Skapande möten - en studie i interaktionism och skapande i musik

Title: Creating meetings - a study in interactionism and creating music. In this study I had my focus on teenagers in a school class. My aim was to explore how pupils experience the processes of creating music together and how they choose to organize their interactions during these creative processes. As analytical tools I used sociological and sociopedagogical concepts and theories. Interactionism provided models toward individualization as well as socialization, related to learning, knowledge and creativity. The study throws light on two epistemological perspectives. These double perspectives concern the perspective of the actor(the pupil) and the perspective of seeing the individual as socially constituted. The first research question concerns the pupils thoughts and feelings. I used face-to-face interviews and written conversation in chat style as qualitative techniques. The second research question deals with the pupils' interaction patterns during their learning processes. Here I used observation as a key technique for understanding. The technique of using chat is oriented to a situation of interaction between the involved participants. This facilitates the access to thought and emotions. Moreover, conversations in a chat style based on texts, rather than traditional writing, opens the possibility to use symbols such as smileys, which mediate expressive feelings in a symbolic way. This raised questions of communicative validity, but also the use of language as a cultural tool, strongly mediating a specific discursive practice. As one of the results I observed a relation between musical organizing and the social organization of the participants. Meads interaction pattern called "play" was noticed and I related my empirical findings to musical improvisations and productive creating. "Gamepatterns" were also discovered, here connected to building the structure musically in a more reproductive way. The two different phases changed rapidly and seemed to be interrelated. Hence I call this creative process "playgames". I found visual gestures to be related to play at the cost of vocal / verbal expressions. The musical conformism as manifested in the students' products, revealed several aspects. One of them was the tension between "the evaluative student" and "the playful student". The didactic implications may point toward a new evaluation of this topic. To explore the relation between collective music making and interaction patterns further, I suggest videotaping the learning processes as a way to analyse and interpret the underlying interpersonal expressions in detail