Teaching as improvisational experience: Student music teachers’ reflections on learning during an intercultural project

Abstract

This qualitative instrumental case study explores Finnish student music teachers’ experiences of teaching and learning as participants in an intercultural project in Cambodia. The Multicultural Music University project aimed at increasing master’s level music education students’ intercultural competencies by providing experiences of teaching and being taught abroad in traditional music and dance programs run by two Cambodian NGOs. The article suggests that beside the importance of learning new music and dance traditions, the student music teachers regarded the learning experiences gained through peer-teaching in an unfamiliar context as significant, as these experiences provoked them to step out from their pedagogical comfort zones and to engage in a deep reflection on the nature of teaching and the purpose of music education. Rather than perceiving their teaching as individual achievements the student teachers’ reflections proceeded towards an increasing emphasis put on the quality of joint interaction and the benefits gained from having to spontaneously create the structure of lessons in fast-changing situations. Based on the analysis of individual and focus group interviews and other research data, we discuss the concept of teaching as improvisation and its implications for teacher education.

Introduction

Internationally, there is an increasing need for music teacher education to incorporate multicultural experiences for students, since interaction at the global level has become the norm rather than the exception (e.g., Banks & McGee Banks, 2010, p. v). As in many other countries, Finnish society is facing a rapidly intensifying climate of multiculturalism through refugee immigration, increasing mobility between countries in the European Union and globalisation in general, creating new demands upon teachers. It has thus been recognised in the current government’s visions for teacher education (Opettajankoulutus 2020, 2007) that teacher education departments should offer more classes related to multicultural issues and competencies in how to interact with students who are trying to adapt to a changing society. In other words, to meet the requirements of working within multicultural societies, student music teachers need to have not only experiences of different kinds of musics, but also experiences of teaching students from a variety of cultural, ethnic, religious and national backgrounds. Teachers have to be able to meet students’ needs without having a common language or common musical or educational histories, or even a complete understanding of what the students will bring to the classroom and other educational environments (see e.g., Karlsen, 2012, 2013, 2014).

In seeking to equip future teachers with the necessary skills to work in diverse communities, many teacher education programs have redesigned field experiences to facilitate deeper reflection on, and practice in, intercultural interaction (see e.g., Hollins & Guzman, 2005). Similar attempts have also been made in music education, concerning both student music teachers as well as in-service music educators (see e.g., Burton, Westvall, & Karlsson, 2013; Marsh, 2005; Robinson, 2005). However, despite the requirements for Finnish music teacher education to provide multiple options in instrumental studies varying from popular and folk music to jazz and classical music (Allsup, 2011; Westerlund, 2006), efforts towards wider intercultural competences beyond multiple musical skills have been rare. In recent decades, Finnish music teacher education curricula have implemented multicultural needs through what Banks (2010) calls an Additive Approach. While integration of wider issues of diversity may start from a more modest Contributions Approach, which focuses on the recognition and teaching of discrete cultural elements, such as increasing the diversity of school rituals, the Additive Approach is different. The latter adds diverse cultural content, concepts, themes and perspectives to the curriculum without changing the overall structure and purposes, for example, when a specific course in multicultural music education is added to a teacher education program in order to add multicultural perspectives to the existing curriculum. Music teachers in Finland study a variety of subjects related to both diverse musics and pedagogy, however, rarely viewing the affiliated knowledge and skills from a diversity perspective (Transformational Approach) or taking action on social issues during their teacher training (Social Action Approach), as suggested by Banks (2010). In this respect, music teacher education in Finland reflects broader patterns in teacher education (Villegas & Lucas, 2002) in which the underdevelopment of reciprocal practices is seen as related to a lack of funded scholarly research on diversity issues in teacher education programs (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). As music teacher education already seems to struggle in providing student teachers with the necessary skills to teach music within a variety of Western classical music practices and beyond, it demands extra effort to further approaches that challenge the Additive Approach and reach beyond normative answers to pedagogical issues. As some multicultural approaches rely on a degree of certainty and distance from the cultural ‘Other’, there may be a need for educational elements that deliberatively provide learning environments with cultural uncertainty, destabilizing elements and even with an activist stance for social and cultural change. Banks (2010) also calls for these elements in his advanced Social Action Approach.

The study reported in this article is based on an intercultural project that aimed at increasing master’s level music education students’ intercultural competencies by providing experiences abroad. As part of these experiences, students’ familiar and assumed notions of teacher, student, teaching and learning were challenged by the context. During the project, a group of nine student teachers from Finland travelled to Cambodia to learn the local music and dance traditions and share traditional Finnish music. In this article, we explore the students’ teaching experiences during their stay in Cambodia through an instrumental case study. The research question guiding our interest is: In what ways do the participating student music teachers narrate their learning experiences while teaching in an unfamiliar context?

Context of the study

The Finnish–Cambodian intercultural project, named the Multicultural Music University and funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, provided student music teachers from the Sibelius Academy with experiences of teaching and being taught in three traditional music and dance programs run by Cambodian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). ¹ The project was designed with the aim of providing the music education students with multicultural music education experiences, which in many ways would follow the ethnomusicological orientation that has traditionally focused on introducing students to musics of the world and the cultural Other (see e.g., Belz, 2006; Campbell, 2004; Joseph & Southcott, 2009; Schippers, 2010; Southcott, 2010; Volk, 1998). The visit was preceded by a preparatory course intended to provide information about Cambodian culture, the political background of the country, and practicalities for travelling. As the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ funding basis required cultural exchange, the course also included preliminary ideas for the Finnish repertoire that later would be taught and performed together with Cambodian children.

