Background: The education for students with intellectual disabilities (ID) in Sweden has a history that goes back tothe 19th century. Already in a governmental report from 1894, music is part of the content suggestedin the curriculum. Music education in the curriculum for the Swedish compulsory school as well as forCompulsory School for Pupils with Intellectual Disabilities (SCSPID) has been subject to several changes. Partly these changes are related to changing societal motives for the subject, partly music for students with ID are related to societal conceptions of this group of students. The societal object in education for these students has changed from caring to teaching/learning. Furthermore, the object for music has changed from therapy to music as subject for learning, and demands for teachers’ qualifications have changed from general or pre-school teacher education to specialteachers with qualifications in music. On an international level, one of the rights UNICEF points out for people with various disabilities concerns cultural citizenship (Ferm Almqvist, 2016). This right is part of the basis for curricula for all Swedish schools. However, experiences from practice indicate that activities made available for students (7–16 years) in the Swedish Compulsory School for Pupils with Intellectual Disabilities may instead be counter-productive. In addition, the competence of theteachers that teach music in the SCSPID holds great variation, regarding music as well as knowledge about ID. One of the thematic results of a review of research on music education for students with ID showed that there are few studies of teaching-learning with this group of students and these are based on integrated classrooms (Berthén et al., 2022). A theme that was of specific interest for our further work was critical studies for empowerment, where the concept musical becoming (Carlson,2013) is in line with our interest.
Aim: The aim of this paper is to identify tensions and contradictions that have an impact on musicteachers’ conceptions of the object of music for this group of students.
Methods: Data for our paper are firstly, a comparison between changes in the Swedish music curricula for SCSPID since the early 20th century with previous analysis by Sandberg (1996) of the music curriculum for compulsory school. Secondly, interviews with five qualified music teachers teaching in SCSPID. For the interviews, a phenomenographic analysis (Marton, 1981, Marton & Booth, 1997) was conducted, after which curricula and the phenomenographic results were related to each other andanalysed by activity theory (Engeström, 2016).
Results: The result of the analysis of the object and function of the music education syllabuses from the early 20th century until the latest, from 2022, discerns a pendulous movement in what can be understood as changed object for music education. From an idea, in the first part of the 20th century, that music education for pupils with IF should provide opportunities to develop musical knowledge and establish contact with "good music", especially hymns and traditional songs, to primary emphasising the therapeutic function of music education instead of musical knowing for more than thirty years. Since the early 1990s, the pendulum has swung back towards the development of musical knowing and an emphasis on cultural citizenship. How these shifts in direction have affected music education practice in SCSPID for students has neither been evaluated nor previously studied. Results from the phenomenographic analysis of the interview firstly showed we established three interrelated phenomena based on the data: Music making in the SCSPID school, Music teaching in the SCSPID school, and Prerequisites for music making concerning students with ID. For each of the phenomena, categories of descriptions were constructed. Furthermore, we found that tensions as well as contradictions were established on several levels: national, local, and classroom.
Conclusions: Based on analysis of the historical changes in the curricula for music for these students and of activity theoretical analysis, we found that the SCSPID school is multimotive-driven, which is not a surprise. However, while the latest curriculum for music for these students supports teaching-learning for cultural citizenship as an intended object, aspects of local organisation and rules contribute with tensions as well as contradictions and consequently function counter productively. Furthermore, the interviewed teachers represent a minority of 6.3 percent that are qualified music teachers. This indicates that the result is not representative for most teachers teaching music in the SCSPID and thereby a need for formative interventions (Sannino, Engeström & Lemos, 2016) how interaction with the participants is planned.
In the next step we will use the findings to collaborate with these teachers as well as other music teachers in the SCSPID school in a change laboratory (Virkkunen & Newnham 2013) project in order to develop formative interventions for developing shared instructional products (Morris & Hiebert,2011).
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