Article III: The Politics of Reflexivity in Music Teachers’ Intercultural

This chapter was co-authored with Professor Heidi Westerlund and Professor Mar-ja-Leena Juntunen from the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Both of them had a central role in the overall Finnish-Nepali collaboration. Professor Westerlund initiated the Global Visions project, and as a project PI has also acted as my main supervisor in the PhD process. Professor Juntunen has been involved with the collaboration and visited Kathmandu two times and acted as a supervisor in some of the Nepali core team study modules. Thus, all three of us had personal experience of the collaboration, albeit from different perspectives. This enabled us to use our own reflections as one of the components in constructing this article.

As already described in Chapter 4.2., four NMC teachers were given the opportunity to conduct a 60-credit study module called Teachers Pedagogical Studies, which is required for teacher competence in Finland (see programme description in Chapter 1.4.3.). The focus of article III is on intercultural professional dialogue (Dervin &

Machart, 2015; Martin, Pirbhai-Illich & Pete, 2017; Nasar, Modood & Zapata-Barre-ro, 2016) and the politics of epistemic reflexivity (Leitch & Day, 2000) as it emerged during the process of Teachers Pedagogical Studies among the Finnish and Nepali music educators. As a starting point, the authors aimed to grasp the ambivalent du-ality of the risk of manifesting colonial power versus the potential for the transfor-mation of professional identity omnipresent in intercultural dialogue. We examined how, in the process of pedagogical studies that require self-reflection, reflection it-self became a focus of reflection and accumulated meta-reflexivity (Donati, 2010), and how this process was triggered with educators from vastly different backgrounds working together. Already at the early stages of the Finnish-Nepali collaboration, the authors had realized that the practice of reflection was somewhat unfamiliar for the NMC teachers, and that the expectation was rather that the Finnish teachers would model desired teaching methods. Consequently, the discussions circled around top-ics such as: What is reflection? How can you learn to reflect and use it for your work

and teacher development? Why are we expected to reflect? The teachers involved also recognized the difficulty of establishing a collaborative reflective practice. Not only writing and reading about one’s own activities as a teacher, but also sharing ideas with colleagues as a facilitated practise, was somewhat new.

Therefore, the instigation of article III was a volatile reflection of the situation where we, Finnish music educators, inexorably implemented Finnish teacher education val-ues and practices in a Nepali context through the process of Teacher’s Pedagogical Studies, even though the studies were partially tailor-made to support the institu-tional development at NMC. This realization triggered us to look more closely into matters of colonialism, as well as the politics involved in such processes. Therefore, the article aimed at grasping the phenomena of reflection and reflexivity, and how they can become a complex field of issues of power, as reflexivity challenges the per-sonal epistemology of teaching and teacher education (Martin, Pirbhai-Illich & Pete, 2017) in the intercultural work.

Empirical material and analysis

The empirical material consisted of eight reflective essays that the four NMC teachers wrote as part of their pedagogical studies, five discussions among the NMC teachers and Finnish teacher-researchers, as well as the first author’s research journal and the collective discussions among the authors. The empirical material was organized by first exploring how the NMC teachers reflected on the (1) expectation to (co-)reflect in Teachers Pedagogical Studies, moving then to (2) look at the emerging epistemic reflexivity within their socio-cultural and institutional context by showing how pro-fessional self-reflexivity critically engages with the larger socio-cultural frame. Fi-nally, (3) we discuss the paradoxes that frame epistemic reflexivity in intercultural dialogue, and the challenges of dealing with the omnipresent power hierarchies. In the analysis, we leaned on such reflexive understanding in which critical, interpre-tive work “conceptualizes social reality as being constructed, rather than discovered”

(Alvesson, Hardy & Harley, 2008, p. 480). In this way, instead of offering clarity and explanations, we aimed at digging into the complexity, ambiguity, and even paradox-es of intercultural interaction. Our own experiencparadox-es and the omniprparadox-esent colonial setting were taken as a backdrop of the overall interpretation and discussion.

Key findings and contribution

Through the findings of article III, we argue that intercultural dialogue in a transna-tional project can develop such epistemic reflexivity that questions one’s existential groundings, independently of the position of the participant. In such dialogue, nego-tiating one’s premises, stance, and ethical relations while confronting and facing a different social order and belief system, among other things, invites - even requires - reflection on one’s existential groundings. Such reflexivity might act as an invita-tion to discomfort, but at the same time is also an invitainvita-tion to deep professional learning (Feucht, Brownlee & Schraw, 2017). Therefore, the article contributes to understanding the potentials and pitfalls of a road from reflective practices towards epistemic reflexivity in the intercultural dialogue. However, we equally articulate the complexity and ambiguity of the findings. If intercultural dialogue is based on intense communication and serious attempts to form a joint arena for collaboration through discussion, in such dialogue one can only begin to understand what is not communi-cated in professional communities, where the personal is often subsumed within the benefits of the organization, project, or the very community. The politics of reflexivity thus keep the questions open, with no final answers.

6. Discussion

In this chapter, I will discuss the potentials and constraints of critical collaborative