Over a period of three weeks in January 2012, the Finnish group visited the Cambodian NGOs. The first NGO was located on two sites, in Siem Reap in the North of the country and in the capital city Phnom Penh, and the second NGO in a small city in the rural Southern coastal region. The task of the student teachers was to participate in the traditional Cambodian music and dance teaching in the NGOs and to share Finnish traditional music and dance by performing and organising teaching and learning workshops for the children cared for by the NGO. More specifically, besides small performances, the assignment involved peer teaching of Finnish music as well as learning situations where the student teachers were mere beginners. The student teachers were entirely free to choose their teaching materials and approaches, although it was suggested that they should include Finnish folk music traditions in their teaching. On one of the sites, however, the NGO staff specifically requested popular music, including hip hop, a wish that the student teachers were able to fulfil without any prior preparation. In addition, some single instrument tuition sessions in various Western instruments that the NGO owned took place within small, on-site workshops. Both the teachers and NGO children participated in teaching Cambodian music to the student teachers, as one of the main project goals was to empower the Cambodian children by allowing them to teach adult beginners. The visits to the first two sites were short and included small-scale performances by the Cambodian children and the Finnish student music teachers, both separately as well as in mixed groups. We spent the longest time at the Southern coastal region site, where a more intensive, 10-day period of teaching and learning took place during two-hour sessions, twice a day. At the last site, we conducted teaching in three groups, each involving three student teachers. This site’s participants had also prepared their own suggestions for a working schedule. A two-day break on a holiday island was included during the final site visit. This visit ended with a public performance of Finnish and Cambodian music and dance for an audience constituted of government representatives, local people and tourists. During our visits to all three sites, we followed the regulations, rhythms and wishes of the local NGOs. Further, we had to adapt and be spontaneous because the university did not have any information on the practicalities (related to, for instance, the length and number of workshops and the amount and age range of children participating in the workshops) prior to the visit.

The children taught and cared for by the staff of the NGOs were all disadvantaged, vulnerable young people, between the ages of 5 and 20. Some children were orphaned, others had families unable to care for them; some were removed from their family environments due to various kinds of abuse, and other children were from the local community who attended music and dance lessons for free. While the roles of the Finnish masters students alternated between student and teacher throughout the project, the focus of this article is on the Finnish students’ experiences of the latter in cultural and educational contexts highly different from those encountered as part of their everyday lives in Finland. Alongside the nine music education masters students and one teacher educator, a group of four researchers participated in the project, conducting various research tasks alongside taking care of travel arrangements.

The students who participated in the intercultural project did so voluntarily and were selected by the project leaders based on specific criteria, such as being in the final stages of their studies and having had previous experiences abroad. Hence, the Cambodian experience, which the university facilitated and for which it granted the students study credits, was not a mandatory part of their education. Following the guidelines given by the Finnish National Advisory Board on Ethics (2009), participants were required to give informed consent. Accordingly, participants are referred to by pseudonyms of their own choosing.

When conducting research in cross-cultural settings, an important ethical consideration concerns giving space and voice to all parties involved (Marshall & Batten, 2003). Hence, although this article focuses on the student music teachers’ experiences of learning while teaching in—for them—an unfamiliar context, other publications stemming from this project attend to the voices of the Cambodian music and dance teachers (see, e.g., Kallio & Westerlund, in press).

Theoretical starting points

The Multicultural Music University project and the research described in this article build on previous theories relating to teaching in intercultural environments (Deardorff, 2008; Gesche & Makeham, 2010; Tange, 2010), previous research on novice teachers’ professional development (Darling-Hammond, Hammerness, Grossman, Rust, & Shulman, 2005; Hammerness et al., 2005; also Richardson, 1996) and intercultural collaborative learning among music students and future music teachers (Bartleet, 2011; Broeske-Danielsen, 2013; Danielsen, 2012; Sæther, 2013).

Summarising research on guiding beginning teachers from novice to adaptive, expert professionals, Hammerness et al. (2005) point to “three widely documented problems in learning to teach” (p. 359), particularly in identifying important starting points for the design and development of teacher education. First, it is widely acknowledged that student teachers need to relearn what it means to be a teacher, or, in other words, challenge and change the preconceptions of teaching and learning that they have constructed through their own experiences of being students “for twelve or more years in traditional classroom settings” (p. 359). These previous experiences, referred to as the apprenticeship of observation (a term first coined by Lortie in his Schoolteacher in 1975), are thought to have a significant effect on how novice teachers approach the task of becoming professionals. In the Multicultural Music University project, the chosen student teachers had prior teaching experiences, through practicum placements and private instrument teaching, for example. However, their teaching experiences were in the same context as when they were students. Thus, it was expected that a radically different context—culturally, pedagogically and musically—would challenge their views and assumptions.

Second, according to Hammerness et al. (2005), student teachers need guidance to understand how their newly acquired skills of “thinking like a teacher” can be put into action and be enacted in the classroom and in other teaching contexts. Hence, facilitated opportunities for reflection need to be accompanied by guided opportunities for acting as a teacher, and for doing “a wide variety of things, many of them simultaneously” (p. 359). In this project, alongside guidance and support by a teacher educator, heavy emphasis was on peer support and learning. Moreover, collaborative reflection was intensified by considering focus group data collected during the project.

Third, teacher education needs to prepare future teachers for thinking systematically about complexity, meeting many different students’ needs at once and “juggl[ing] multiple academic and social goals requiring trade-offs from moment to moment and day to day” (Hammerness et al., 2005, p. 359). This suggestion is to help students develop metacognitive habits of mind so that they are equipped with tools that can “guide decisions and reflection on practice in support of continual improvement” (p. 359). Such habits of mind involve not only specialised content knowledge, but also emotional intelligence, the ability to take perspective, to learn by reflecting on one’s own experience, and the ability to control one’s thoughts and feelings—in other words, self-regulation (e.g., Ryan, 2010), among other skills. It was believed by the teachers and researchers in the Multicultural Music University project that an intense, non-interrupted experience involving considerable opportunity for shared reflection might influence student teachers’ metacognitive habits of mind.

