Abstract

Affordance and choice: performing music in lower secondary school

The purpose of this study is to elucidate affordances and meaning-making processes where students in Compulsory lower secondary education learn to play music together in music class. The data consists of a series of observed music lessons, performances and stimulated recall interviews in two 8th form classes, video recorded in the course of one term.

The analysis focuses on students’ and their teacher’s musical interaction and sign making during music class. In order to explore multimodal aspects of sign making in teaching and learning, the study rests on a theoretical framework of social-semiotic multimodality and design theory of learning. Nine students, strategically selected, were observed more frequently than the rest. Excerpts of their singing and playing music on different occasions were transcribed into scores in which musical notation together with other graphic signs and written descriptions represent the events. The scores visualise mul- timodal aspects of musical interaction, which made a 'fine grained' analysis of meaning-making processes possible. Further, an analysis was made of how the students and their teacher expressed themselves about the playing and learning and how this related to their observed actions.

The result reveals how the teacher’s physical and verbal communicative sign combinations and choice of repertoire conveyed several layers of mean- ing by means of instructions for playing and by references to different dis- courses and genres. During lessons the principle of recognition was present in all of the teacher's sign making but it might be expressed in different modes including expected actions that surprised, amused and helped students to link different musical parameters together. Through transmodal transla- tions of the teacher’s signs, students, linked short fragments of their parts together, and taking turns with the teacher, made longer musical lines. It was found that students’ activities and utterances indicated that a shared sense of meaning and acceptance took precedence over personal musical wishes and preferences.

The study contributes to a close insight and understanding of how young people's meaning-making processes may be manifested in music 'teaching- and-learning' in heterogeneous classes, as well as of the significance of teachers’ sign-making in that process. The results of the study warrant a discussion of how musical learning is made possible and is restricted de- pending on how music teaching in schools is designed.

Keywords: music teaching, musical interaction, meaning making, semiotic resources, re-design, transmodality, dialogue