The aim of this study is to establish a typology for instrumental music teachers at Swedish municipal music schools, and to describe different types, generated from questionnaire-answers, regarding how their attitudes and valuations in matters concerning democracy in broad sense are reflected in their pedagogical activity. I address the following concrete questions. • From where do music teachers at Swedish municipal music and culture schools get their attitudes and valuations, what circumstances lie behind, and are there specific circumstances that explain (...) attitudes and valuations that are not embraced by most of them? • How can different types of music teachers be described? • How do the attitudes and valuations differ between different types? • How are the attitudes and valuations of the different types reflected in their respective work? In the first place I try to answer the questions by using questionnaires which I analyse with methods including factor and cluster techniques. In order to generate intelligible pictures of the types I also interpret, by mean value and correlation analyses, quantitatively dependent data with hermeneutical tools. The population is about 5 000 individuals, represented by 834 informants. The results show that each subject has its own inherited culture, with its own set of attitudes and valuations These attitudes and valuations are, in the first place, transmissioned within the subjects. The questionnaire answers have generated eight different types: MISSIONARY, GATE KEEPER, MUSIC MAKER, MASTER TEACHER, MUSIC DIRECTOR, REFORMIST, ANTI-FORMALIST, and PEDAGOGUE. Each of them has their own set of attitudes and valuations, which are based on the four factors MISSION, FEELING, FOUNDATION, and STUDENT-FOCUS. The eight types and their significant qualities, can be described, in reasonable and recognized ways. Different discourses can also be discerned. Most types seem to have a given position at music school. THE REFORMIST, however, appears to be dissatisfied. He or she is rooted in classical music, but wants to teach the children to play music of their own, although he or she is lacking the didactical tools for this kind of teaching. THE REFORMIST constitutes 19 % of the population and is thereby the largest group. Among other things, one conclusion drawn from the discussion is that the conservatory discourse is a cement keeping together the whole field of music education, and without it the structure and organisation of music school as well as college of music would collapse into a messed-up activity beyond defini¬tion. Another conclusion is that education of music teachers must be reformed with the starting point in democracy and philosophy, if discoursive isolation of music school should not become total—with fatal consequences for music school. These two conclusions stand for opposite poles, which must be balanced to each other. (shrink)

Authority, love and mystery are three small words that capture the essentials of pedagogy - so I will argue. They tell us about our connection to the world, including each other, yet they are shunned in educational discourse. The aim of my paper is to unfold the relation between these conceptions, and to critically discuss their implications for the pedagogical relation between teachers and young students and locate it within a topographical perspective, in a ‘pedagogy of place’, following Lars Løvlie. (...) Today we seldom join love to education and schools. Love is a general name of the quality of attachment, but love is also capable of infinite degradation and is the source of great errors – yet, when it is even partly refined it is the force that “joins us to the world through Good” says Iris Murdoch. So understood, love can be part of the ‘architecture’ of education. Educators’ responsibility for the world takes a specific form of authority in schools. Hannah Arendt argues that the school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be, and that the educator stands in relation to the young, as a representative of the world. An implication of her argument is that the task of the educator is to show the world to the students, not to translate it or explain it, but also not to change or explicate the students. Following these thoughts I conclude that for an educator in school, different from politics, to love the world is to accept the world, and to love the students is to accept them and to refrain from wanting to change them- and refraining from wanting to prepare them for changing the world in a particular and predefined way. What, then, is the place for mystery, the third shunned essential of pedagogy? To put it shortly; I question the established belief that schools can - or even should - respond to the ideal that everything can and ought to be illuminated and measured; recognizing mystery may allow students to be persons in their own right. (shrink)