While the three points taken up by Hammerness et al. (2005) are all worthwhile considerations for teacher education program development, it is of course also the case that student teachers’ “strong beliefs, in combination with the salience of the real world of teaching practice, create conditions that make it difficult for preservice teacher education to have an impact” (p. 6), as also pointed out by Richardson (1996) and, indeed, by Lortie (1975). Furthermore, Cochran-Smith and Fries (2005) argue that, “there is a fundamental tension between teacher educators’ desire to change their beliefs and prospective teachers’ desire to learn how to ‘do’ teaching” (p. 88). Student teachers thus expect that the main task of teacher education is to guide them into mastering existing local practices and hence to function within the boundaries of the apprenticeship of observation, rather than exploring alternative ways of teaching and learning. In addition, notwithstanding their education focus on the learning processes and needs of their future students, it seems that novice and new teachers “do not often begin with a focus upon student learning [but] are instead concerned with their own actions in the classroom” (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005, p. 400). However, these tendencies can, to a certain degree, be overcome by presenting the novice teachers with “purposefully constructed experiences and coursework” (p. 400). Consequently, the intercultural project was designed with the hope that the participating student teachers would have numerous opportunities in the foreign, Asian context to encounter a degree of complexity that until then had been inaccessible to them in their Finnish homeland. Further, the project designers hoped that this experience abroad would offer space for the student teachers’ own solutions and negotiations.

Reporting on teachers’ experiences of working in an intercultural environment to make this complexity accessible, Tange (2010) emphasises three progressive stages that often characterise learning in order to adapt to new contexts, namely: arrival, culture shock and adjustment. While the stage of arrival can be referred to as a honeymoon phase and is generally characterised by “a high degree of enthusiasm and excitement about cultural differences” (p. 105); the culture shock stage may not be quite as pleasant. During this second stage, negative reactions to intercultural relationships appear, “levels of uncertainty and anxiety grow” (p. 106) and participants often experience an increased sense of frustration and anger connected to their exposure to unfamiliar contexts and ways of doing and being. However, during the third and final stage of adjustment, participants complete their “intercultural learning process” (p. 109) and are often able to view their own behaviour and reactions more objectively, even with a dose of humour towards themselves. Tange’s description of these stages serves in our analysis as a framework for exploring the Finnish masters students’ experiences of learning while teaching as processual and evolving instead of, for example, focusing solely on their final learning outcome.

In the work of Sæther (2013), Tange’s stages are also recognisable among the music students who participated in facilitated intercultural collaborative learning situations as part of the GLOMUS camp in Ghana. Sæther argues that being exposed to culture shock by being forced to step outside one’s comfort zones was the most effective way to achieve “fundamental learning” (p. 37). Similar findings are reported by Danielsen (2012) and Broeske-Danielsen (2013), who researched a project that in many ways resembles the one reported here, but was conducted among student music teachers at the Norwegian Academy of Music who undertook parts of their practicum in a Palestinian refugee camp. Danielsen describes how the students were thrown into teaching situations without knowing anything about them beforehand, and how that caused them to be especially aware of the challenges connected to “planning and division of responsibility, the making of decisions, as well as the handling of the unpredictability of the situations” (Danielsen, 2012, p. 97). Furthermore, Danielsen (2012) describes how the unfamiliar contexts and situations made the students “move the focus from their own main instrument and their own wishes, to the children’s needs in the teaching situation” (p. 98), how the lack of a common language among the student teachers and the children led to “a more nuanced understanding of the need for language in general” (Broeske-Danielsen, 2013, p. 309) and also how the students’ “experience of themselves while meeting an unknown culture contributed to awareness of their own viewpoints, choices and actions” (Danielsen, 2012, p. 99).

While an educational culture shock or “‘immersive’ learning experience” (Bartleet, 2011, p. 12) may be challenging for student teachers, it may also be seen to provide opportunities for developing skills that are needed for working in intercultural educational environments. In this connection, Gesche and Makeham (2010) make a tripartite division between cognitive, affective and operational intercultural skills. While operational aspects are connected to teachers being able to draw upon the cultural diversity of their classrooms in fruitful ways, cognitive aspects include “raising awareness of and learning about other cultures and languages, and getting to know diverse worldviews” (p. 254). Moreover, affective aspects “relate to behavioral adaptations and are associated with issues such as motivation, adaptation, openness and a willingness to change” (p. 254). Kim (2006) argues that, for such adaptations to actually occur, individuals need to undergo a necessary psychological shift in order to adapt and accommodate, requiring a stress–adaptation–growth dynamic or, in Gesche and Makeham’s (2010) words, “manoeuvring in and out of challenging situations that push individuals into a developmental upward spiral of increased adaptive capacity” (p. 245). Hence, one of the hopes of the teacher educator and the researchers who facilitated the experience in Cambodia for the student music teachers was that this intercultural project, including reflections during the project, would kick-start such an upward spiral with respect to the development of their intercultural competencies (Cushner & Mahon, 2009; Deardorff, 2008). It was hoped that teaching and being taught together with the children and staff in the selected Cambodian NGOs would engage the students in challenging but meaningful interaction beyond a perfunctory surface-level engagement. Yet, as Deardorff (2008) writes, such deeper-level engagement “requires a degree of risk taking, of trust building, of being able to see from the other’s perspective, and a willingness to reach out” (p. 46).

Research methods

Data and procedures

The data of the study stems from the researcher-facilitated reflections of all nine Sibelius Academy music education masters students who participated in the intercultural project. In all, we conducted nine individual interviews (one with each student) and six focus group interviews of three students in each group. The first group interviews took place at the beginning of the project (January 7, 2012) and the second group interviews during the middle of the project (January 15, 2012). The individual interviews were conducted toward the end of the project during a weekend break (January 21–22, 2012). The student group combination was changed for each interview session in order to create new contexts for meaning making. Furthermore, we recorded one joint-reflection session (January 21, 2012) with all the participants present (the students, researchers and teacher educator). Additionally, all of the students wrote reflective diaries throughout their stay, and seven of them chose to share their writing with us as part of the research data. Four of these diaries were returned anonymously. After the project, all of the students wrote a one- to two-page final evaluation of the project, and one student shared an extended diary-based reflective essay. Except for the diary reflections that in some cases continued after the project, all data collection took place during the three-week stay in Cambodia in January 2012. In line with the research tradition on teacher thinking (see e.g., Calderhead, Denicolo, & Day, 2012), the research question of the study, laid out above, focused on the student teachers’ narration of their experiences of learning while teaching during their stay in Cambodia. Consequently, observational data was not collected in any systematic way or with an aim to corroborate the students’ accounts. Still, the researchers’ presence in the field alongside the study participants, the shared daily discussions and the researchers’ gained experiences while following the student teachers around throughout their days and various activities, represent an important backdrop for understanding the contexts in which the student teachers were working and learning, and hence for interpreting the interview and diary statements.

