The forms of professional expansion described here are not the ones of a musician or music teacher (although I am also educated as such), but rather the ones experienced by a music education researcher. Although fairly domain specific, they still share some general traits with the development of expertise in other areas. I will come back to that in a minute. First, I will attempt to answer the questions asked in the beginning of this chapter: Professional expansion is possible, among other things, through the means of travel, research, and various kinds of collaborative work. What is expanded in the examples shown above is of course my own personal limitations, but also, at the best of times, the collective knowledge-base of the profession to which I belong.
Writing on expertise, collective creativity and shared knowledge practices, Hakkarainen (2013) describes several characteristics of development of expertise on the individual and collective levels. While the format of this chapter does not allow me to delve into all of these, I will focus on three in particular that have bearing on some of the experiences narrated above. First, Hakkarainen emphasizes that what he names adaptive experts “deliberately work at the edge of their competence and seek challenges that assist and elicit their learning, development and creative knowledge advancements” (p. 16) instead of engaging in routine practices. Working at the edge of my competence is indeed a very precise description of what it feels like when my head is ready to explode from collective reading or my consciousness is somehow widened through joint writing. Second, elaborating on how human cognition can be distributed,
Hakkarainen claims that “the human mind has permeable boundaries so that it can merge, fuse and integrate with various extended artefacts and other minds in a way that augments cognition and elicits creative achievements” (p. 16). Clearly, this is what occurs when my mind is merged with that of another author, via and integrated with the extended artefacts of laptops and Google Docs. Third, focusing on the collaborative emergence of innovation, Hakkarainen sees that it is “[t]
hrough sustained collaborative improvisation … [that] ideas, artefacts, methods and practices emerge that do not belong to any one of the individual participants but that are interactional emergents from self-organized collaborative processes”
(p. 21). Although the various publications stemming from the Global Visions project are owned by particular individuals, in the sense that they are written by and rightly attributed to certain named authors, many of the project’s ideas, ways of doing things, and also publications definitely stem from joint efforts and are, as such, interactional emergents. One would only have to look at the large proportion of co-authored articles to understand that, for example, the practice of collective writing has been widespread throughout the project period. The open-endedness and general adventurous mode of the project, described above, can hence, in my opinion, be understood as an attribute allowing for collaborative improvisation, which again has led to the “systematic and deliberate pursuit of knowledge creating learning” (p. 18), and to the project becoming a “dynamically evolving epistemic [practice]”—a knowledge community producing new professional insights. This—the development of high-level expertise through creating vibrant knowledge communities—is what Heidi has facilitated during her many years at the Sibelius Academy, not only in the Global Visions project, but also through a wide range of other research initiatives, developmental projects, seminars, and
teaching and supervision practices. Borrowing her own words and those of her co-author Tuulikki Laes, quoted in the beginning of this article, she has contributed to “an enhancement of community expertise over individual expertise” (Laes &
Westerlund, 2017, p. 42). This has never happened at the expense of developing professionalism at the individual level, but rather with a deep understanding that an expertise-enhancing social community is needed for the individual to grow. I count myself lucky to have participated in this work, and I am forever grateful to have been included.
References
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Global Visions. (n.d.a). About the project. https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/globalvisions/
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Hakkarainen, K. (2013). Mapping the research ground: Expertise, collective creativity and shared knowledge practices. In H. Gaunt & H. Westerlund (Eds.), Collaborative learning in higher music education (p. 13–26). Ashgate.
Karlsen, S. (2019). Competency nomads, resilience and agency: Music education (activism) in a time of neoliberalism. Music Education Research, 21(2), 185–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2018.1564900
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Westerlund, H., Karlsen, S., & Partti, H. (Eds.). (2019). Visions for intercultural music teacher education. Springer.
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1321103X15590698
About the Author
Sidsel Karlsen is professor of music education at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she is one of the leaders of the Centre for Educational Research in Music (CERM). She is also a docent at the University of the Arts Helsinki, and has been affiliated with the Sibelius Academy since 2009, when she received a postdoctoral research grant from the Academy of Finland. Sidsel has known and worked with Heidi for many years, and considers her a friend, mentor, colleague and fellow traveler. Their collaboration is visible in many ways, perhaps most notably through a large number of research publications.