Heidi Westerlund

• Doctor of Music, Master of SocSci, Master of Music
• Professor (Full) at University of the Arts Helsinki, Sibelius Academy

While musical practice is more often than not considered through musical repertoires, genres, and traditions, in higher music education, musical practices are further narrowed down to music profession-specific, craft-based competences and learning outcomes. This narrow understanding encompasses the intertwined social and material dimensions that-ac...

Socially engaged, participatory music making is slowly establishing itself as a complement to musicians’ portfolio careers, although it may still be considered of less value than established concert hall practices. To gain a better understanding of the drivers toward socially engaged practice in music field, we analyzed 20 semi-structured interview...

Socially engaged, participatory music making is slowly establishing itself as a complement to musicians’ portfolio careers, although it may still be considered of less value than established concert hall practices. To gain a better understanding of the drivers toward socially engaged practice in music field, we analyzed 20 semi-structured interview...

This chapter presents a narrative of Grammy Award-winning musician, Global Ambassador for UNESCO, UNCCD, UNICEF, and the United Nations, and environmentalist Ricky Kej. The chapter explores his pathways towards becoming an environmental ecologist who uses his work as a musician to engage across multiple political and social arenas and agendas. The...

This chapter presents a narrative of musician, music educator, and festival organiser Riju Tuladhar and his work in multiple arts projects in Nepal. The chapter outlines his work to sustain the cultural heritage of Nepal while at the same time effecting systems transformation in cultural practices that prevent inclusion, participation, and sharing...

This chapter presents a narrative of music educator and entrepreneur Tuulikki Laes and her work in community-based projects in Finland. Laes’ work is theorised through Liz Lerman’s metaphor of “hiking the horizontal” through the social ecologies in which we live and work to effect ecological systems transformation in the provision of music engageme...

This chapter summarises the key arguments of the book and discusses the implications for music and music education institutions and organisations including schools and higher music education and the professionals who learn and work in these settings. The chapter returns to the need to move beyond path-dependency of organisational contexts in music...

This chapter explores the emerging ecological shift in music education theory and practice. The chapter presents a critical view of ecological thinking and the need to recognise and address the unintended consequences of cultural and educational practices. The chapter examines global sustainability agendas such as the United Nations Sustainable Dev...

Professionalism is a contested concept as it responds to various socio-political agendas, shifting perspectives, competing ideologies, and power issues not revealed in common understandings of the term. This chapter interrogates the assumptions that underpin professionalism in music education in order to propose an ecopolitical professionalism that...

Music Schools in Changing Societies addresses the need to understand instrumental and vocal pedagogy beyond the individual sphere of teacher–student interactions and psychological phenomena, focusing instead on the wider sociocultural, spatial, and institutional contexts of music education. Viewing music education through the perspective of collabo...

The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education addresses ways in which music teachers and students interact as co-learners and forge authentic relationships with one another through shared music-making. Concepts of care addressed in this handbook stem from philosophies of relationship, feminist ethics, musical meaningfulness, and compassionate musi...

The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education addresses ways in which music teachers and students interact as co-learners and forge authentic relationships with one another through shared music-making. Concepts of care addressed in this handbook stem from philosophies of relationship, feminist ethics, musical meaningfulness, and compassionate musi...

As Artistic Research (AR) is gaining momentum in academia and the movement has begun to affect the industry, in this qualitative study we ask how contemporary art music composers in Finland think of artistic doctoral education in the field of composition. Ten bigenerational composers participated in open interviews in which they were asked to refle...

Contemporary professional landscapes in classical music fields are rapidly changing and younger generations of musicians are confronting their creative careers, more often than not in connection to self-employment and freelancing. This narrative inquiry investigates the pathways and livelihoods of composers in a changing professional ecosystem thro...

This theoretical inquiry approaches the challenge of reflexivity in the music education profession from the perspective of a collective and social understanding of memory. While memory is typically understood as being an individualistic, psychological, and cognitive phenomenon, in this paper we argue that the perspectives of collective and social m...

This study presents an analysis of hidden elitism in music education through the free choice argument – that individuals are fundamentally free to choose to study music – as a meritocratic power structure. Qualitative Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is applied to understand music education as a social system with a special structure in which its pur...

The book describes some of the most significant inequality mechanisms identified in the arts and arts education service system in Finland as well as the mental models that underpin them. The ArtsEqual project, led by Uniarts Helsinki’s Center for Educational Research and Academic Development in the Arts (CERADAI and funded by the Academy of Finlan...

REACT - Rethinking Music Performance in European Higher Education Institutions is an Strategic Partnership project 2020-2023, funded by ERASMUS+, European Commission. REACT is a reaction to a current problem arising from the long-established model for teaching music performance in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): musicians are trained for acqu...

ArtsEqual Research Initiative, funded by the Academy of Finland's Strategic Research Council (2015–2021), examined mechanisms of exclusion and barriers to participation in the arts and arts education in Finland. The project proposed actions to break the circle of disadvantage, and investigated services in the arts and arts education from an ethical...

This article presents a synthesis of findings from a large-scale research project, the Global Visions Through Mobilizing Networks—Co-developing Intercultural Music Teacher Education in Finland, Israel and Nepal ( https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/globalvisions/home ), and conveys its theoretical and practical explorations and insights. By envisioning 21...

This article urges a reconsideration of professional responsibility in arts education, moving beyond an emphasis on narrow technical expertise and strict disciplinary boundaries in order to respond to the needs of complex late modern society. We reconsider ‘professionalism’ in arts education as a site of struggle that requires ‘systems reflexivity’...