The individual and focus group interviews were semi-structured (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009), and while the interviews undertaken in the beginning of the exchange project mainly focused on the students’ expectations, the interview guides of the later interviews gave opportunities for discussing and reflecting on the students’ most significant experiences; what they learned from the situation, from each other and from the teachers and children cared for by the NGOs; which of their learning experiences they found to be most relevant in relation to their own teaching in Finnish contexts; and the processes connected to forming as well as working and teaching within a group. Whilst the individual interviews offered a platform for individual voices to be heard, the format of the focus-group interviews aimed to facilitate interaction and interchange among the student teacher interviewees and hence to “bring forth different viewpoints” (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009, p. 150). Deardorff (2008) has acknowledged that such reflections on interactions are important during experiences abroad for the development of students’ intercultural competence. The idea of creating contexts for the interchange of viewpoints was also behind the facilitation of the joint-reflection session, which developed into a 2.5 hour-long pedagogical discussion on how the group had culturally represented Finnish music education and music in the Cambodian NGOs. As with the individual interviews, the reflective diaries foregrounded individual students’ voices and offered insights into the students’ experiences of being, learning and teaching in Cambodia. As Bogdan and Biklen (2006) remind us, diaries that are written, “under the immediate influence of an experience, [can] be particularly effective in capturing peoples’ moods and most intimate thoughts” (p. 134).

Analysis

The interview data was gathered by a multinational group of researchers and among student teachers from both the Finnish and Swedish-speaking music education study lines at the Sibelius Academy. ² While most interviews were conducted in Finnish, three group interviews were conducted in English and one individual Swedish-speaking student’s interview was in Swedish. The data was transcribed, and the translations and data analyses were made by two of the researchers who speak all three languages.

The interviews, diaries and the final evaluations were understood as accounts (Atkinson & Coffey, 2002) through which the participants organised, recounted and retrospectively constructed the events, choices and activities and, consequently, created interpretations out of an abundance of meanings related to those happenings (Josselson & Lieblich, 2002). The narratives were viewed as a source for experience depictions, offering insight “into the characters, events, and happenings central to those experiences” (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996, p. 68). By following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis method, we aimed to identify and analyse patterns, or themes, within the data, as well as to interpret “various aspects of the research topic” (p. 79) in examining the student teachers’ interpretations and perspectives that they attached to their expectations and teaching experiences during the project. Moving from description into a deeper level of interpretation, we then constructed two main, overarching themes, namely 1) learning to face the unknown; and 2) learning to collaborate. Furthermore, the latter theme was divided into three sub-themes describing different aspects of learning related to collaboration: a) learning to give and take space; b) learning from one’s peers; and c) learning the significance of the encounter. In accordance with the aim of exploring how the student teachers’ experiences of teaching and learning evolved as a process during their stay in Cambodia, the themes have been positioned in relation to each other in a way that enables the reader to follow this evolutionary process. Furthermore, in order to ensure the validity of the findings, our analysis was “fed back” (Pole & Morrison, 2003, p. 103) to the student teachers by presenting them with the first complete outline of this article and inviting them to comment and make suggestions for revisions.

Limitations of the study

The limited sample of only nine students does not allow for generalisations in the common understanding of the word. However, as Yin (2012) reminds us, for researchers working with one case or a small set of cases “analytical generalizations” (p. 18) may be drawn. In other words, and with respect to this particular study, the findings stemming from the Finnish student teachers’ narrations of their learning experiences while teaching in an unfamiliar context might, when “using [the] study’s theoretical framework to establish a logic” (p. 18), be applicable for student teachers in subsequent situations in similar circumstances.

As explained above, the main body of data in this study stems from the recorded individual and group interviews along with the joint reflection session and final evaluations. In the end, one student teacher chose not to share the reflective diary written during the stay, and for ethical reasons we, as researchers, did not regard it as appropriate to require any student to hand over what became very personal accounts of the Cambodian journey. Consequently, the results are mainly based on the interview material. The other forms of data are used more sparsely to provide some triangulation. This approach was also used to maintain the multivoicedness of the findings, allowing all the students to speak without prioritising those who chose to share their journals.

Results: From chaos to encountering

Learning to face the unknown

The first group interviews took place during the first days in Cambodia, prior to the initial visit to the first NGO. As already mentioned, the first interviews focused on the students’ expectations connected to teaching and learning from the children and their teachers at the Cambodian NGOs. Altogether the students expressed alternating emotions of nervousness and curiousness in a situation in which almost everything was new. The Cambodian music “was a mystery” (Anon. 4, diary, January 4, 2012) but for some students even the teaching content was new: “Finnish folk music and singing. It’s not my thing, really. So, everything is quite new, and I’m expecting a lot” (Frank, group interview, January 7, 2012).

