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This article urges a reconsideration of professional responsibility in arts education, moving beyond an emphasis on narrow technical expertise and strict disciplinary boundaries in order to respond to the needs of complex late modern society. We reconsider 'professionalism' in arts education as a site of struggle that requires 'systems reflexivity' to engage in the transformation of wider society. By presenting three cases, conceptualised as social innovations in the arts education system in Finland, we illustrate how multi-professional collaboration and systems entrepreneurship, flexible institutional boundary-crossing, and performing social categories in professional education of artists help tackle exclusion and inequalities. We also argue that a degree of activism may be necessary for the field to expand its sense of professional responsibility beyond 'what is' towards 'what could be'.

Highlighting the need for teacher education programs to respond to rapidly diversifying societies, this article reports a qualitative metasynthesis of intercultural outreach projects in music teacher education, conceptualizing these projects as a "pedagogy of interruption." Results show that such outreach projects interrupt the individualistic frame of music teacher education, the known difference, the logic of teaching, and the understanding of what intercultural teacher competence is, rather moving toward letting the context teach. The complex relational work involved in intercultural outreach projects can be seen to establish spaces for framing learning within professional self-reflexivity, embracing uncertainty and trusting relational becomings through an investment in the political and moral aspects of teacher education and intercultural theorization. The article argues that intercultural outreach projects and theorization can be taken as a healthy test for contemporary music teacher education to rethink what competence and its own education is for in the 21st Century.

This article presents a synthesis of findings from a large-scale research project, the Global Visions Through Mobilizing Networks--Co-developing Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Finland, Israel and Nepal (https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/globalvisions/home), and conveys its theoretical and practical explorations and insights. By envisioning 21st-century music teacher education from the perspective of interculturality and through transnational collaboration, Global Visions has engaged with international societal changes and struggles related to the rising tides of xenophobia, populism, and social disharmony, by focusing on what happens at the boundaries, in dialogue, and in conflict when difference is encountered, experienced, and reflected upon. While the dominant culturalist view presents music as neutral and diversity as tied mainly to ethnicity, Global Visions has recognized, analyzed, exemplified, and increased understanding of the complex politics of diversity. Resulting in envisioned music teacher education programs as innovative game changers, the project has enhanced professional reflexivity through considering the responsibility and moral aspects of music teacher education. Six main focus areas of the project are presented with recommendations for future research and practice in music teacher education: (a) research education and research as intervention; (b) reflexivity and professional learning in intercultural encounters; (c) the capacity to aspire in music teacher education; (d) the development of intersectional praxis; (e) intercultural music education as a political engagement; and (f) transcultural professional development and international professionalization.

This study presents an analysis of hidden elitism in music education through the free choice argument -- that individuals are fundamentally free to choose to study music -- as a meritocratic power structure. Qualitative Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is applied to understand music education as a social system with a special structure in which its purpose regulates its functions and makes them meaningful in a given social setting through discourse. The study shows how free choice can appear both as a democratic principle and a legitimising discursive mechanism restricting the enactment of equality. Through a case, the study then demonstrates, first, how the relationship between the meritocratic discourse of free choice and hidden elitism can be identified by using SSM in the context of Finnish music education system, and second, how professionals can bridge social systems and transgress hidden elitist structures.

Governments and funding agencies increasingly expect researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work not only within the academy but also for a range of stakeholders beyond academia. Whilst arts researchers have tended to resist impact measurement, in this article, we will describe one form of demonstrating impact, namely through writing impact narratives in order to argue that such writing can be effective in promoting learning and reflection on the researcher's work in the society. We provide collaborative autoethnographic narrative accounts of our experiences as arts education researchers, located in Australia and Finland, of developing research impact narratives and consider the ways in which the development of impact narratives can shape researcher identities, research processes and epistemic cultures of disciplines. We suggest that impact narratives are inevitably retrospective but may also be future-oriented in the ways in which they structure ongoing research processes and future projects and their activities providing a space for 'narrative learning' and professional transformation. We also suggest that arts educators experiment with and explore the potential for narrative impact statements to inform and engage society beyond academia with research findings and outcomes.

Embracing an ethos of sharing music and practices across cultural boundaries, the multicultural vision of music (teacher) education has paid scarce attention to the paradox of freedom that arises between such freedoms and the complex politics that frame and constrain teachers' choices and values. In this article, we explore these demands of professional reflexivity through an instrumental case study of music teacher educators working in an all-female, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish music teacher education programme in Israel. Through a thematic analysis of data generated together with six teacher educators, we illustrate how their context-responsive approaches to developing programme visions engage with processes of censorship and cultural translation, as teachers work to align their professional boundaries within established religious boundaries. This boundary-matching and hybridity required may be seen to result in intense processes of professional reflexivity that raises questions as to how all teacher education programme visions might engage with the moral order of a society and highlights the need for international music teacher education to develop a critical, reflexive awareness of how values shape professional work.

