaches, and that such unequal norms and structures are to be challenged. Taking a border-crossing musical comedy project as a starting point, the specific aim of the current study is to illuminate how, and on what levels, organisational norms and traditional structures can be challenged, and what possibilities and new challenges that occur in a project taking place beyond the Anthropocene. To be able to grasp the aspects of becoming within the project and how that is related to aspects of organisation, we created a research entanglement based on post-human theory. Hence, situations seen as webs of relations were created, including the actors: humans with intellectual disabilities, musical performance students, educators, artists, researchers, and varied digital communication tools. Observations, video recordings, collaborative writing, qualitative surveys, and interviews produced material for analysis. Actor-network theory was applied aiming to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks were constituted, as well as how the actors influenced each other. The results identify significant actors and trajectories in Sammankonst, that in turn challenge anthropocentric organisational structures of municipal arts schools.

Streaming media seems to have become a natural part in teachers’ professional life. Streamed music, primarily distributed by the company Spotify, sounds in most music and dance classrooms, not least in Swedish schools. Hence, the concepts of digitalization and listening are accentuated within the area of music education. Within the frames of a larger border-crossing research project financed by Wallenbergstiftelsen ‐ ‘Evolving bildung in the nexus of streaming services, art and users: Spotify as a case’, which aims to explore the meaning and function of streaming media as a facilitator of bildung, using Spotify as a case ‐ this presentation takes two interviews regarding Spotify use as a starting point. One music teacher and one dance teacher, among sixteen participants, were interviewed about their use of Spotify. The aim with the specific analysis was to describe the phenomenon of bildung regionalized to relational school settings, where streamed music, teachers and students come together in intended learning situations. The interviews were stimulated by the teachers’ own Spotify interfaces, and documented by the virtual communication tool Zoom. They were transcribed and analysed in a phenomenological narrative manner. The narrative is shaped as a dialogue between the two teachers, to make similarities and differences regarding relations with Spotify in the classroom setting visible. The result shows aspects of existential and essential bildung through listening taking place as being, thinking and acting with Spotify in the spirit of Heidegger.

This article takes experiences from a contemporary multi-artistic dance project as a starting-point. The aim is to describe and explore how such a project can offer possibilities for being and becoming among elderly amateur dancers, based on a phenomenological way of thinking. The phenomenon of the investigation is self-conceptualization. The multi-artistic process and context is defined as an adult educational situation. To come close to the lived experiences of the dancers, the rehearsals as well as the performance were observed, and documented. Six of the participants were also interviewed. The material was analyzed in a hermeneutical phenomenological manner, and de Beauvoir’s thinking regarding aging, was used as a theoretical lens. The results show how the self-images of the participants change throughout the project. The dance activities seem to give the elderly possibilities to remain themselves, even if they become different. They learn to know themselves, each other and the world.

Recent reforms in England and the USA give evidence that teaching methods and content can change rapidly, given a strong external pressure, for example through economic incentives, inspections, school choice, and public display of schools’ and pupils’ performances. Educational activities in the Scandinavian countries have increasingly become dominated by obligations regarding assessment and grading. A common thread is the demand for equal and just assessment and grading through clear criteria and transparent processes. Torrance states that clarity in assessment procedures, processes, and criteria has underpinned widespread use of coaching, practice, and provision of formative feedback to boost achievement, but that such transparency encourages instrumentalism. He concludes that the practice of assessment has moved from assessment of learning, through assessment for learning, to assessment as learning, with “assessment procedures and practices coming completely to dominate the learning experience” and “criteria compliance” replacing “learning”. Thus, formative assessment, in spite of its proven educational potential, threatens to be deformative. In this article we will explore to what extent and how this development is visible in two cases, presenting music education in one Norwegian and one Swedish compulsory school setting. Three thematic threads run through this exploration: quality, power, and instrumentalism.

Previous studies indicate that ideas related to special education could influence the way arts education is performed and motivated in schools. Further investigation is therefore required in order to raise awareness of how perspectives on inclusion can serve as a starting point for arts education, and vice versa. This article takes it starting point in an ethnographic double case study of arts education practices. Data were collected during the school year 2013/2014 in two Scandinavian schools (for pupils aged 6–13) with an articulated commitment to the arts. The methods used for data collection were observation and interviews. The material was analysed from a phenomenological point of view, and the analysis showed a predominantly holistic view of inclusion in the two schools. Five dimensions of inclusion were identified through the analysis: providing arts education for all, being connected to something larger, allowing access to different forms of expression and communication, establishing preco...

The starting point for the study presented in this article is constituted by experiences of using Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy aiming to describe and understand the becoming of musical women in Swedish schools. Earlier research conducted outside the area of music shows that Beauvoir’s theories can help to explain – and provide means of change for – situations where there is a risk that traditional gender roles will be conserved. A majority of gender studies in the field of music education are based on the performativity theory of Judith Butler. In comparison, de Beauvoir states that repetitions and habits are stratified in the body as experiences, and that human beings are able to make choices in a situation. The aim of the study is to explore how caring is nurtured among girls in Swedish music educational settings. Material generated through two phenomenological studies conducted within specialist music programs in lower respectively higher secondary education in Sweden, constituted the empirical base for a re-analysis. The re-analysis followed a hermeneutical phenomenological analytical model. Examples of how caring seemed to be nurtured among girls in music education appeared at different levels and in different situations. It concerns actions made by the girls aiming to make the social and musical setting function in agreed upon “good” ways, namely in the form of taking initiatives, filling “gaps”, and being flexible, andbecoming (aware) musical women. In the end we reflect upon causes and changes in relation to actions that seem to establish and maintain female students as immanent, and non-able to run their own projects, to speak with de Beauvoir.

Earlier research has stated that there is a risk that traditional gender roles are conserved in non-formal popular music education, which might challenge teachers when it comes to offering ...