The overarching theme of this thesis concerns the possibility of balancing the values of unity and pluralism in education in developed nation states characterized by an increasing pluralism when it comes to the beliefs and values of its citizens. The author suggests that democracy has a normative basis in the principle of reciprocity which can be supported in an overlapping consensus by reasonable persons who differ in their moral, religious and philosophical beliefs. It is argued that this basis mandates a (...) deliberative kind of democracy and that certain implications follow for how to understand the relation between democracy and individual rights, between democracy and religious belief and speech, and between rationality and deliberation, among other things. The author proceeds to discuss three educational issues in relation to the principle of reciprocity and its implications: 1. The legitimacy and content of a mandatory citizenship education, 2. Children’s rights to develop personal autonomy, 3. The opportunity for parents and children to choose which school children attend. These issues are important in relation to the question of how to balance unity and pluralism in education in that they concern the promotion of certain common beliefs, values and dispositions among citizens or the creation of a system of choice between schools with different profiles. The purpose of the discussion is to construct a theoretical position which balances the values of unity and pluralism in education, by giving diversity its due while upholding a measure of unity which is located in the democratic and autonomy- promoting purposes of education rather than in its economic/vocational purposes. The discussions make use of political philosophy, educational philosophy and empirical research carried out by other researchers. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility of building a coherent knowledge base for philosophyof design in IS research. After identifying and categorizing what is considered as designissues in the IS field, we propose a taxonomy of design abstractions in the form of a meta-theoretical structure. Based on the proposed hierarchical taxonomy, we have conducteda concept-centric literature review on four leading IS research journals publishedbetween January 2011 and July 2016. Our result shows that the IS field struggles withmisalignment of philosophy of design (...) issues, including constructing design theory,research positioning, and an inconsistent knowledge base in design subject areas such asethics and aesthetics. It is suggested that integrating philosophy of design into IS researchcould contribute to the development of a coherent body of design knowledge. We concludeby proposing a model both to study and integrate philosophy of design into the ISresearch field. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore Swedish junior high school students meaning-making of participating in exergaming in school based on their aesthetic judgments during game play. A transactional approach, drawing on the work of John Dewey, was used in the study and the data consisted of video- and audio recordings of ongoing video gaming. A practical epistemology analysis was used in order to explore the students’ meaning-making in depth. When analyzing the data, the importance of performing well in (...) relation to the challenges the game offers; developing techniques suitable for the game; and interacting socially with one’s peers emerged as main themes in the students’ meaning-making and learning. It was clear that the students’ taste for gaming played a crucial role in how they proceeded in the activity and that meaningful gaming included an intrinsic combination of pleasure and displeasure. (shrink)

Introduction: Music, such as the duration of a musical piec e or length of a concert, can b e measured by metronomes and clocks in objective time. However, playing an instrument, singing, attending a concert, listening to a record or reading a musical score are musical activities also experienced as subjective time. Music has an intrinsic temporal dimension of experienced time, often including an intensification of the present moment, coexisting intertwined with its measurable dimensions. This makes music a fasc inating (...) object for philosophical exploration. Musical practice em bodie s temporal phenomena like pulse, tempo, timing, ad lib, accelerando and fermata. The musical present can be viewed as a moment of sem antic fullness, a meaningful moment. Music can carry narrative, which is a related phenomenon, also containing intrinsic temporality. Furthermore, music can be improvised in the present moment. The tonal texture of music is experienced as a context, a coherency with an intrinsic temporality. This symposium is set to investigate how music can be experienced, philosophically speaking, in the present moment. In order to do this, we introduce a number of prominent Western philosophers who have taken an interest in the phenomenon of time by using the phenomenon o f music as a lens: Saint Augustine, Husserl, Bakhtin and Ricoeur. (shrink)

Is the most important function of education to provide students with basic skills and useful knowledge in order to eventually become employable? In many parts of the world knowledge league tables and policy documents informs us this is the case. As the question on what should form the educational content seems to be answered, teachers can concentrate on how they should teach; researchers can concentrate on what method is the most effective. In the current rhetoric, however, many vital pedagogical issues (...) have been placed in the background and the aesthetic subjects are downgraded. These tendencies worried Frede V. Nielsen who stated that didactic studies and philosophical inquiries yet again are needed to explore and give substance to the content dimension. Nielsen’s writings on didactics form the basis for this essay, where we highlight issues of which perspectives and dilemmas could be placed on a critical, philosophical didactic study agenda. The starting point is the field of tension between the what and the why of education. (shrink)