Rethinking arts education in late modernity - discourses on educational practices in Sweden

• This paper explores discourses of arts and knowledge within two different educational practices in Sweden. By analysing interviews, group talks and video recordings from both Swedish school and Swedish teacher training settings, we have revealed dominant knowledge discourses and discuss how they serve to legitimize an educational field in late modernity. The point of departure of our studies is discourse analysis, including micro- as well as macro level. It embraces perspectives such as discursive psychology, discourse theory and Foucault inspired analysis. In one of the practices studied, the empirical material consists of focus group conversations, in the other, classroom interaction. In a meta-perspective, both studies enclosed, two kinds of approaches are shown: Word-level analysis, identified as rhetorical actions in group-conversations, and practice-oriented analysis, identified as rhetorical actions in classroom praxis. Both approaches aim to identify hegemony and antagonistic discourses, and also to problematize the subject agency and what possible subject positions they open up for. The relation discourse-subject also contributes to the analysis of the over-determined subject and ideological dilemmas. According to the results, the area of arts education in Swedish schools seems to be a battlefield of different discoursers. This is shown by different ideological dilemmas related to activities in the music classroom and in the questions of democracy and pupil influence that rises in the studies. A relativization of the concept of quality as well as an articulation of lack of subject knowledge as a marker of teacher quality were features of two prominent discourses among teacher educators in arts education.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

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

HUMANIORA  -- Konst (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)