The week after Easter, several of the FUTURED researchers’ schedules were filled up with The Twelfth International Research in Music Education Conference (RiME2021). This year’s conference was planned to take place at the Royal College of Music in London. Because of the COVID-19-situation we were only able to meet our dearly missed colleagues worldwide in a virtual presence through Zoom. Nevertheless, we were excited to see everyone again, and choosing from an extensively full packed program of engaging presenters and brilliant keynote speakers.
Results and reflections were shared from FUTURED. Based on their action research in teacher education, Bendik Fredriksen, Hanne Rinholm and Silje Valde Onsrud from work package 2 presented a paper called Preservice teachers’ involvement in developing their own education: Limits to participation?. Catharina Christophersen, Kari Holdhus and Ailbhe Kenny presented findings from their study of interprofessional collaboration in the music classroom from work package 3, called Composing the team: An action research study of interprofessional collaborative teaching in the music classroom. Last, but not least, Tine Grieg Viig shared insights from her action research project in her paper presentation entitled The MineMixMusic project: exploring digital tools and virtual spaces in music education.
Time is always at premium at conferences, where we would like to see and hear it all, but can only manage a few of the parallel sessions going on at the same time. Luckily, being so many researchers from one team present, also means that we could go to different sessions learning from the interesting research going on across countries and educational systems. Then, a wide array of input from the conference is fed back to the project, leading us into new exciting paths and thoughts for the further development of the project.
We look forward to meeting again at the next RiME, to discuss implications from the FUTURED project, and heading for the future together.