Var får instrumentallärarna sina pedagogiska idéer ifrån? Om bakgrunden till didaktiska ställningstaganden

Sammanfattning: During my time as Director of Studies at the Municipal Music School of Lund, Sweden, I have had several discussions with teachers, students, parents, municipality civil servants, and politicians. I have concluded that in general, culture schools and music schools are looked upon as institutions where parents safely can send their children convinced about that they get a qualified education regarding the instrument of choice. Even if one sees the above as an affirmation of education within the cultural sector the question arises as to which influences affect the educational and didactic positions of teaching staff. In other words, where do the pedagogical ideas come from? Consequently, as a professional teacher of instrumental music, I ask the following questions: What education and what teaching do we deliver, and what is the teaching philosophy that create the pedagogic ideas of the teachers? The questions lead to the title of the thesis: “From where do the pedagogic ideas of instrumental teachers emanate”? The principal aim of the thesis is to define and illuminate factors which are antecedentents to the development and meaning of the teaching philosophy of the instrumental teachers. The theoretical points of departure are based upon the fundamental questions of didactics: what is taught, how should it be taught, and what is the purpose of teaching. The empirical data consist of eight interviews with instrumental teachers from four municipal music schools in South Sweden. The interviewees told life stories concerning adolescence, university education, and contemporary conditions. The findings show that the teachers are not explicitly conscious from where they have got their pedagogical ideas. The ideas emerge from the context in which the teachers were growing up, and the social context has had a great impact. The person who was the first instrumental teacher of the teachers intervieweed, irrespective of whether he or she was a professional teacher or not, has had a large impact. It was also found that the methodological education that the teachers have received, had not served as the base that the teachers probably needed when the started their professional career. It is possible to make a categorization based on the differences of mind sets of pedagogy of the interviewed teachers. The categorization contains the following categories: didactics, pedagogs, and musicians. Together the categories relate to a spectrum of different learning styles connected to different apprehensions of learning: spanning from formal learning, in which the pedagogic ideas of the teachers are approaching formal learning to a learning style in which the teacher’s ideas are in line with informal learning. Between these two categories there are the pedagogs, embracing both formal and informal leaning. The categorization, which is a result of an empirically based development of concepts, has to be tested further empirically as well as theoretically. The discussion about the categories and their connection to different theories of learning, forms the theoretical contribution of the thesis. It is my ambition that this thesis may contribute to further discussions about pedagogy, based both on praxis and science, that would help all of us, who are involved in music education, to defend and develop our pedagogical ideas in a professional way.