1 Introduction: Inspiration meets opportunity

My dissertation project began with the extraordinary opportunity to create a research seminar in teacher education from scratch and without methodological boundaries. Inspired by the work of scholars such as Gouzouasis (2015), Bakan (2014) or Bartleet and Ellis (2009), I decided to introduce the student group to the methodology of arts-based autoethnography as a means of reflecting on their personal and professional becoming. "Songwriting as Autoethnography: Arts-based (Un-)learning in Teacher Education" took place over two semesters, beginning in September 2023 and ending in May 2024. 19 student teachers were involved and engaged in autobiographical writing, songwriting and critical reflection as they became part of a participatory, practice-based research project exploring the following guiding question:

How can musical autoethnography help student teachers create meaningful accounts of their personal and professional becoming and what is the transformative potential of this practice?

2 Musical Learning, Existential Creativity and the Pedagogy of Vulnerability

2.1 Musical Learning

Any research in music education needs to develop an understanding of musical learning, which implies both a concept of learning and a concept of music. The present project is based on the German concept of “Bildung”, which goes beyond cumulative and outcome-oriented ideas of learning and is instead interested in the transformation of world- and self-relations (Koller, 2018). Within the project, music is understood as a semiotic practice and a form of multimodal discourse (Way & McKerrell, 2017), making it an inherently social practice taking place under specific social conditions (Born, 2011). The concept of Bildung, which can be understood as the development of the individual through education, is extended to musical learning. The project is hence not primarily focused on the accumulation of musical knowledge and skills, but rather on the development of new musical self- and world-relations. Building on an understanding of music as a social semiotic practice, musical self- and world-relations are furthermore not limited to the aesthetics of sound. Rather, they semiotically structure our understanding of the social world as a whole.

2.2 Existential Creativity

Transformative learning cannot be planned and structured by a teacher and there is no objective way to measure its outcome. "Bildung”, according to Koller (2018), occurs as a subject's need to find creative answers in the form of new semiotic figures when confronted with a lived experience that goes beyond its habitual understanding of the self and the world. A similar but more active understanding of learning can be found in Baldacchino's (2019) concept of art as "willed forgetfulness" and a practice of unlearning habitual ways of knowing in order to allow for the emergence of something new. Just as "Bildung" is not limited to the structures of the school and may even be opposed to them, "art as unlearning" (Baldacchino, 2019) is not limited to, and may even be opposed to, professionalised and institutionalised artistic practice. However, both concepts can be connected to Joseph Beuys’ emancipatory idea of "existential creativity" (Buschkühle, 2020, p. 48) that potentially encompasses all human activity and is not necessarily tied to a specific activity: making music or painting is not creative in itself. Fostering an environment in which transformative musical Bildung can take place therefore means encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning and to understand their musical practice as a situated and open-ended inquiry into who they are, what music is, and how the two relate to each other and to the world.

2.3 Pedagogy of Vulnerability

Conducting a seminar as a practice-based musical inquiry into transformative processes of Bildung requires a pedagogy of vulnerability. First and foremost, both students and teachers are asked to allow for what Gilson (2014) calls „epistemic vulnerability“, that is, to be „open to not knowing“ (Gilson, 2014, p. 94). Relegated to the position of the "ignorant schoolmaster" (Rancière, 1991), the teacher cannot know what it is that the students should learn. All they can do is enter into a dialogue with the learners to ensure that they are searching. Students, on the other hand, are deprived of any easy way of confirming that they are doing a good job and must ultimately decide for themselves whether their explorations have been deep and wide enough.

Knowing music and knowing the world through music is furthermore a highly individual and often deeply emotional body of knowledge. Reflecting on this knowledge and using it to create new understandings of the self and the world is likely to open up the professionalized university space to personal testimonials, thereby challenging the public/private dichotomy. Art, like Bildung, is always personal. Participants thus become vulnerable to the ears of others when they express themselves musically, they become vulnerable to being touched by the expression of others, and they become vulnerable in their understanding of who they are and how they relate to others and the world by engaging in musical self-exploration.

