Article I: The reinvented music teacher-researcher in the making: Conducting

teacher-researcher in the making: Conducting educational development through intercultural collaboration

Article I was co-authored with professor Eva Saether from Lund University and her colleague from the same institution, senior lecturer Anna Houmann. Both of them have vast experience and professional expertise in intercultural work similar to the process of this inquiry in Kathmandu. Lecturer Houmann has been one of the key contributors in an eight-year-long collaboration between the Malmö Academy of

Mu-sic (MAM) and the Vietnam National Academy of MuMu-sic (VNAM) in Hanoi. Profes-sor Saether has extensive research expertise in intercultural perspectives on musical learning and creativities. She has also acted as a member of the Global Visions project advisory board and has been one of the supervisors of this inquiry.

This article focuses on scrutinizing the nature of the demanding process of reinven-tion (McLaren, 1998) of the music teacher-researchers participating in intercultural educational development work as it has unfolded in two contexts, namely the Global Visions Through Mobilizing Networks: Co-Developing Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Finland, Israel and Nepal, and the eight-year-long collaboration be-tween MAM and the Vietnam National Academy of Music (VNAM) in Hanoi.

The article utilized the theoretical concepts of micropolitics (see e.g. Hoyle 1982;

Pillay 2004) and affective actions (Wetherell 2012) as they manifested in the collab-orative activities in the two intercultural development projects. Following Wetherell (2012), we used the concept of affective action as a pragmatic way to think about af-fect and emotion, and as a way forward for social research. Afaf-fective action expands on basic terms for emotions (sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and happiness) to events, moments, and experiences that shaped the outcome of activities and the developmental aims in the two projects. Furthermore, the article opens the study of affective performances, affective scenes, and affective events: “Affective practice fo-cuses on the emotional as it appears in social life and tries to follow what participants do” (Wetherell 2012, p. 4). Examination of institutional change is viewed in the arti-cle through micropolitical action, which can be described as an interaction shaped by group hierarchies and ideologies (Pillay 2004), a kind of action where the importance of issues of leadership, organizational goals, and objectives become visible particu-larly in terms of power or powerlessness. More precisely, we highlight that the pow-er to influence may be expow-erted in various ways in an institutional hipow-erarchy, which has an impact on those who have less or no power. Therefore, micropolitical studies could also be seen as helping us to understand the unanticipated arenas of power and how they shape intercultural work aiming towards educational development.

Empirical material and analysis

The empirical material from Kathmandu, Nepal included seven interviews with NMC teachers,⁵⁴ five video-recorded NMC teacher workshops,⁵⁵ 13 discussions among the core team,⁵⁶ my researcher diaries from March 2015- November 2016, and eight re-flective essays from the core team Nepali teachers. The material generated in Kath-mandu is mirrored with lessons learned from the development activities of inter-cultural music education in Hanoi, Vietnam. The material from Kathmandu and experiences from Hanoi were utilized to illustrate: 1) the micropolitical climate of institutions, and 2) the key moments of affective actions in an individual’s experi-ences that shaped the outcome of the intercultural music education work aiming for institutional development in Nepal and Vietnam.

Through the empirical material excerpts, chosen within the flow of activities in the two projects, the article addressed the affective actions and micropolitical climate that had an impact on change in these intercultural, collaborative educational ef-forts. The article strived to grasp the nature of affective actions in the process of ed-ucational development and suggests that including an understanding of emotional dimensions contributes to conceptualizing intercultural educational endeavours. The mutual re-inventions prompted by the collaborative actions in Nepal and Vietnam were then used to inform the discussion of intercultural music education.

Key findings and contribution to the research questions

As illustrated in Table 1c above, Article I contributes to answering all of the main re-search questions. The theoretical tools of affective actions and micropolitics helped to examine the interpersonal relations and the emotional climate in the institutional development work, and how these impacted the process of the music educators’

pro-54 Conducted in March-April 2015. Each about one hour.

55 Between 9.8.-15.8. Each about 1.5 hours.

56 Three discussions in December 2015; Three discussions in January 2016; One discussion in February 2016;

Three in March 2016; One discussion in April 2016; Two discussions in August 2016. Each about 1.5 hours.

fessional re-invention (McLaren, 1998) and educational development as a whole. In particular, the concept of micropolitics proved valuable in understanding the nature of the politics involved in the two projects. In the findings, we recognized that the mi-cropolitical climate has an enormous impact on an individual’s capacities to take an active role in educational change. Micropolitics can thus act as a catalyst or hindrance for developmental aims. In both cases and contexts, the educational development process entailed the music educators in Nepal and Vietnam to change their actions against the prevailing educational systems, and thus called for a strengthened pro-fessional agency. Similarly, the differences in the participating educators’ cultures, traditions and values, and recognition of privileged positioning accumulated com-plicated emotions in everyone involved in the two projects. The concept of affective action (Wetherell, 2012) was helpful in highlighting how the participants had to han-dle recognizing a sense of power, as well as being powerless during the processes of interaction. The findings suggest the importance of acknowledging the teachers’ need to practice epistemological creativity and their readiness to work in rapidly changing and unpredictable situations in intercultural environments. Therefore, this article argues for the need to consider not only the cognitive but also emotional aspects of change in order for the educational development efforts to succeed. Furthermore, the findings highlight the importance of supporting the development of the emotional capital of stakeholders as an important ingredient that seeds educational change.

The findings strongly highlight the meaningfulness of trust in any developmental en-deavours, particularly in intercultural environments. In both contexts examined in this article, the positive personal relationships acted as essential catalysts for over-coming the emotional turbulence involved in the intercultural developmental pro-cesses. This, however, requires the stakeholders to spend enough time together, in formal and informal settings, which can be a challenge in intercultural collaborations where the participants reside geographically far from each other most of the time.

Another interesting finding was the manifestation of silence in the research material, which calls for further methodological reflections. Undoubtedly, in research like this there are challenges in describing, let alone interpreting, what is not being said. The findings highlight the importance of detecting the moments when questions remain

unanswered, or the moments when discussions lead to a dead end. The concepts of affective action and micropolitics might act as a means for detecting these crucial moments. The literature on affective action and micropolitics also supported us in our examination of interpersonal relations and the emotional climate in institutional development work, from the point of view of trust and the multiple manifestations and forms in which it plays out. As trust is developed at the micropolitical level of educational change (Hoyle, 1982), we argued that the development of trust is crucial for organizational goals to be met, and the manifestation of trust is essential to un-derstanding when educational development is at stake. Therefore, the changing insti-tutional practices and new innovations yield a trustful environment, and moreover, trusted professionals. In the two projects, affective actions such as building trust, collegiality beyond national borders, collaborative knowledge-building, increased agency, and a sense of ownership were identified as driving forces. Similarly, the ed-ucators’ engagement in the wider music education community, through collaborative scholarly readings and conference participation, was recognized as a springboard to transformative professionalism. Relating one’s own practices to the global music ed-ucation research provided a means for the educators’ self-reflection. Consequently, we argued that music education research can play a vital role in finding the means for the professional development of music educators. Research can, indeed, act as a strategy to accumulate the kind of knowledge that supports teaching music through affective actions, and to contribute in establishing a new kind of music teacher pro-fessionalism through a process of reinvention.