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mastery of the relevant literature and the ability to engage in debate about relevant questions and issues. He carefully introduces the colonial context to situate his theoretical framework within the particular colonial history of Costa Rica, highlighting the key role of music education in the production of national subjects within the context of settler colonialism. This allows him to present a nuance reading of the data collected from the participants and to draw compelling and significant conclusions regarding the future of music education. Rosabal-Coto uses his concepts consistently throughout the work and the connective tissue between his research goals, theoretical and analytic framework, and his research findings is solid and clear.
Rosabal-Coto shows how “the construction of subalternity through power relations … in postcolonial Costa Rica is grounded in a sometimes tacit, sometimes overt, aspiration to colonial Whiteness” (p. 207). This is perhaps the most important finding of the dissertation, and one that deserves ample attention from the music education community.
Another key contribution of Rosabal-Coto’s work is the integration of Christopher Small’s (2011) concept of musicking into the prism of coloniality. This is an important
contribution, as postcolonial scholars, even those who have paid close attention to cultural production, have largely ignored music as a field of practice. Such works have focused largely on the products of musical practice, highlighting the ways in which such products point to hybridity and the emergence of new subjectivities. By bringing attention to the lived experience of those who produce such work Rosabal-Coto adds an important layer to our understanding of musical lives within a postcolonial context.
Of particular interest are Rosabal-Coto’s conclusions regarding the role of what he frames, again drawing on Walter Mignolo (2009), as “epistemic disobedience.” It is curious that many of the instances Rosabal-Coto frames as resistance actually involve success in what are ultimately colonial institutions, like churches or as conductors of instrumental groups, instances that complicate the very concept of disobedience or resistance. The notion of disobedience seems quite present in the participants’ teaching styles, suggesting that teaching practices are a key site for epistemic disobedience as framed in the
dissertation. For Rosabal-Coto, “in spite of the recurrent instances of oppression, music learners partially or fully exercised resistance to coercive control of their music worlds, at different stages in their lives, and on their own terms” (p. 205). This observation has important, implications for music education and the puzzle of whether the aim of music learning should be to produce opportunities for resistance, which would involve coercion, or to proceed in a way that removes the opportunity to resist. If, as Rosabal-Coto claims,
“we all partake of colonial structures in different degrees” (p. 218), then what should be the role of music education with regards to such institutional arrangements?
Rosabal-Coto set out to examine a compelling an important problematic of what are the social relations that rule the experiences of his participants within the worlds of music education focusing on the disjunctures that animate such experiences as they are related to coloniality and power. His dissertation is a pleasure to read, well-written and organized in a logical sequence. The writing is eloquent at times, particularly in discussing theoretical matters. More importantly, Rosabal-Coto is extremely generous with his participants. He takes time to present them in a complex and rich manner that pays tribute to who they are in all their multifaceted intricacy. Even as he notes the ways in which they invest in the promise of imaginary whiteness that institutionalized music education makes to them, he also notes the many ways they resist the terms of engagement.
References
Mignolo, W. 2003. The darker side of the Renais-sance: Literacy, territoriality, and colonization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Mignolo, W. 2012. Local histories/global designs:
Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border think-ing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mignolo, W. D. 2009. Epistemic disobedience, inde-pendent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26, 7-8, 159–181.
Small, C. 2011. Musicking: The meanings of perform-ing and listenperform-ing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-sity Press.
Smith, D. E. 2005. Institutional ethnography: A soci-ology for people. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira.
Wynter, S. 2004. Unsettling the coloniality of being/
power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The new centennial review 3, 3, 257–337.
Note
[i] This is not the official review for the Academic Council.
Ajankohtaista
uring the past few decades, research in music education has often focused on one of two major areas of inquiry. One is how optimal learning conditions can be created for different music learners. Another is to understand the factors that facilitate or restrict access to such learning conditions. In the second case, the rationale for undertaking study is often, very simplified, that music is good for human beings. The same idea justifies the advocacy argument that music is a right, and that music education should be democratic: inclusive, pluralistic, and egalitarian in its practices.
This dissertation addresses a related question: what is about music and music education that might be so good that it is thought of as a public good? The question is particularly relevant in the Nordic countries, where music is taught to all children in comprehensive schools. In addition, high-quality, extracurricular music education is seen as something that should be offered to as many children as possible. In Finland, such education is arranged systematically in state-supported music schools that follow national guidelines and curricula. In these curricula, a foundational principle articulates one idea of how goodness and music education may be connected; namely, that teaching and learning in music schools should promote ‘a good relationship to music’ (see Kurkela 1997). Since this aim is written into the national curriculum, it is legally binding. The intention has been to create a principle similar to ‘the best interests of the child’, a legal principle which should always take precedence in matters concerning children (Heimonen 2002). Just as with that concept, what ‘a good relationship to music’ means in practice has been deliberately left open in order to encourage dialogue between teachers, students and parents or other caregivers—the persons who are close enough to the real life circumstances to be able to make wise interpretations of the principle.
The meaning of ‘a good relationship to music’, then, is to be interpreted time and again. To search for good answers, to find the specifics of how music might support the good life of each student, is considered a central part of the work that Finnish music school teachers do. So far, there has not been a study that has specifically looked into how interpretations are made in these teachers’ real-life activities: what the teachers think of as important, how they go about striving for it, what their strivings reveal about what they value in music and in life more generally; and how all of these things come together in their daily work. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate those questions.
More particularly, it is the practice development of teachers in music schools that is in focus in this study; in other words, how teachers attempt to improve the socially established activities, skills and knowledge that are part of teaching and learning music. I have asked what five experienced teachers hope to accomplish in their work and how, what they want to develop, what challenges they face as they strive for what they believe is worthwhile, and whether collaborative work can be helpful for them.
Let me go back for a moment to the idea that ‘music is good’. A closer look at this assumption immediately reveals immense conceptual, philosophical and practical
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Cecilia Björk