The polyphony of musician–teacher partnerships: Towards real dialogues?

Abstract

This article aims to explore and discuss how, on many levels and in many ways, polyphonic dialogues can fluctuate among participants in a multidisciplinary didactic art project implemented in schools, namely, School and Concert – From Transmission to Dialogue (DiSko). DiSko is an innovation project that aims to try different ways to address the significant lack of school ownership to professional visiting concerts in Norwegian schools.

The project method, educational design research, is a combination of approaches that are usually applied to well-known research-based problems. Empirically, researchers and participants carry out successive iterations of experiential case interventions based on ongoing analysis. A central aim of the method is to suggest concrete research-based solutions or new ways of addressing a problem, which is instrumental outside specific case contexts.

Dialogue is a major epistemological grounding for DiSko and its descriptive cases, and throughout the article, the project design and activities are viewed in terms of Bakhtin’s concepts chronotope, carnival and polyphony. Through discussions about aspects of the methodology as well as by providing an empirical case example, this article describes how elements of educational design research may be composed in order to maintain an epistemology of dialogue and polyphony.