The aim of the study was to investigate teachers’ conceptions of music teaching in the Swedish grundsärskolan, Special-needs Compulsory School (SnCS) for children with intellectual disabilities in order to discern indications of common characteristics of their music teaching practices.

According to the result of a previous review (Berthén et al., 2022) of international research focusing music teaching for students with intellectual disabilities (ID), such studies either are based on 1) integrated classrooms – mixed groups of students; 2) music therapy, studies based on individual children; or 3) norm critical studies related to admission requirements or to musical production.

Since the 1990s, reforms have contributed to changing the conditions for SnCS: 1) the change of the political object for SnCS from caring to teaching; 2) the national curriculum from 2011 introduced assessment criteria; and 3) new qualification requirements for all teachers in SnCS were introduced. However, for several years, few music teachers within SnCS are qualified music teachers: during the school year 2020–2021 this share was 6.3 percent. UN’s Conventions on 1) the Rights of the Child, and 2) the Rights of Persons with Disabilities are legal foundations for this curriculum. In relation to music teaching this means that also students with ID must have access to the aesthetic meaning that musical experiences can contribute with as well as its transformative power that Carlson (2015) labels as musical becoming. Against this backdrop, the overarching research question we pose for this paper is the following: What characterises music teachers’ conceptions of music teaching in SnCS?

This study is based on qualitative interviews with six music teachers in SnC schools from various regions in Sweden. Data were analysed phenomenographically (Marton, 1994) and the result will be presented as an outcome space consisting of interrelated categories of description.

References

Berthén, D., Backman Bister, A., & Lindberg, V. (2022). Musikundervisning för grundsärskolan? – en forskningsöversikt. Nordic Research in Music Education, 3, 21–50. https://doi.org/10.23865/nrme.v3.3729

Carlson, L. (2013). Musical becoming: Intellectual disability and the transformative power of music. In M. Wappett & K. Arndt (Eds.), Foundations of disability studies (pp. 83–103). Palgrave Macmillan.

Marton, F. (1994). Phenomenography. In T. Husén & T. N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Education (2nd ed., vol. 8., pp. 4424–4429). Pergamon.