Advancing Music Education in Northern Europe

David Hebert, Torunn Bakken Hauge, David G. Hebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351045971
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Advancing Music Education in Northern Europe tells the story of a unique organization that has contributed in profound ways to the professional development of music teachers in the Nordic and Baltic nations. At the same time, the book offers reflections on how music education and approaches to the training of music teachers have changed across recent decades, a period of significant innovations. In a time where international partnerships appear to be threatened by a recent resurgence in protectionism and nationalism, this book also more generally demonstrates the value of formalized international cooperation in the sphere of higher education. The setting for the discussion, Northern Europe, is a region arguably of great importance to music education for a number of reasons, seen, for instance, in Norway's ranking as the "happiest nation on earth", the well-known success of Finland's schools in international-comparative measures of student achievement, how Sweden has grappled with its recent experience as "Europe's top recipient of asylum seekers per capita", and Estonia's national identity as a country born from a "Singing Revolution", to name but a few examples. The contributors chronicle how the Nordic Network for Music Education (NNME) was founded and developed, document its impact, and demonstrate how the eight nations involved in this network – Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – are making unique contributions of global significance to the field of music education.

1 Introduction

Advancing music education in Northern Europe

Torunn Bakken Hauge and David G. Hebert

Across any 20-year period, much changes while much remains the same in human life, but what of value can be gained from considering the collective experience of university lecturers across two decades of their work cultivating the next generation of master music teachers in Northern Europe? This book, Advancing Music Education in Northern Europe: Twenty Years of the Nordic Network for Music Education, tells the story of a unique organization that has contributed in profound ways to the professional development of music teachers in the Nordic and Baltic nations. At the same time, it offers reflections on how both music education and approaches to the training of music teachers have changed across recent decades, a period of significant innovations. In this uncertain time, in which international partnerships appear to be threatened by a recent resurgence in protectionism and nationalism, this book also more generally demonstrates the value of formalized international cooperation in the sphere of higher education. The setting for our discussion, Northern Europe, is a region arguably of great importance to music education for a number of reasons, seen for instance in Norway’s recent ranking as “happiest nation on earth” (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2017), the well-known success of Finland’s schools in international-comparative measures of student achievement (Heim, 2016), how Sweden has grappled with its recent experience as “Europe’s top recipient of asylum seekers per capita” (Sorensen, 2017), and even Estonia’s national identity as a country produced by a “Singing Revolution” (Schwab, 2015), to name but a few examples. We chronicle how the Nordic Network for Music Education (NNME) was founded and developed, document its impact, and demonstrate from a global perspective how the eight nations involved in this network – Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – are making unique contributions of global significance to the field of music education. Music education has across recent decades become a fully developed and research-based field, with reference works that attempt to offer international comparisons and summaries of research findings (Bowman & Frega, 2012; Cox & Stevens, 2016; Hebert & Kertz-Welzel, 2016; McPherson & Welch, 2012), as well regional comparisons (Leong & Leung, 2013; Takizawa, 1992; Torres-Santos, 2017). However, our thorough search has revealed no previous books on major academic presses that offer an overview of music education across Northern Europe, and only one notable book on any music education organization (McCarthy, 2004).

Northern Europe is comprised of three components. Scandinavia, consisting of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, is unified by linguistic, political, economic, and cultural similarities, and rather than divided into three nations, Scandinavia was actually united at various points in earlier centuries and has much shared history. Scandinavia is at the center of the Nordic nations, which also include Iceland to the far West, and Finland to the far East. Iceland shares important similarities with Norway and Denmark, but Finland has even more of an identity of its own, and might be accurately understood as situated between Eastern and Western Europe, despite its strong historical ties to Sweden and its significant minority of Swedish-speaking Finns. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Finnish language is completely unlike Germanic and Scandinavian languages, yet is rather close to the Estonian language. Finland maintained its independence through the latter half of the 20th century, while the Baltics, including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were until 1991 part of the Soviet Union. Over the past quarter-century, Baltic nations have been rapidly modernizing and integrating with the rest of Europe at the same time that a rediscovery of their unique national identities is occurring, largely independent of Russian influence. However, despite complex histories, each of the eight countries in the network has preserved its unique cultural identity, of which music is an essential component.