On the one hand, some students seemed to be hesitant regarding what lay ahead, especially in terms of meeting children whose backgrounds were assumed to radically differ from that of their own:

I am nervous about how it will feel to see these children, these orphans. And when I know what their background is, actually I am afraid of that—how it feels. … I sometimes hate myself and wonder why I’m so lucky. (Olivia, group interview, January 7, 2012)

On the other hand, the students were looking forward to delving deeper into the local culture and especially its music:

[This project is] like meeting a new world for me. I’ve never been outside Europe, and now I’ve seen a lot of things. And I hope I’m going to see a lot more that will teach me something about humanity and about how things are in the world right now. And, of course, I’m also expecting to learn Khmer music a bit, and music in general … and for me, at first it [the Khmer music] sounds all the same. … There’s something going on that I really would like to know what’s going on there. And what is the thing, what are they playing and how do they communicate. (Frank, group interview, January 7, 2012)

Well, [my expectation is] just to blow up my musical world. Just to hear something else, just to challenge the ears and brain. (Olivia, group interview, January 7, 2012)

Yeah, I was looking forward to confronting a different culture and people somewhere out of my comfort zone. Especially, people in music always fascinate me. It’s meaningful to be in the centre … when people and music happen. (Sven, group interview, January 7, 2012)

The open-endedness of the project and related lack of clarity regarding what was expected of them, and what to expect of their new teaching context, also contributed toward a general feeling of nervousness among the student teachers. It was hard to plan anything beforehand in order to feel more prepared, and more safe. One of the students wrote in the diary: “We were asked [by the NGO leader] to teach ‘We are the world’ and these kind of pop tunes are not my strength. I like to teach when I am told what to teach, but I struggle when having to come up with harmonies extempore” (Anon. 1, diary, January 13, 2012). Although not all the students considered the scarcity of opportunities for planning to be a problem, the data collected in the beginning of the project involved plenty of reflection on how to deal with an open platform, as the following quotations indicate:

Well, it’s very little, what we know about what is going to happen. We’re going to the school tomorrow, and we still don’t know exactly how it will go or what we should do. Of course we have a program, and have prepared as best as we can. So, it’s quite open; it’s hard to know what to expect. (Miina, group interview, January 7, 2012)

I’m excited about it, because it’s a new experience. But then again there’s this “I don’t know what’s going to happen” thing. It’s like I feel there’s a child living in me: I want structure and I want routine and I want to know what’s happening! So it’s hard to break that, like “OK, I’m going to jump and flow”, and I don’t know where I’m going. (Sunny, group interview, January 7, 2012)

I think that there is something lacking—working like this. We have just been told that “yeah, it will be sorted out when we get there”, “yeah, and we will have some space to teach, let’s do this ‘Piiri pieni pyörii’” [nursery song]. … Some of us know those songs, some of us don’t; maybe half of us know some game, so I’m thinking “oh, who is going to do this?” Is there a situation that I’ll be standing there and won’t know the game?! … and a lot of strong wills. And, of course, we are musicians and everyone has something to say. But in that kind of situation I’m not always … I’m always saying nothing—I’m just letting others speak. So, I really easily feel not valuable in a group. And I think we are so many that I feel it now, but maybe it’ll change. (Laura, group interview, January 7, 2012)

I can imagine that this is the hardest for many of us: to adapt into … uncertainty. (Anon. 2, diary, January 9, 2012)

Not only the new context and situation, but also the group with whom they were expected to teach traditional Finnish music, brought forth anxieties. After the first day of teaching, Olivia wrote in her diary “a couple of students started getting irritated with each other” (Olivia, diary, January 8, 2012). Many of the students emphasised the nervousness they felt towards finding their place and role in the new group. As Sunny and Miina told in the interviews:

Yeah, I think that’s why we are nervous about it, because we haven’t said “you do this” and “you do this”. Because if I have a job I need to do, I’m going to do it and that’s it. Now it’s like “we’ll see”, and I’m like “oh, my God”. (Sunny, group interview, January 7, 2012)

And if you know what you should do, it’s also easier to do your real best … Because you know that “this is my thing and I should do this”, and you can do it with all your heart. But then if there are many wheels, and you don’t know … “who is doing [that] … but she wants to do that”. (Miina, group interview, January 7, 2012)

Although many of the students were accustomed to ensemble playing as musicians, and some even had experiences of teaching together with others, only a few members of this group had worked together with each other, and the students seemed to be highly aware of the challenges related to the division of labour between them (Broeske-Danielsen, 2013; Danielsen, 2012), as well as the importance of trying to build relationships and trust between the group members. During the project, one of the most commonly recurring topics in the interviews was therefore the question of how peer negotiation relates to leadership.

Learning to collaborate

Learning to give and take space

Gradually, the division of labour between the student teachers began to take shape although issues of leadership still existed. Miina wrote in her diary after arriving at the final site: “We, the Finnish students, now seem to be more united as a group … however, I still think that there are flaws in the group dynamics, especially when it comes to leadership and equality” (Miina, diary, January 16, 2012). However, two days later she wrote, “the collaboration among us in the ‘leadership group’ was more equal, too” (Miina, diary, January 18, 2012). Many student teachers began to view the group work and the access to their fellow students’ competencies not as a hindrance but as a benefit, and they noticed the development in their collaborations. Sunny and Rita described their experiences of giving space in teaching situations:

Usually, I’m actually the one who leads that stuff, but now, here, I’ve been the one who follows the pack. So, I’ve actually been a bit surprised that I’ve even somewhat liked not having to be the leader all the time. (Sunny, group interview, January 15, 2012)

Yeah, but personally I feel like it’s gone very naturally. And then, when you give some space, when you notice that somebody’s coming up with something, I just take a step back and let them do their thing. That’s when it’s all somehow very fluent. Like if you keep in mind that. … I mean, what I think is that, rather than getting everyone to participate equally, the main thing is for the teaching to be fluent and for the kids to learn. (Rita, group interview, January 15, 2012)

The quickly changing situations and the need to react in the moment, rather than to stick to predetermined plans, also challenged the student teachers’ preconceived understanding of their own place and role in the group. During the project, those who had regarded themselves as ‘leaders’ learnt that it is sometimes more productive to step back and let others take the lead, as Mia, Sunny and Miina expressed:

[I have] learnt to make room for others—that as a teacher … you do not always need to have things happen as you want them to happen. (Mia, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

Stepping aside is not a bad thing, either. That’s also been something for me to try to learn. … I feel like all teachers and teacher-types are normally used to organising things and being in the spotlight. I think it’s important to also know how to give space for others. And I’m pleased to have succeeded in that. (Sunny, group interview, January 15, 2012)

