Effects of insecurity : Class and Gender at Stake in Secondary School Music Education

• In this paper I would like to present preliminary results from my ongoing PhD-project focusing creation of subjectivity in secondary school music education. The aim of this paper is to discuss construction of femininity in intersection with class regarding the use of different rhetorical resources available in different music classrooms. In particular I will pinpoint how the girls make use of insecurity and how this effects their possibilities to participate in musical activities. During autumn 2014 I have been following the weekly music lessons in three classrooms in Stockholm and it's surroundings. The schools were strategically selected to represent maximum differentiation in the students socioeconomic background using the notion of symbolic capital resulting in three schools: a High end school, a Low end school and a Music profiled school.The lessons were documented with video camera, transcribed in great detail, and analyzed with concepts drawing from positioning theory, discursive psychology and conversation analysis focusing the rhetorical resources in the interactional work done among the pupils. Insecurity appears to be a resource available for the girls in all three classrooms but with different effects. For girls in the high end school insecurity explicitly expressed by words is frequently followed by further musical activities. In the low end school insecurity, expressed by avoiding difficult tasks, limits the possibility to further practice. In the music school the use of insecurity also of risk of being positioned as nervous and problematic and can be understood as an obstacle for practicing difficult music tasks in ensemble practice.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

power

governance

neo-liberalism

schooling

intersectionality

gender

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)