Methodological Musings: Thinking with Narrative in Music Education Research (Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, 37)

This book focuses on narrative forms of research and inquiry in music education. As narrative approaches gain momentum, questions of methodology become salient. This research anthology highlights a diverse array of narrative methodologies and offers strategies for new researchers. The authors reflect transparently on how they did their narrative analyses, how they position themselves, and which narrative tradition(s) they align with.

In this book, editors and authors aim at conceptualizing and clarifying narrative approaches in music education, showing how narrative thinking can be combined with theoretical stances such as discourse analysis and phenomenology. The book demonstrates how awareness of multi-layered dialogical meaning production can inform narrative research. It also addresses performative narratives of musicians and educators. The authors forefront narrative research methods as highly valuable for arts-based research, because of their potential for being expressive and performative, as well as conceptual.

Tiri Bergesen Schei is a professor (Dr. Art.) in Music Education and head of the research program “Arts, Creativity and Cultural Practices” at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). Schei is an experienced music teacher, singer, teacher educator, and academic supervisor. Her research interests are related to creative and artistic activities with professionals as well as amateurs. Her recent research targets the functions of art in early childhood education, topics on cultural formation, vocal and performative utterances, and the relationships between the audible body and the phenomenology of being heard by others.

Dr. Kari Holdhus is a professor of music education at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research and teaching interests are relational pedagogy, dialogic musical encounters, creative teaching and learning, and pedagogical improvisation. Holdhus explicitly studies communication processes between musicians, teachers, and pupils in visiting music practices and musical partnerships. In the years 2011–2016, Kari was a researcher in the project improvisation in teacher education (IMTE), working with pedagogical improvisation.

Dr. Amira Ehrlich is the dean of the Faculty of Music Eduaction at the Levinsky-Wingate Academic College. Amira is an educator with more than twenty years of experience in the field of music, as a teacher, producer, and researcher. Her published writings explore the cultural aspects of music education, and the interfaces between music, spirituality, education, and leadership. Amira participated as an active researcher in an international research group lead by Sibelius Academy in Finland between 2015 and 2020. Since 2020, Amira has been the chair of the International Society of Music Education's special interest group for spirituality in music education.