[I have learnt] how knowledgeable the others are—I am not always right—and I have had confirmation that it is important to recognise the student. (Miina, individual interview, January 21, 2012)

Practically, the last site was easier for the students to negotiate since the teacher groups were at this point smaller, consisting of three student teachers. One of the students wrote in their diary, “We work together well. … It feels like a lucky stroke that all of us are really adaptive and extremely pedagogically oriented” (Anon. 3, diary, January 10, 2012). For some, however, learning to find their way to work in a large group and giving up their own ideas did not come without pain:

It was very educative, and so educative that it hurt; you need to think about how you are and really look at yourself and recognise your own faults. It is painful learning. (Laura, individual interview, February 21, 2012)

Learning from one’s peers

Learning from one’s peers in teaching situations included pedagogical issues, such as teaching mainly through body language and without verbal explanation or instruction. The possibility of taking turns at being the leader enabled the student teachers to effectively pay attention to the children’s level of activity and to quickly notice if someone was struggling to keep up with the others. Rita explained: “You’re constantly absorbing stuff when you watch others teach. Like, ‘oh, they’re doing it like that’, or ‘hey, that’s genius’ or ‘they’ve got a great attitude with that’.” (Rita, individual interview, January 22, 2012). Or, as Miina noted:

Working in a group is really important and also seeing their [the other group members’] strengths, that is inspiring too, and the discussions one can have afterwards have often been really rewarding, and above all just ideas that they have about songs that we use … [they] might be new to some extent. (Miina, individual interview, January 21, 2012)

Sunny, Olivia and Frank described the two-way learning process, which they experienced during their shared teaching situations:

In the group instruction where it was the three of us … well, I noticed that I tend to always rush ahead while the others can see that not all [students] have yet learned. I thought that I probably, really should calm down a bit in the teaching, and keep my eyes peeled. (Sunny, individual interview, January 21, 2012)

Well, of course, when you notice while someone else is teaching that “OK, now you could do this”, or that “I probably would’ve done this”. And yet, when you look at it from the outside, you realise that you yourself probably wouldn’t have realised to do it in that situation. Like when you notice that now they’re just talking too much, but it’s likely that you would’ve been just as talkative in that moment. It’s not so much that you’re just finding others’ faults, but that you’re observing and noticing how much more is happening around you when you’re not the one who’s constantly teaching. (Olivia, individual interview, January 21, 2012)

You definitely learn when you watch others teach, and I generally take much too few opportunities to observe. Even though we’ve been observing during this teacher training, to get to be right there, looking over someone’s shoulder at how they approach certain situations, and how they cope with unusual circumstances … that kind of teacher-assisted singing and playing is not my strongest suit. I’ve enjoyed getting experience in that now. And what better way than to be right there with a pro, seeing how it’s done, and then trying it for yourself. (Frank, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

Seeing and interpreting the teaching habits and pedagogy of one’s peers was expressed as being “holistically rewarding” (Sven, individual interview, February 22, 2012). Since the student teachers were sharing rooms with each other and spent almost all their time together as a group, there were always plenty of opportunities to reflect on the joint teaching together. Olivia wrote already at the beginning of the visit, “this journey is good also because we have a relaxed possibility to discuss pedagogy with each other” (Olivia, diary, January 7, 2012). The facilitated group interviews and reflection session before the last week of the project also enhanced learning. The latter was described as “perhaps the longest uninterrupted pedagogical discussion in my life—really intensive” (Frank, individual interview, January 22, 2012), and also as an arena where “several people had nice viewpoints that you could only agree with although you did not come up with them yourself” (Miina, diary, January 21, 2012). This continuous interaction seemed to deepen the experiences of learning, as Sven described:

One can discuss immediately after the situation, and in the situation you communicate with looks, words, tones, and then after that you reflect on it with them [the other student teachers]. It immediately stays with you, how they [the other student teachers] teach. (Sven, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

Learning the significance of the encounter

Whereas in the beginning of the project student teachers primarily focused on their own experiences, anxieties and uncertainties, towards the end of the project the experiences of the Cambodian children dominated reflective discussions. One of the dominant themes regarding the communication with the children had to do with language. Rather than viewing the lack of a common tongue as an obstacle, many students highlighted the benefits of not having the option to lean on their familiar ways of filling up the space with words (Broeske-Danielsen, 2013). Instead, they had to learn to use body language as the primary means of communication: “I experienced that, without a common language, teaching [music] is actually more effective”, wrote Laura in her diary and final reflections (Laura, diary, written after the project). The student teachers also mentioned the power of facial expressions, such as eye contact and a smile. Olivia reflected on this aspect of teaching in her diary after the trip:

Some children seemed to need undivided attention … sometimes a child needs that [the teacher’s] eyes are directed towards him and that action is for that child. … So does eye contact help learning? Interesting! (Olivia, diary, February 20, 2012)

In many ways, the foreign context facilitated opportunities to learn new skills that the students regarded as applicable and highly valuable. Comments in the project’s final evaluations illustrate these transferable skills: “I was able to get a deeper result in my personal pedagogical process. I thought it was highly important to delve into the culture, to get acquainted with the teaching methods and to work long-term” (Anon. 1, final evaluation, written after the project); “this was a trip not only to Cambodia, but also into a fascinating culture, humanity, respect, understanding and my inner self” (Anon. 2, final evaluation, written after the project). Further, these new skills were also seen to be valuable for them in the familiar settings in Finland.

