During their time in higher music education music performance students are participating in a wide range of musical activities. While curricular activities play a central role, self initiated learning activities, both inside and outside the school, are a common part of the everyday activities of music students. This thesis focuses on the complex relations between these diverse activities and contexts, and the way music students make sense of and organise their learning.
The thesis comprises two case studies of students from a bachelor program in music performance. A sociocultural perspective is employed to analyse learning as the construction of personal learning trajectories whilst accounting for the mutually constitutive relation between cultural and personal aspects of learning. By doing so, the thesis aims at exploring the way participation across contexts is linked in personal ways and how this feeds into the ongoing development of these contexts.
The findings show that extracurricular music activities, as well as personal histories of participation, can play a crucial part in the way music students make sense of and organise their learning. They also highlight the importance of seeing higher music education as part of a larger field of interrelated practices across which students participate.
- NMH-publikasjoner 2013:6.
