Musikaliskt lärande i kulturmöte : En fallstudie av gambiska och svenska ungdomar i samspel

Sammanfattning: In this licentiate thesis, I study how young people from two different countries, Sweden and the Gambia, learn music in interaction with each other within the context of a concert project carried out in the Gambia. This study in music education is inspired by ethnomusicology and anthropology.The main aim of the study is to explore in what ways adolescents acquire music and to analyse it in a context of cultural identity. The primary research question is: What characterizes musical learning in a situation where the intention is that young people from different cultures are expected to learn in interaction with each other? The theoretical points of departure are to be found in (i) socio-cultural theories of learning, with a focus on how cultural tools are used in the learning and teaching processes, and in (ii) theories on orality and literacy.Since 2000, I have annually conducted fi eld studies in the Gambia. The analysed data consist of observations and video recordings of the musical learning activities, individual and focus group interviews and fi eld notes from the years 2008-2010. The participants are nine students, age 15-16, from one Swedish high school and nine students from different schools in the Gambia.The results demonstrate how the students’ musical and cultural background strongly influences the ways in which they learn themselves and how they teach others. The cultural background also affects their choice of tools for learning and teaching. The students from both groups are generous in their attitudes towards each other and they are responsive and interested in the others’ way of learning. However, while the tools they use to learn music themselves remain stable throughout the project, the tools for teaching others how to play or sing change during the course of the project. Thus, the students appear to be more inclined to change their way of teaching others, rather than changing the methods of their own musical learning.In conclusion, the results point at the importance of teachers not always using the same methods in teaching their students as they have experience of having learnt themselves, and that teachers need to have the ability to identify the learning styles of their students and to create a learning environment in which all these various ways of learning are given space.