This theoretical inquiry approaches the challenge of reflexivity in the music education profession from the perspective of a collective and social understanding of memory. While memory is typically understood as being an individualistic, psychological, and cognitive phenomenon, in this paper we argue that the perspectives of collective and social memory may be of critical assistance to music teachers and music teacher educators who are facing the problem of increasing diversity. Teachers experience mounting pressure to include a wider selection of available material from the diverse musics of the world in their curriculum. We suggest that understanding the politics of memory--how memory shapes the future and reveals our reflexive capacity in terms of our bonds to, or freedom from, the past--provides new tools and perspectives for considering diversity. Furthermore, we propose that in order to make a difference, the politics of memory require an agonistic engagement in pluralistic societies, with multiple, even conflicting, relationships to memory and time, place, and space. The article argues that a critical politics of memory is not just about combining the past and present, but about re-imagining, re-negotiating, re-working, and re-generating the collective futures of the school, its educational context, and broader society. Keywords: Politics of memory, music education, musical repertoire, social memory, INTRODUCTION When music is used in school events or functions, it is often said to be there either because 'it has always been there' or because someone in the school [...]

Expert musical memory has been the fundamental focus of research in the field of musical memory, and this line of research has demonstrably informed the ways memory is understood by the current generation of music professionals. In this theoretical inquiry, we draw on Foucault to first argue that the dominant Western classical music expert gaze in music and memory studies can be seen as a form of ocularcentrism. Second, due to this narrow gaze, the field also fails to recognise that the human memory system is characterised by a unique symbiosis of not just learning and remembering, but also forgetting, a potentially powerful theoretical aspect of memory in music education. Third, we argue that the recent 'genetification' of musical memory, together with the narrow expert gaze, may further reinforce old dichotomies between the talented and untalented, abled and non-abled. Through a critical lens towards the politics of knowledge production in memory studies, we argue that there is a need for a more critical, holistic and ethically reflexive understanding of memory in professional education in music and music education.

This study attends to the global need to rethink how music education could provide opportunities for shaping imagined communities in times of intensifying societal complexity and diversity by exploring the practice of singing 'school-specific songs' in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The methodology combines educational ethnography with Appreciative Inquiry, whereby individual interviews with school administrators, musician-teachers, a school founder and a composer were analysed and reflexively interpreted. Countering previous critical research on school-specific songs, this study shows that although the school-specific song practice originates outside Nepal, the songs are tailor-made to canonise each school's unique vision and mission, and for teaching values and character, and were thus considered to be local. Through considering the new ideas and practices that emerge through a reflexive interpretation of the school-specific song practice, we discuss five perspectives that arose from the Appreciative Inquiry process: the universal right to aspire; developing reflexivity; the pedagogical paradox of rituals; a continuum from individual to collective goals; and a constantly changing 'we' in diversifying, complex societies. The study suggests that rituals in schooling, of which school-specific songs are a part, should be applied reflexively and subject to ongoing critical reflection and constant revision.

Socially engaged, participatory music making is slowly establishing itself as a complement to musicians' portfolio careers, although it may still be considered of less value than established concert hall practices. To gain a better understanding of the drivers toward socially engaged practice in music field, we analyzed 20 semi-structured interviews with musicians in Finland, using the lenses of work values and career orientations. The abductive, theoretical reading analysis shows that the musicians viewed the social-relational nature of their work as a fundamental feature of the practice and sought congruence between their work values and other personal values. The interviewees renounced the hierarchy between intrinsic (autonomy, creativity, variety, achievement, challenge, and intellectual stimulation) and social work values (interacting with people, altruism, and contribution to society), and found participatory practice to be artistically freeing and personally rewarding. Their work appeared less driven by extrinsic values (economic gain and status); hence, their self-directed and values-driven orientation resonates strongly with the notion of the protean career. Although their sociopolitical stance involved the risk of weakening their professional status and they had to constantly justify their work amongst their colleagues, they all expressed conscious counternarratives to what they considered the elitism of expert culture in traditional music institutions. The study argues that the practice of socially engaged musicians can help the professional field of music reconsider and transform its stubborn value hierarchies in the complex social, political, ethical, and moral landscapes of contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades there has been a proliferation of neuromyths based on oversimplifications and over-generalisations of research findings. As part of a larger project that examines the societal impacts of the arts and arts education practices, this interdisciplinary collaborative study examines the translation of recent neuromusical research into the public domain, one of the main generators of neuromyths. We review the claimed benefits of musical engagement to other domains, and the ways that researchers discuss these claims. To accomplish this, we first provide a thematic analysis of the kinds of claims that are made in research texts. We analysed 76 review articles published between 2006 and 2016 that both concern brain imaging studies in humans and involve music. The analysis highlights the ways that researchers qualify the potential benefits of music. Second, we explore the ways that neuroscientists report their results to the public and the ways that these results are taken into public discourse. In order to do this we analysed the homepages of the researchers who published at least 2 review articles in our dataset, focussing on the media linked to their homepages. We also explored over 100 websites that mention the benefits of music and also refer to brain imaging research. These overviews allow us to show that the same criteria commonly applied in research are almost never applied in public discourse. We conclude that there is an ethical imperative for researchers to take care in presenting the research results of brain imaging studies to the larger public, and furthermore argue that there is an ethical obligation for researchers to speak out against misuse of research findings.

