Novel opportunities for intercultural music education: Integrating singing and a language-aware approach in Learn-Finnish-by-Singing choirs

Abstract

The topic of language awareness in intercultural music education has received surprisingly little attention in discussions on meaningful and responsive musical practices, despite language being an ubiquitous issue that every music educator encounters when entering a multilingual learning environment. This study explores a language-aware perspective that is embedded in a dynamic and dialogical choir practice drawing on the direct social needs of adult choir participants with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The analysis sets the practitioner experiences, planning, and implementation of the choir practice against the theorisation of activity systems and the concepts of boundary object and boundary crossing, in particular. The theoretical exploration considers how a dual meaning choir practice (a) integrates musical and linguistic activity, (b) crosses boundaries between the disciplines of music and language education, and (c) justifies change in music educational thinking. The study suggests that a dual meaning choir practice provides meaningful musical activity for adult immigrants, expanding the understanding of musical practice and the profession of music educator by blurring the dichotomous thinking of music and music education as being either instrumentalized or existing only for purely musical purposes. The study further advocates that a hybrid musical practice can widen professional understanding with novel insights, out-of-the-box perspectives, and new opportunities.