Researching ensemble teachers’ assessment criteria and values from a dialogical theoretical perspective

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1980s, playing in pop ensembles and rock ensembles has been an integrated part of both Swedish music teacher education and the Swedish national curricula for music. However, there is little research on ensemble playing and teaching in Swedish schools, and even less so on the assessment and the criteria for assessment of this practice. The aim of my PhD project is to investigate what values music teachers in focus groups express and what criteria they base their judgements on when they comment on and discuss video excerpts from ensemble classes. This paper, however, focuses on the method of analysis: a discourse analytical method that is informed by a dialogical theory of meaning. In order to create ‘thinking societies in miniature’, focus groups consisting of music teachers were asked to comment on video excerpts from ensemble classes playing music in four different Afro-American genres. The discourses from these focus groups were analysed in a three-step procedure, which comprised: (1) reconstructing the participants’ perspective through a dialogical discourse analysis, (2) eliciting hierarchies from the discourses and (3) presenting a final analysis of implicit and explicit values and criteria expressed in the focus groups. In this paper, an outline of the dialogical theory of meaning is given, the method is illustrated in some detail and its potentials for music education and music education research are discussed.