Harald Jörgensen: Research into Higher Music Education

The RAIME conference started with an opening paper by Harald Jörgensen, Norges musikkhögskole: "Research in and about higher music education: an overview". The speaker had made an impressive investigation of a vast amount of studies in the field, recently published (2009) in the book "Research into higher music education: an overview from a quality improvement perspective".

This research field is quite young - more than 90% of the studies have been published after 1980! There is a complete dominance of research from the US. The second most productive country is Great Britain. A big problem is that studies published in smaller languages unfortunately will be invisible in an overview like this. The author had, however, included studies in Norwegian;-)!

The speaker urged his colleagues to treat the reports and assessments the regularly do as research, by adding theory and reflection - then publish them. Institutions must establish and encourage research within their own walls. Sadly it turned out that several participants shared a common experience, namely that the management of the conservatoires simply does not want such research to be carried out. Especially not if it is critical to the work of the institution.

In his speech Harald Jörgensen was actually focussing on what topics have been neglected by researchers so far. Most studies concern processes taking place within institutions, but there are almost no studies of the institution's missions and goals. The list of topics was quite long - apparently there is a lot of more work to be done. This is good, I guess, since the research community is growing drastically year by year.

Conference with Research Alliance of Institutions for Music Education (RAIME)

At present, my place of work "Artisten" is hosting the 10:th conference of Research Alliance of Institutions for Music Education (RAIME). The first meeting took place in Stockholm 2010. About 40 researchers have gathered here in Gothenburg, mainly from the US and Northern Europe. RAIME consists of nearly thirty institutions from all over the world. The research themes presented at their symposiums are very diversified. Since I have the kind permission from the organizers to attend I will be happy to give you short summaries of some of the presentations.

Offer from the Masterclass Foundation

Dear colleagues,

I am so sorry that I don't have time to write more often on the blog, but I suppose you know how it is...

I just wanted to forward a message from Joanna Pearson at the Masterclass Foundation, since I am very fond of their Masterclass DVDs.Our library has all of them and the students are very enthusiastic!

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