Browsing by Subject "monikulttuurinen musiikinopetus"

The object of my thesis is to solve how Finnish primary school music books approach non-western cultures and their music, and how they construct cultural identities. In this research, I see identities as socially and discursively constructed: identity of "others" is always formed in relation to "us". Biased or negative descriptions may affirm stereotypes and prejudice of a certain group. This study is based on the ideology of multicultural education: the aim is to teach students to understand and value different perspectives and offer equal rights to different groups in society. As for music education, it means that different cultures should be approached from their own perspective, taking into account the musical diversity and dynamic nature of cultures. For my thesis I analysed two series of primary school music books: Soi (published by WSOY) and Musiikin mestarit (Otava) for grades 1–2, 3–4 and 5–6. All six books were published in the past two decades and encompass the majority of music books that are generally being used in the Finnish primary schools. I applied discourse analysis as research method for my study. It aims at understanding language as social behavior in a certain cultural and historical context. Within discourse analysis, I chose the critical approach as I was interested in the way the discourses were used to produce, renew and question unequal power relations, depending on how they positioned people. My aim was to observe how the cultures were represented and positioned in relation to "us" in the data. I categorized lyrics, pictures and their captions as per cultural areas, mainly by their geographical location. After that I observed the verbal and visual representations and how identities were constructed by them. I found many repeated and strong representations of certain cultural groups. They created a hegemonic discourse, which failed to take into account the diversity of the culture but instead repeated and boosted existing stereotypes of it. Identities of "others" were constructed in relation to "us" as a part of a long historical continuum. However, there were differences between books. The amount of different cultural contents, captions and photos in relation to drawings grew towards higher grades. Yet only Soi 5–6 had a clear attempt to approach other cultures from a multicultural perspective. On the whole, critical discourse analysis offered an interesting perspective to observe schoolbooks, and would be necessary for all authors, in order to improve multicultural approach in Finnish music education. Nevertheless, multicultural approach should be acknowledged already in teacher education in order to prepare teachers to approach different music cultures in their future work.