STUDENT AGENCY IN A CULTURALLY DIVERSE SECONDARY SCHOOL MUSIC CLASSROOM

Abstract

Students´ musical agency is a musical process whereby students act and interact. Musical agency plays an important role in a culturally diverse classroom; but how do educators foster student agency in such diverse settings? What repertoire and class activities do they use? To address these questions, three experienced music teachers from Vantaa, Espoo and Helsinki were interviewed. This paper is based on the concepts of Musical Agency (Karlsen, 2014; Klemenčič, 2015) and Democracy (Dewey, 2016; Karlsen & Westerlund, 2010). Findings show that pupils are more interested in working with pop songs than music from their own culture and that teachers tend to choose easy repertoire for pupils whose musical knowledge is not well developed and their talent not yet realised.