Finally, arts-based inquiry is not about filling knowledge gaps, but about creating "openings" (Springgay et al., 2005, p. 898), i.e. becoming aware of the contingency of all knowledge systems and experiencing the human capacity to create reality through semiotic practice (Leggo, 2008). Thus, the creation of new musical meanings as a result of artistic inquiry cannot simply be translated into propositional forms of knowledge. Doing art means doing work on the “social sculpture” (Buschkühle, 2020, p. 10) as a whole and experiencing its vulnerability to one’s actions.

3 Method

According to Koller (2018), the study of transformative processes of Bildung always goes hand in hand with a transformative process of Bildung on the part of the researcher. As a full participant in the research field, my study therefore calls for a Critical Autoethnography (CA) to uncover hidden power dynamics within the research field by analyzing my personal experience. This involves an analysis of how my own understandings of music and education, as well as the structural framework of the university, have shaped the research seminar and how they may have changed throughout the process. In order to analyze the songs written by the student teachers, the study further applies Judith Butler's (1997) concept of subjectivation in conjunction with Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). Butler's theory explores how individuals become subjects through processes of power and subjection, highlighting the simultaneous acts of domination and submission that shape identity. By integrating this with MDA, which examines how different semiotic modes (e.g. text, sound, visual) interact to create meaning, the study aims to uncover how student teachers' identities are constructed, expressed and transformed through their songs.

4 Preliminary Results

The following three songs were written by generalist student teachers in the third and final year of their studies. For most of them, the seminar was the first time that they engaged in music creation. Interpreting their work as arts-based research implies not listening with a teacher's ear and not hearing the songs as students' songs. As music teachers, we must unlearn the pedagogical gaze and meet the songs as creations of intelligences equal to our own. Only then will we be able to hear beyond the craft and experience the songs as works of art, that is, as works of love: „Craftsmanship to be artistic in the final sense must be ‘loving’; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised“ (Dewey, 1980, p. 47–48)

4.1 Sandra* & Lilly*: «Die Welt verblasst in sich (The world fades)»

After an intuitive writing session in which both students wrote about how certain songs make them think of loved ones that had died, they got into an exchange about this experience and wrote a song together. While the song ostensibly was about Sandra’s grandmother, excerpts from Lilly’s writing found their way into the lyrics as well and turned the song into a performance of shared vulnerability. In a later reflection, Sandra realized that the song spoke to her about her mother who had lost two siblings and her own mother within the last few years. The songwriting process helped Sandra grasp how the repeated loss of loved ones had affected her mother and in turn her whole family. She finally invited her mother to the University where she performed the song for her.

In Sandra’s and Lilly’s practice, songwriting presents itself as an act of listening and as an act of care. While in the subject position of students, they sing to us as daughters, granddaughters, and friends whose identity depends on the people they have loved and lost. The two students transgressed the normative boundaries of teacher education and transformed the seminar into a space where self-testimonials of personal vulnerability become a part of teacher education. Their song challenges normative ideas of professionalism that frame grief as a private issue that should be dealt with individually and affect work as little as possible. Instead, they put their grief out in the open and acknowledge that it is what makes them who they are. Their song, which was written in the very beginning of the seminar, significantly contributed to the humanization of the professional relationship among the study participants.

4.2 Laura’s* Mash-Up of Identities

„I believe that children develop a sense of shame around kindergarten age. And as soon as I had developed this, I was regularly ashamed of my mother. She yodeled at every opportunity, be it at home, in front of my friends or on my birthdays. However, as soon as we were in [the countryside], with our relatives, I loved yodeling and the atmosphere, which was so different from the one I knew in [the city]. I enjoyed the mountains, the constant sound of the accordion in the background, the loud talking and swearing, and the yodeling.“ (Laura, 2023, translated by author)

Laura’s musical product is not a song in its traditional sense but rather a mash-up of different sounds that symbolize different aspects of her identity. Growing up in an urban area, she used to be embarrassed by her mother’s singing which gave away the rural heritage of her family. The young child intuitively understood that the sound symbol of yodeling is out of place in the soundscape of the city and marks a difference in her family’s cultural identity that leaves her vulnerable to the judgement of her friends. When visiting her relatives, the meaning of the sound symbol changed entirely: Instead of signifying difference, it now signified a deep sense of belonging. Reflecting on the meaning of music in her life, Laura realizes that the rich musical culture of her family is something that she should be proud of rather than embarrassed about. At the same time, she feels that simply reproducing the music of her family could not do justice to her own identity. Building on these thoughts, Laura began a process of playful interaction with sound symbols combining her mother’s singing with her own playing of the electric guitar and an electronic drum beat. The process led to a musical product in which the mother’s singing is no longer a marker of cultural difference but is instead resignified and normalized as an aspect of Laura’s hybrid identity.

