The fourth period illustrates the time frame of articulating the inquiry outcomes.
In labelling this phase as ‘knowledge building’, I lean on Scardamalia (2002) and Hakkarainen, Paavola and Lipponen (2004), who point out that any effort of knowl-edge building is preceded with learning, but to turn learning into knowlknowl-edge build-ing requires conceptualization and dialogue with the surroundbuild-ing world. Durbuild-ing this phase, the articulation of this inquiry has taken place in the form of book chapters, articles, and this summary, as well as presenting the research in various international arenas, such as conferences. The process of writing and presenting for the public has played a significant role in interpreting the events in phases 1- 3. In this description of phase 4, I will also incorporate a brief description of the direction that our Finn-ish-Nepali collaboration has taken in recent years, as the collaboration with my Ne-pali colleagues has continued to this day.
In January 2018, the Nepali participants of the core team arrived in Helsinki for a one week stay. They visited schools, Sibelius Academy classes, and music institutes, and also received their certificates in a small graduation ceremony organized for them.
In July of the same year, I presented48 in the MISTEC conference held in Prague, where the Global Visions project research findings were presented through various presentations. Later in the same month, at the ISME world conference in Baku, the Nepali teachers presented the individual research conducted as part of their studies.
My own presentation in Baku was titled ‘Increasing intercultural competencies in
48 Timonen, V. 2018, July. Challenging a Finnish folk musician’s professional self: Artistic and pedagogical transformations in Nepal. Paper presented in Music in Schools and Teacher Education Commission (MISTEC) conference, Prague 3.7.2018.
music teacher education through reflexivity. Lessons from a collaborative project be-tween Nepali and Finnish music teachers’.49 Again in Baku, my Nepali colleagues and I practised the presentations together and helped each other with preparing slides for the presentations. In October 2018, one core team member and I were invited to present50 at a conference of the World Music Expo (WOMEX), the biggest world music event, organized that year in Las Palmas, Spain. After WOMEX, we travelled to Kathmandu again with the Global Visions PI’s and the two doctoral researchers that had conducted research projects in Nepal.
Table 15 Visit 13.
Visit 13. ACTIVITIES PARTICIPANTS
29.10.-3.11.2018 • Closing seminar of Global Visions research project for the Nepali government, NMC and Tribhuvan University representatives
• Conducting a pedagogy class for the Perfor-mance Diploma Program Students
• Confluence book launch in Manamaiju
We organized an event to mark the closing of the Global Visions project for represen-tatives of the Nepali Government, NMC, Tribhuvan University, as well other stake-holders in Nepali music education that had been part of the Global Visions work in Nepal. We also co-organized a book launch event at the village of Manamaiju to celebrate the newly published Confluence book, as well as a Nepali translation of an
49 Timonen, V. 2018. July. Increasing intercultural competences in music teacher education through reflexiv-ity. Lessons from a collaborative project between Nepali and Finnish music teachers. Paper presented in ISME world conference, Baku 20.7.2018.
50 Timonen, V., Tuladhar, R. 2018, October. Equal accessibility through international capacity building -Ex-periences from Nepali-Finnish collaboration. Paper presented at World Music Expo (WOMEX) conference, Las Palmas, Spain, 25.10.2018.
article51 about the life work of one of the village’s music education activists, Mr Nu-uche Bahadur Dangol, with the local hosts and musicians there.
In March 2019 I returned to Kathmandu to assist in coordinating a conference day organized as part of the second Echoes in the Valley Festival in Kathmandu. My Nepali colleagues and I also hosted Mr Simon Broughton, a chief editor of the leading world music magazine Songlines, for a ten-day visit in Nepal. Despite its rich and diverse musical traditions, Nepal has been somewhat invisible in the world music market. The articles written by Mr Broughton as a result of this visit have brought a much-needed improvement in this situation. In June 2019, one of the core team teachers and I pre-sented collaboratively at the Cultural Diversity In Music Education conference in Tel Aviv. The frame of our presentation52 was to illustrate our ways of working by scrutiniz-ing it through the concept of ‘professional conversations’ as a way of boundary-crossscrutiniz-ing (see e.g. Akkermann & Bakker, 2011). During the time in Tel Aviv, the participating core team members from Nepal went through the draft of my second PhD article to-gether, so that everyone had a chance to comment and contribute to the articulation of the results. In the fall of 2019, my Nepali colleagues and I continued with our efforts to support the entrance of Nepali music to the world music market by finding the financial means for three musician-teachers to participate in WOMEX, which took place in Fin-land this time. We gained financial support through crowd funding, and also an abun-dance of immaterial support from the networks of people who had been associated with our collaborative work so far. In November 2019, the second edition of the ISME South Asia regional conference was organized in Kathmandu. Professor Westerlund in-vited the core team, myself, and the second doctoral researcher DT who had conducted her research in Nepal, to participate in a collaborative keynote with her53 to illustrate
51 Westerlund, H. & Partti, H. 2018 (first online). A cosmopolitan culture-bearer as activist: Striving for gender in-clusion in Nepali music education. International Journal of Music Education. doi/pdf/10.1177/0255761418771094.
52 Timonen, V, Tuladhar, R. 2019, June. Boundary crossing in an intercultural learning environment. Dialog-ical reflections between Nepali and Finnish music teacher-researchers. Paper presented at Cultural Diversity in Music Education (CDIME) conference, Tel Aviv, Israel.
53 ‘Self-reflexivity in and through intercultural professional collaboration in music education’ with Heidi Westerlund, Danielle Treacy, Riju Tuladhar, John Shrestha, Iman Shah in the 2nd South Asia International Soci-ety for Music Education Conference, Kathmandu, November 4–6, 2019.
the potentials and challenges of our journey together. One of the most delightful things in the conference was that there were numerous presentations from the Nepali music educators, who had never been part of this kind of academic world before. The core team educators had supported them in the process of carrying out the presentations, from the abstract writing to presenting, and thus took an active lead in further spread-ing what they had learned to the larger music education community in Nepal.
As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the globe in the spring of 2020 and disrupted the ongoing development of the Finnish-Nepali collaboration.
The initial plan was to have a Global Visions project closing event at the ISME World Conference 2020 in Helsinki. The conference was however cancelled due to the pan-demic. All of the Nepali co-researchers in this inquiry were to present at the confer-ence on the research projects that they had created in Nepal over the past couple of years. Further, other music educators from Nepal had applied for scholarships to take part in the ISME world conference for the first time. The Nepali co-researchers’
research projects are, however, presented in the Finnish Journal of Music Education (FJME) for fall 2020. Communication has remained frequent with the Nepali co-re-searchers, and we are eagerly waiting for the pandemic to settle so that our future plans can take place, hopefully already in the near future.