The Discomfort of Intercultural Learning in Music Teacher Education

Abstract

Recognizing and ethically engaging with the inherent diversity of music education contexts demands a continuous interrogation of the norms and values underpinning policy and practice in music teacher education. In doing so, teachers and students in higher education are challenged to question why and how students are socialized into particular music education systems, traditions, or perspectives and to consider alternatives. In this chapter, we explore such reflexive processes, employing a theoretical reading analysis through Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, and doxa. The data consists of group reflections and interviews with student-teachers that the authors conducted as part of an intercultural arts education project between Finnish masters students and two Cambodian NGOs. Based on our analysis, we argue that stepping outside of one’s cultural, musical, and pedagogical comfort zone is a necessary component of constructing and (re)negotiating teacher visions in music teacher education. However, this renegotiation may be discomforting for student-teachers, unsettling deep-seated visions of what good music education is and ought to be – the taken-for-granted doxa of music teaching and learning. Therefore, for music-teacher education to become transformative and reflexive, there is a need for such educational experiences that engage with processes that are related to the art of living with difference.