Gender Issues in Scandinavian Music Education: From Stereotypes to Multiple Possibilities

Project summary

This project collect studies by music education researchers in Scandinavia who particularly works with gender issues. By puttings together studies from primary and secondary school to higher music education, we aim to give a thick description of the situation in Scandinavia in terms of gender trouble, and how the different educational levels effect each other. The aim of the project is further to move beyond gender stereotypes and envision music education practices on all levels with a gender diversity that do not limit young people's musical expressions and participation in musical practices. The contributing studies in the project are:

• Music, gender and social change: Contemporary debates, directions and challenges (Cecilia Björck)
• Singing like a child: Transgressive girlhood in the music classroom (Eirik Askerøi and Ingeborg Lunde Vestad)
• Binary oppositions and third spaces: Perspectives on the interplay between gender, genre practice, instrument and cultural capital in upper secondary schools in Sweden (Carina Borgström Kallén)
• Equality and sustainable development in Swedish music classrooms (Linn Hentschel and Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist)
• Positioning in a Swedish music profiled school (Mikael Persson)
• Thinking queer pedagogy in music education with Girl in Red (Silje Valde Onsrud)
• On breaking the "citational chains of gender normativity" in Norwegian art and music schools / (Hilde Synnøve Blix and Live Weider Ellefsen)
• Career paths in higher music education: Challenges for gender equality in the arts (Lilli Mittner and Hilde Synnøve Blix

The studies include both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and are  influenced by gender theorists from Simone deBeauvoir to Judith Butler.

Method

Qualitative and quantitative methods, which include interviews, observations, music video-analysis, survey and statistics.