4.3 Stella*: If I’ll be okay

“The piano and I merge. When I start my own song, I am completely in the moment and I enjoy it. There are only a few people watching, which doesn't make me nervous. After about three minutes, I look up from the piano and my cell phone with the lyrics and see my friends' faces. Two of them have tears in their eyes, they smile and clap. This reaction touches me deeply. It's beautiful, but also surreal. Somehow, I can't deal with it.” (Stella, 2024, translated by author)

Stella’s description of playing one of her songs to a group of friends exemplifies the physical vulnerability within musical performance. She feels how the body of her instrument, whose construction and inner workings enable but also limit her expressive possibilities, merges into a single entity with her own. The resonating strings within the grand piano and Stella’s voice become audible as a oneness and move her friends to tears. By focusing on her song and the physical connection between instrument and voice, Stella finds herself protected from the potentially unnerving effect of the ears of the others. Instead, she realizes how her friends become vulnerable to her expression and thereby becomes aware of the powerful effect that she has on the world around her. On the one hand, the experience is perceived as flattering and affirming. On the other hand, it puts Stella in a new position that challenges her to rethink her self- and world-relations.

In Stella’s process, becoming a teacher and becoming an artist came together and led to both exceptional human flourishing and existential doubt. Her song «If I’ll be okay» expresses the paradox of becoming within the boundaries of the social and brings to light the complexity of arts-based learning. Instead of simply inscribing herself into normative narratives about teachers and artists, the artistic engagement incited an unlearning of an individualistic understanding of personal and professional development. A teacher or a musician is not something anyone can become on their own in a free and autonomous development. Rather, Stella feels how she is recognized by her friends as a musician and experiences a new sense of agency in this position. But by becoming a musician in the eyes of others, she now also feels subjected to further social expectations about how a musician should present, what they should know and be able to do. These social norms unfold their effect both in habitual understandings of the social world that Stella has developed throughout her life and in encounters with social actors who incorporate them such as music teachers. Stella sings about her self-doubt and questions whether she can ever do justice to these norms sufficiently to be recognized as adequate or „okay“. The song offers no resolution, there is no bridge or chorus that turns things around by appealing to the individual’s power to overcome such doubt. Because of this lack of resolution, the song leaves the listener–and the first listener is always the artist herself–with an open-ended question. The doubting of the self leads to a doubting of the world, reveals the subject’s heteronomy, and finally leads Stella to critisize the lack of creativity and self-awareness that is expected of students when we educate them to be ”teachers” or “musicians”.

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* All names have been changed.

5 References

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Baldacchino, J. (2018). Art as unlearning: Towards a mannerist pedagogy. Routledge.

Bartleet, B.-L., & Ellis, C. (2009). Making autoethnography sing/making music personal. In Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal (S. 1–20). Australian Academic Press Bowen Hills, QLD.

Born, G. (2012). Music and the social. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert, & R. Middleton (Hrsg.), The Cultural Study Of Music (S. 261–274). New York: Routledge.

Buschkühle, C.-P. (2020). Joseph Beuys and the artistic education: Theory and practice of an artistic art education (Bd. 6). Brill.

Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford University Press.

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Gilson, E. C. (2014). The ethics of vulnerability: A feminist analysis of social life and practice (1. publ). Routledge.

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Leggo, C. (2008). Astonishing silence. Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues, 165–174.

Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford University Press.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., & Kind, S. W. (2005). A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 897–912. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405280696

Way, L. C., & McKerrell, S. (2017). Music as multimodal discourse: Semiotics, power and protest. Bloomsbury Publishing.