Importantly, the students were pushed out of their comfort zones, and yet they learnt to relax in a situation where they could not cling to their preconceived plans and understandings but had to develop flexibility, as Laura, Rita and Sven narrated:

Yes, now I suddenly realise that when I’ll go back to Finland I won’t have this feeling when a small child comes, that “what shall I do with that, when I don’t know what one is supposed to do with a child that age?” … I don’t need to understand anything else than “this is a human being”—and that’s enough. … It was much easier than I thought! Very easy, when you just take a look at who is there. (Laura, group interview, January 15, 2012)

But when I actually realised that letting go of control was actually quite cool, I’ve really had quite a great time. … This has actually been more of a freeing experience for me. Probably just from letting go of my own conventions, going with the flow and seeing what comes of it. (Rita, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

The thing that was again pointed out in our joint reflection session yesterday was that it’s beneficial to constantly question one’s methods, and to consider trying things in another way. … Or to find a suitable compromise, combination or method for each situation—and something that can be “stretched”—something that is flexible in any way in that moment. So that flexibility would become a natural part of being in the midst of a situation. I think it’s terribly important … that the method doesn’t lead you, but that you lead the method. And it’s a combination of many things learned—previously, and in that particular setting. (Sven, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

Furthermore, what, in the beginning of the project had appeared as overwhelmingly different and even chaotic, was now seen in other ways too. The student teachers started to see that the children also had something to offer and teach them, as two final evaluations illustrate: “[The best part was] that the children taught us, and noticed that they were much more skilled than us, the clumsy Finns—the fact that the roles were switched around!” (Anon. 3, final evaluation, written after the project); “[The best part] … was to be a student. For the project, it was very important to challenge oneself in the role of a learner, and not just a teacher” (Anon. 4, final evaluation, written after the project). Furthermore, it was acknowledged that the idea of the project was not to complete the students as music teachers, but to set them out on a lifelong journey:

As a positive side of this project, I see my own growth in a short time to face new cultural things and new sides of myself. As much as I was scared to join this trip, during the last week I thought I could stay in Cambodia and work there as a teacher. (Laura, diary and reflection, written after the project)

This has been a significant journey also in a philosophical sense. It feels like I’m on the right path, but I’m not taking anything for granted … or “now I can do this”, but, instead, I am all the time, and increasingly so, interested in learning and understanding more about what it means to be a music teacher and what it is to encounter a human being. … That is something I want to take with me for the rest of my life and in every encounter—the skill of encountering that [you can] never complete. Every person brings you something new. (Sven, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

Discussion

In Finland, as in many other countries, multicultural music education courses as part of music teacher preparation are thought to enhance learning of cultural diversity and competence in making music of cultures other than our own (Sibelius Academy, 2011). This was one of the goals of this project as well. The learning of traditional Cambodian music and dance traditions was intended to open the students’ ears and give them experience of a culture that is mostly unknown in Finland, in its very authentic context. However, the experiences of teaching the children in the NGOs were considered equally important to the learning of Cambodian musics and dance. The Finnish students’ teaching-related learning curve was steep, starting with frustration and feelings of insecurity and ending with the most mature thoughts of the basic idea of education. As Laura expressed:

If one also considers that this isn’t a performance situation or practicum … nor a situation where I am attempting to prove to someone how competent a teacher I am, then actually all those thoughts should just be thrown away. … It’s actually an extremely liberating thought when crafted to its very conclusion … that in this moment we are there for them [the children], and I don’t have to prove ANYTHING to anybody. (Laura, group interview, January 15, 2012)

Rather than perceiving their teaching as individual performances, the student teachers’ reflection proceeded towards an increasing emphasis put on the quality of interaction and the benefits gained from having to improvise, as the “script” or structure of lessons often had to be spontaneously created. They were required to be able to make on-the-spot decisions to fulfil the situational demands, as well as to prepare for a public music and dance performance within a relatively short period of time. Their reflections approached what Keith Sawyer (2011) refers to as “teaching as improvisational performance” (p. 5); a concept that emphasises the tension between structure and freedom. Whereas teaching-as-performance points more to the artistry of an individual teacher, almost as a form of public speaking or as a set of techniques teachers need in “reading” curricular texts, Sawyer’s concept of teaching-as-improvisation underlines the situational and collectively-generated nature of teaching. Instead of seeing teaching simply as a situational teacher performance where “educational imagination” balances structure and spontaneity (Eisner, 1979), while exploring new avenues and dealing with uncertainty (e.g., Barrell, 1991), Sawyer’s teaching-as-improvisation emphasises teaching as scaffolding students’ learning improvisations and the co-constructed nature of teachers’ and students’ encounters.

In many ways, the Sibelius Academy students went through a very similar process to that of the Norwegian students teaching in Palestinian refugee camps described in Danielsen’s (2012) and Broeske-Danielsen’s (2013) study. Similarly, our students’ focus shifted from themselves towards the children within an extremely short period of time, and they began to concentrate on how to connect with the children, and how to see and listen to them. The student teachers’ learning curve during the project hence can be seen to represent the growth from novice stage toward gaining what Hammerness and her colleagues (2005) term “adaptive expertise” in teaching. “Trying and experimenting in the region of the unknown”, as described by John Dewey (1996, MW1, p. 73), and then letting “go with the flow” (Rita, individual interview, January 22, 2012), as Rita, one of the masters students, expressed, the experience led them into reflections regarding the fundamental purpose of music education.

Importantly, in this intercultural project, the improvisatory element in teaching was intensified not only because of the obvious culture shock (Tange, 2010), the unknown conditions, different pedagogies used by the Cambodian teachers and students, uncertain and changing schedules and new students with varying ages and extremely heterogeneous skills, but also particularly because of the requirement to peer-teach and the culture change this brought about. The peer-teaching took place in different formations, sometimes involving all nine masters students, while at other times happening in groups of two to four. As there was only a little space for discussion regarding with whom to collaborate in the fast-changing situations, the students had to be able to overcome any personality differences and preferences, despite the fact that, in such a situation, issues of interpersonal relations may be practically impossible to separate from substantive issues of peer work (see e.g., Gunn & King, 2003). As a whole, the project provided a forum for intense interaction within which meanings were not received from university teachers but co-constructed through proactive participation and complex collaboration; in other words, this unusual setting provided an unfamiliar educational culture (see Bruner, 1996, p. 84) and influenced how the student teachers reflected on their personal professional conduct. In many ways, they had to learn new understandings about leadership in teaching, as Olivia put it towards the end of the project:

