Transformative dialogue in music teacher education : A duoethnographic journey towards planetary wellbeing

Abstract

Music teacher educators have divergent responses to the roles that the various social and ecological global crises should play in their work, and to ways that they could contribute towards planetary wellbeing. We conducted a duoethnographic study in which we explored our own understandings of and responses to the ecological crisis within our work. As music teacher educators who grew up and worked in the divergent contexts of Finland and South Africa, we were interested in the role that these contexts played in our respective understandings, and in the transformational affordances of dialogue. Data consisted of personal reflections, diary entries, and interviews. In the process of collaborative writing we also discussed readings and co-analysed the data. We characterise the duoethnographic study as a journey of transformation, and have titled the findings Triggered by privileges, The stumbling block of guilt, and Moving towards encounters. We argue in this chapter for dialogue as a means to (re)humanise music education and, drawing on Martin Buber’s distinction between I-Thou and I-It relationalities, we see dialogue as an ethical imperative for educators to promote ecological awareness and contribute to building a socially just world within planetary boundaries.