Leaning particularly on Zygmunt Bauman's thoughts, this paper analyses past theorizations of music education, asking if these trends have created a value indifference and moral blindness in terms of who 'we' want to be in super-diverse societies. The paper pinpoints the need for a professional social epistemology in which social integration brings forth the use of moral imagination beyond the bounds of existing musical and educational practices whilst constructing the 'we'. Post Second World War music education theorisation shunned the idea of schools as spaces of education fostering a 'common culture', an idea seen as characteristic of nationalistic music education. The cognitive turn towards individual knowledge construction, first manifested in the aesthetic approach and then followed by the 'practice turn' and rights-based multiculturalism, has focused on individual cognition and identities in relation to diverse musical practices. The paper argues that the increasing diversity, polarisation, and consequential policy demands for social integration now require that music education needs to return to moral questions about how we as a profession potentially construct 'our life' and 'our values' in educational contexts.

Although music education scholars have increasingly advised teachers to take heed of values, principles, and strategies of musical practices outside of school, very little has been written in music education regarding the ideological underpinnings of musical practices in these contexts. This article argues that musical practices outside of school do not necessarily provide ideal models to be directly applied in the music classroom, but need to be critically examined and transformed to better align with global imperatives such as inclusiveness. In addressing the imbalance between "inauthentic" learning in school and "authentic" learning outside of school, this article shows how working toward the global ideal of gender inclusion may require radical activism and a cosmopolitan approach countering the right of an ethnic group to practice and preserve their own distinctive culture. The life story of a Newar musician from the Kathmandu Valley is used to illustrate this argument by demonstrating what it takes for a "culture-bearer" to initiate radical processes of social change and transformation. In this qualitative narrative case study, we asked what kind of context-specific, socio-cultural negotiation was required to overcome the challenges the musician faced in including girls and women in musical learning in a Newar community.

Societies worldwide are becoming more aware of the educational challenges that come with increased cultural diversity derived from ethnic, linguistic, religious, socioeconomic and educational differences and their intersections. In many countries, teacher education programmes are expected to prepare teachers for this reality and develop their intercultural competences. This instrumental case study is based on a project that aims to initiate mobilizing networks between two music teacher programmes to explore intercultural music teacher education. In this study, we map the intercultural competences that are required of music teacher educators and that are provided in the music education programmes at two higher music education institutions in Israel and Finland. The data consists of 11 focus group interviews with music teacher educators at the Levinsky College of Education in Tel Aviv and the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, conducted by a multinational research team. The data was analysed abductively, using content analysis as a method. While the interviewed teacher educators could articulate many aspects of their own intercultural competences or the lack of them, the findings indicate that in musical diversity and teaching students from different musical backgrounds the teacher educators found it difficult to explain what kinds of intercultural competences their respective programmes provided for the students. Based on the findings, there is a need for a more holistic understanding of intercultural competences in music teacher education as well as how our institutions produce power. There is also a need for the teacher educators in the programmes to collaborate and discuss among each other in order to create "knowledge communities" and to move towards addressing intercultural issues.

Disability is a neglected field of diversity within music education scholarship and practices. The study reported in this article sought alternatives for the hierarchical practice-model and ableist discourses that have thus far pervaded music teacher education, through a reconceptualization of expertise. The focus is on a Finnish university special education course, where musicians with learning disabilities conducted workshops for student music teachers over three consecutive years. Student teachers' written reflections (n = 23) were reflexively analyzed in order to examine how "performing disability" may disrupt, expand, and regenerate normative discourses and transform inclusive thinking in music teacher education. Performing disability is here seen to generate critical discursive learning, and create third spaces for pedagogical diversity and the co-construction of professional knowledge. It is thus argued that through teaching "with," and "by," rather than "about," we in music education may move beyond normalizing understandings and practices of inclusion, towards an expanded notion of professionalism.