Focusing Choral Singing in Music Education : A Study of Teachers´ Interaction with Choir in Musikklass.

In musikklasser in the Swedish compulsory school a special musical training focusing on choral singing is offered students from the age of ten to sixteen. Regarding singing with children, choir teaching in these classes represents conventions developed in accordance with the Swedish choral tradition. Students are trained in large groups of (30-60); in parallel, they receive individual singing voice training in order for the choir to perform with a communal musical expression. This complexity places high demands on the choir teachers' ability to foster the specific musical skills required in a choir. Starting out from a cultural-psychological theoretical perspective, this study explores two choral teachers' interaction with their choir classes, respectively, by means of a method inspired by ethnography. Participating students were aged 10 and 11. Observation data of four lessons was collected, two with each teacher. Lessons were documented by field notes, one lesson of each teacher was video-documented. Analysis included three methods of data transcription: First of all, by writing thick descriptions. After that all events during the lesson were written down in a timetable and finally, a short representative sequence from each lesson was transcribed into a music score. Thus, the variety of methods enabled a deep analysis of data. The results show, on the one hand, that the teachers use a similar overall pattern for interaction. On the other hand, within this overall pattern they interact with their students in different ways that are being described as personal designs of interaction according to which each teacher uses the available cultural tools in individually different combinations when distributing knowledge to the students. In spite of this, differences in quality between the performances of the two choir classes were not recognised during the observed lessons. Accordingly, one conclusion of this study is that the overall music cultural context has a larger impact on students' ability to perform choral music than teachers' personal design of interaction