Together, the Nordic and Baltic nations represent a significant part of the world, with major Nordic cities such as Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo, as well as other cities of great historical and cultural significance, such as Bergen, Tallinn, Reykjavik, Vilnius, and Riga. As of 2017, the Nordic countries have a combined population of around 27 million and an estimated total GDP of nearly $1.5 trillion. The Baltic countries, on the other hand, have a combined population of slightly more than 6 million, and an estimated total GDP of $100 billion. In terms of musical contributions, the Nordic and Baltic countries have produced many outstanding performers and composers, leading music ensembles, unique folk music genres, and popular music styles, and overall the entire region is especially rich in choral music traditions. The social role of music, as a way of uniting people and developing social cohesion, is very much emphasized in traditional cultural life, and its importance is maintained even in modernized lifestyles of the 21st century.

Music education research of all kinds comes from this part of the world, but there is a prevalence of qualitative interview-based studies bolstered by reference to philosophical theories. Unusual relative to other parts of the world is the fact that across recent decades, popular music pedagogy – often with amplified rock band instruments – has become a common mode of school music education in the Nordic countries. However, local folk music heritage and “world music” genres are also present in schools, while classical art music traditions are primarily maintained via the public “culture school” system that is available in most communities outside general comprehensive schools, especially through choirs. The Baltic countries have been especially successful at maintaining strong art music and folk music traditions, and creative approaches to jazz and improvised music can be found across nearly all of Northern Europe. One especially notable phenomenon is the song and dance festivals of the Baltic countries, which are acknowledged by UNESCO as globally significant cultural heritage events.

The Nordic countries are known worldwide for being rated as among the most advanced in the world in terms of the egalitarian democracy, quality of life, and social services characteristic of the “Nordic welfare state” model of governance. However, there are signs of rapid changes that bring new challenges. One development across recent decades is the rising popularity of English as the dominant language for international projects, which comes with both advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, the unexpected departure of the UK from the European Union, or “Brexit”, might in time change the relative importance of English language while it also threatens to encourage other nations to contemplate departure from this historic partnership widely credited with increasing pan-European cooperation and stability (including in the higher education sector). Moreover, recent populist movements in other European states as well as in the USA (under President Donald Trump) are calling for increasingly protectionist policies, with less support for international partnerships in various fields of research and development, so there appears to be a greater need than ever before to effectively demonstrate the value of these kinds of international networks in not only music education but other academic fields as well. Finally, another major development of relevance is the “migrant crisis”, which has entailed a massive exodus of refugees into Europe – exceeding one million in 2015 alone – from war-torn parts of Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. This situation brings new challenges as music educators consider how to most judiciously serve students from increasingly diverse backgrounds. In this book, as we reflect on what can be learned from the past 20 years of our history in Northern Europe, both within and beyond this international network, we will also consider present challenges and prospects for the future.

Background of the book

The idea of developing a book based on the two decades of experience in this network first came up in a planning meeting in Iceland in 2015. We realized at that time that the network would soon be reaching the 20-year mark in its history, and interest in the book grew with greater urgency as we later became concerned that some of the network funding to which we had applied was denied. We realized that production of a book of this kind would compellingly demonstrate the importance of the network and its impact, while at the same time inspiring others and offering a more general contribution to global knowledge in the field of music education. We solicited contributing authors from across the entire network, and around 20 writers expressed an interest in developing chapters. Their book chapters were revised through a series of network book-writing workshops held in Bergen, Tallinn, and Vilnius in 2016–2017.

Discussions in this book are framed by three overarching themes that shed light on how the field of music education has been advancing across Northern Europe: (1) current practices and background, (2) higher education reforms, and (3) professional networks. For the first of these themes, we endeavored to document current practices and developments across the past 20 years of music education (including music teacher education and research) in Northern Europe, both within individual nation states and across the entire Nordic and Baltic regions. Within theme two, we aimed to explore how policy developments are affecting music education, particularly in terms of standardization, internationalization, and neoliberal approaches to public sector management. Finally, theme three concerns not only the role and impact of the NNME network in particular, but also the broader significance of professional networks of this kind for music education, the teaching profession, and higher education in general. For each of the three overarching themes, we collaboratively developed three or four model questions for contributing authors’ consideration, but we also encouraged all authors to freely decide both what to emphasize and how best to structure their individual chapters.