As, after all, we do have nine teachers here who are all accustomed to taking charge of the situation. So, it’s a significant call for self-examination to decipher what my role is in this kind of group, especially when no one has been clearly appointed as “leader of the group”. (Olivia, individual interview, January 21, 2012)

In music teacher education that mostly tends to emphasise autonomy and feelings of security and the hands-on apprenticeship of individual teachers, experiences of peer-teaching and improvisation are rare. However, such experiences can be seen as meaningful, since they bring up a different kind of emotional involvement and arise through an unusually intense process of inquiry and problem solving. In other words, stepping out of comfort zones can be painful, but offers the potential for the creative aspects of teaching (see e.g., Bresler, 1998, p. 4). For instance, the situation when the Cambodian students requested that the Finnish student teachers should teach a particular song (“We Are The World”) without any preparation, was for some, “probably that one defining moment” (Vappu, individual interview, January 22, 2012). Later, Vappu reflected in her individual interview:

Well, just that that was the first time we had actually been teaching without a language. … And it was nice to see that we succeeded well this time … so I was like, “should we just include some choreography here?” And then everyone was like, “Huh?” … and then we just quickly went, “well, let’s stand up now”. Just winged it like that. It was sort of this flow and ecstasy in the teaching that we experienced. Everyone was solidly in that same one space. … And on that stage you felt that now I’m alive and happy—all these intense emotions overcome you. Even though I have students in Finland, and I teach a lot … and I feel proud when they succeed. But this was such a stronger feeling. (Vappu, individual interview, January 22, 2012)

Teachers’ common need and expectation for structure has been illustrated in Burnard’s (2011) study in which teachers and artists collaborated in teaching situations. According to Burnard, teachers’ pedagogical practices tend to be more towards the structured end of the spectrum, whereas their artist collaborators tend to work towards the more improvisational end. A teacher could describe her practice as “a fully orchestrated score” (p. 64) whereas artists could even resist seeing their practice as teaching (p. 63). Due to the differences in understanding “teaching”, Burnard concludes that collaboration and partnerships between teachers and artists may create tension, but such partnerships also “model the more improvised and less formulaic and fixed approaches to teaching” (p. 69). In the same way, the varied individual needs for structure amongst the student teachers participating in the Multicultural Music University project represented differing perspectives towards the work in Cambodia, but they also provided points of reflection for learning.

Such tension between structure and freedom was indeed manifest in the student teachers’ reflective accounts, and showed that experiences of stress and anxiety during the project were related to difficulties in planning, negotiating the structure of lessons and making pedagogical decisions; in other words, the continuous seed for discord in collaboration. In such situations, as Dewey would suggest, the indefinite multitude of “heres and nows” and existences interact with one another and start forming “a world of intercourse and association” (Dewey, 1996, LW3, p. 80) that is not necessarily harmonious. While discord is typical for team teaching (e.g., Shapiro & Dempsey, 2008) and can be seen even as necessary in collaborative learning (Rogoff, 1998), it may also be related to the understanding according to which even improvisational teaching does not simply refer to a laissez-faire stance to teaching, but “involves a strategic balancing of structure and open-endedness” (Sawyer, 2011, p. 35). The student teachers’ reflections illustrated that during the three-week project they increasingly started to trust that each of them was able to bring the needed structure to teaching situations. They started to trust themselves as improvising teachers who knew how to juggle multiple goals as well as handle complexity (Hammerness et al., 2005) in here-and-now pedagogical situations. As a whole, the student teachers gained more confidence in moving within the spectrum of structured and unstructured as well as co-constructed teacher improvisation in which quick decisions had to be made, not just in relation to the students, but also in relation to their teaching peers. It could even be suggested that they began to view themselves as being on a journey towards becoming “professional improvisers who are deliberate about developing and employing improvisational skill” (Sawyer, 2011, p. 45). As argued by Sawyer, reflection on such improvisational successes “will be an important component in students’ own progress as teachers” (p. 45). This learning, however, varies from one student to another, as the students’ learning neither ends nor starts from the same experiential place (see also, Savicki & Selby, 2008).

Conclusion

As revealed by our analysis, the significant intercultural learning outcomes of the Multicultural Music University project in Cambodia and its facilitated structure of having students manoeuvring “in and out of challenging situations” (Gesche & Makeham, 2010, p. 245) were related not simply to the foreign musical culture, but also to the stress and related success experienced when the student teachers had to improvise and at the same time develop trust and new patterns of interaction, peer-collaboration and teaching partnerships. Nevertheless, this outcome is recognisable as being among the affective aspects of intercultural skills—“adaptation, openness, and a willingness to change” (Gesche & Makeham, 2010, p. 245)—within a complex and open-ended educational setting. As such, this outcome potentially supports the upward spiral of the students’ critical meta-learning that could help in reaching beyond the apprenticeship of observation. The intercultural project brought the students around a joint reflective inquiry in which different interests were brought to a clearer recognition through action and discussion. The student teachers’ learning curve illustrated growth that could be compared to what, according to Dewey, are the core steps in dealing with diversity: “learn to act with and for others while you learn to think and to judge for yourself” (Dewey, 1996, LW6, p. 98; emphasis in original). The nature of this growth was manifested in the data of this study through the clear dominance of multiple self-reflections on student teachers’ own musicianship, teacherhood and personality over any particular content knowledge. In order to fulfil the increasing challenges within multicultural societies, these steps may also be seen as necessary for any community to emerge within multicultural classrooms in schools.

For future reference in organising intercultural projects, we consider it important to acknowledge and take into consideration—already at the preparation stage of the project—that the intense group interaction in uncertain and ever-changing conditions is likely to be the most demanding aspect with which to deal. In music teacher programs intending to increase students’ intercultural skills, this means, paradoxically, that instead of teaching about the “others out there”, we may as well start searching for and engaging ourselves with the closest diverse here-and-now units of interaction in our very everyday contexts. As this diversity is often hidden and taken for granted, experiences and projects abroad, such as the Multicultural Music University project, may reveal and help us to better recognise our musical and pedagogical comfort zones.