Late April 2021, FUTURED researchers Bendik Fredriksen and Hanne Rinholm presented results from their ongoing study at the third biannual music education conference in Kampala, Uganda. The conference is part of an ongoing international collaboration project between the music departments at OsloMet and Kyambogo University in Kampala. Due to the pandemic, the conference was held in a hybrid format with about 80 Ugandans participating on campus, while about 25 international participants from USA, Norway, Germany, and Ethiopia joined online.
The conference aims at developing music education as a practical and scholarly field in a Ugandan educational context, as well as furthering the intercultural scholarly dialogue in music education. The traditional Buganda concept of okugunjula, which may be translated into English as ‘upbringing,’ has been central in the conferences in the effort to develop a de-colonized advocacy and practice for Ugandan music education. In 2021 the conference theme was Rethinking Music Education in Pre-primary, Primary and Secondary Schools: Concepts, Contexts, Contents, and Insights.
The implementation of the new Ugandan curriculum from 2019, introducing student-centered pedagogies, actualized the conference theme and fueled the debates in the conference. The keynote and some papers addressed student-centered pedagogies by referring to a Vygotsky-inspired “constructivist approach to teaching and learning”, as opposed to the “banking education” colonial school system that has been applied for many years in Uganda.
The FUTURED-presentation, entitled “Student participation – knowledge and resistance: reflections from an ongoing participatory action research project in Norwegian music teacher education”, referred from student voice work in the quite different Norwegian context, where students have a voice from their first day in school. The paper seemed to represent challenging thoughts for the Ugandan understanding. The first commentator held that such an approach for demolishing the (natural) power structures and the relation between teacher and student. Another commentator pointed to the fact that context matters. Since the students come from traditional homes with a traditional upbringing, such changes will not be easy to achieve. Changes in school can first be made when families are changed. A third commentator questioned the applicability of student voice work to performative activities in the music classroom: How do I make the learning of a (traditional) dance democratic? This view was opposed by a speaker that reminded about the situation that when teaching music, the teacher often has some students that are better than himself. This means that he needs to involve these students more. In line with this, some students who were present found that student participation could be useful as a form of encouraging students. Some of the participants, including a Ugandan PhD-fellow studying in Germany, wanted to follow up more on the FUTURED-project.
After the conference, Hanne and Bendik had important reflections about how presentations of the FUTURED project in such different surroundings bring up questions regarding the importance of the context and the generalizability of student voice work.