Current practices and background

As mentioned previously, the present book appears to be the first published volume on music education in Northern Europe, although an array of articles and book chapters have been published over the years on individual countries in this region. The rationale for this book should be clear, since a notable gap in knowledge is evident. Moreover, in terms of educational networks in Northern Europe, our thorough review yielded only one previously published research study of a Nordplus educational network. In that study, which examined a Nordic network for action research among school teachers, Rönnerman et al. observed that

Through the different activities being developed in the Nordic network, together with discourses in the Nordic countries emphasizing teacher collaborative learning and the need for teachers to research their own classrooms, new arenas might open up for further dialogues and activities nationally and globally.

(Rönnerman, Salo, Furu, Lund, Olin, & Jakhelln, 2016, p. 60)

The authors of that study also briefly noted some “challenges of neo-liberal policies for education” (p. 59) and determined that the network developed a “community of supervisory practice” which they identified as “compatible with all Nordic universities’ emphasis on internationalization” (p. 55). We have anecdotally made similar observations within NNME, and through development of the present book we were able to explore such issues more deeply than is possible in a single journal article, but have aimed to “take some cues” from this one previous study regarding such topics that evidently call for deeper examination.

Higher education reforms

As will be explained in detail within the Conclusion chapter, care must be taken in scholarly investigations of institutional change to avoid the pitfalls associated with an excessively deterministic orientation, and there may be advantages to using what has been called a “kosmos-oriented approach” that takes into account the uniqueness of institutions as malleable human social constructions (Moroni, 2010, p. 284). Previous studies have suggested that higher education restructuring and institutional mergers are an increasingly common challenge for professors in the Nordic countries (Pinheiro, Geschwind, & Aarrevaara, 2016), and our experience in producing this book suggests that universities in the Baltic countries – and even Russia (NUFFIC News, 2016) – are experiencing much the same concerns. In fact, an array of publications indicates that higher education restructuring and mergers are part of a worldwide issue, but their implications for music studies appear to thus far be very little discussed. Education authorities and “think tanks” have issued recommendations for university mergers in the USA (Education Advisory Board, 2013) and the UK (Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2012), and a Chinese approach has even been presented as a model for other countries (Cai & Yang, 2015). Moreover, specialized books have recently been published in this field (Eastman & Lang, 2001; Martin & Samels, 2016; Pinheiro, Geschwind, & Aarrevaara, 2016), and an array of studies in higher education journals has addressed related issues (Boling, Mayo, & Helms, 2017; Cai, Pinheiro, Greschwind, & Aarrevaara, 2016; Eisenberg, 2016; Harman, 2002; Harman & Meek, 2002; Lang, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Skodvin, 1999; Thomas & Chabotar, 2015). Through our discussions in this book, we were able to explore how higher education mergers affect the field of music education.

Professional networks

In addition to the intensive courses, one of the most important activities of the NNME is sponsorship of mobility, which enables international exchange in the field of higher music education. While NNME may be the largest state-funded network of this kind in the field of music education, there are certainly precedents in higher education more generally that should be taken into account. The Fullbright exchange program in the USA is one of the earliest and most well-known models of international academic exchange, but its emphasis is on relatively long-term international exchan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: advancing music education in Northern Europe
• 2 Master’s seminars in music education across 18 years: inclusion, equality and democracy as lived experience
• 3 Reflections on research collaborations: a call for Nordic research on music education, sustainability, and democracy
• 4 Musical performance and tacit self-censorship
• 5 Music, universality and globalization: some challenges for music education in the decades to come
• 6 An Icelandic perspective on the Nordic music education community
• 7 Musician and teacher: higher popular music education in a Danish perspective
• 8 Advancing music education via Nordic cooperation: equity and equality as central concepts in Finland
• 9 Bridging the past, present and future in Estonian music education
• 10 A paradigm shift in Latvian music teacher education: a selection of research experience in the period, 2008–2017
• 11 Music teacher education challenges: national and international perspectives in Lithuania
• 12 Emotional imitation method in the context of Lithuanian music education
• 13 Integrated learning of music and science: reception of Björk’s Biophilia Project in the Nordic countries
• 14 Conclusion: learning from two decades of music education leadership
• Index