Highlighting the need for teacher education programs to respond to rapidly diversifying societies, this article reports a qualitative metasynthesis of intercultural outreach projects in music teacher education, conceptualizing these projects as a “pedagogy of interruption.” Results show that such outreach projects interrupt the individualistic fram...

This study suggests that the pedagogy of music history for the professional training of musicians-including opera singers and future opera composers-could benefit from applying narratology to operatic analysis and acknowledging the "operatic of opera" in the organization of the artistic materials as one possible pedagogical approach. By breaking wi...

In this chapter, we unpack the complex politics of popular music education (PME) in schools through an examination of the ways in which youth and youth culture are represented in the Finnish National Core Curricula (2004 and 2014). Interrogating commonly held conceptualizations of diversity in music education, we identify a paradox in school-based...

The Politics of Diversity in Music Education attends to the political structures and processes that frame and produce understandings of diversity in and through music education. Recent surges in nationalist, fundamentalist, protectionist, and separatist tendencies highlight the imperative for music education to extend beyond nominal policy agendas...

In this chapter, we explore the politics of music teacher reflexivity that emerged in a transnational collaboration between two institutions, the Nepal Music Center (NMC) and the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki when co-developing intercultural music teacher education. We examine in particular the reflexivity in this intercultural...

Embracing an ethos of sharing music and practices across cultural boundaries, the multicultural vision of music (teacher) education has paid scarce attention to the paradox of freedom that arises between such freedoms and the complex politics that frame and constrain teachers’ choices and values. In this article, we explore these demands of profess...

This open access book examines the political structures and processes that frame and produce understandings of diversity in and through music education. Recent surges in nationalist, fundamentalist, protectionist and separatist tendencies highlight the imperative for music education to extend beyond nominal policy agendas or wholly celebratory dive...

Finnish Journal of Music Education. https://sites.uniarts.fi/web/fjme/archive We review the landscape for SIMM (Socially Impactful Music Making) activities in four countries (Belgium, Colombia, Finland, and the UK) by interrogating a sample of publicly available material on the policy and funding environment in each country, and by analysing an in...

Governments and funding agencies increasingly expect researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work not only within the academy but also for a range of stakeholders beyond academia. Whilst arts researchers have tended to resist impact measurement, in this article, we will describe one form of demonstrating impact, namely through writing impact...

Expert musical memory has been the fundamental focus of research in the field of musical memory, and this line of research has demonstrably informed the ways memory is understood by the current generation of music professionals. In this theoretical inquiry, we draw on Foucault to first argue that the dominant Western classical music expert gaze in...

Recognizing and ethically engaging with the inherent diversity of music education contexts demands a continuous interrogation of the norms and values underpinning policy and practice in music teacher education. In doing so, teachers and students in higher education are challenged to question why and how students are socialized into particular music...

This book is published at a time of intensified social change, which is also reflected in a new epoch of music education professionalism. The need to address the dynamics of diversity is acute in many countries, not only those that struggle with the so-called migrant crisis and the often-accompanying xenophobia, populism and social disharmony. As t...

Researchers have suggested that higher education institutions need to be re-thought as ‘imagining universities’ that continually engage in re-imagining themselves, in order to be able to justify their own existence in a fast-changing world. It can be expected that music teacher education programs, as part of higher education, would benefit from env...

This open access book highlights the importance of visions of alternative futures in music teacher education in a time of increasing societal complexity due to increased diversity. There are policies at every level to counter prejudice, increase opportunities, reduce inequalities, stimulate change in educational systems, and prevent and counter pol...

By synthetizing a compilation of theoretical lenses and exemplifying narration in one institution's community building, this inquiry explores the idea of stories and narratives as important strategic agencies of change for music education professional communities. More specifically, it examines narrating as forward-looking and as a source for creat...

https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/music-education-and-religion/section/638611b3-69b4-453c-8be2-c82cfe020097

This book highlights the importance of visions for intercultural music teacher education in a time of increasing social complexity. This complexity spans a wide range of diversity dynamics related to various traditions of knowledge formation, multiple forms of cultural and artistic participation, feelings of national and ethnic belonging, and polit...

https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/music-education-and-religion/section/ee942e39-fbf7-47c4-826f-5558cf382ff8

Leaning particularly on Zygmunt Bauman’s thoughts, this paper analyses past theorizations of music education, asking if these trends have created a value indifference and moral blindness in terms of who ‘we’ want to be in super-diverse societies. The paper pinpoints the need for a professional social epistemology in which social integration brings...

This study attends to the global need to rethink how music education could provide opportunities for shaping imagined communities in times of intensifying societal complexity and diversity by exploring the practice of singing ‘school-specific songs’ in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The methodology combines educational ethnography with Appreciative I...

Although music education scholars have increasingly advised teachers to take heed of values, principles, and strategies of musical practices outside of school, very little has been written in music education regarding the ideological underpinnings of musical practices in these contexts. This article argues that musical practices outside of school d...

In recent decades there has been a proliferation of neuromyths based on oversimplifications and over-generalisations of research findings. As part of a larger project that examines the societal impacts of the arts and arts education practices, this interdisciplinary collaborative study examines the translation of recent neuromusical research into t...

Societies worldwide are becoming more aware of the educational challenges that come with increased cultural diversity derived from ethnic, linguistic, religious, socioeconomic and educational differences and their intersections. In many countries, teacher education programmes are expected to prepare teachers for this reality and develop their inter...

In this article, we argue that mainstream discourses of diversity in music education are ocularcentric; that is, they provide a one-sided way of understanding diversity that has prevented music educators from seeing our biases. In remedying these local and national professional blindspots, we propose transnational knowledge production, which we exp...

Although rituals are considered central to human life, scholarship on rituals in music education is sparse. This may be due to a more general emphasis on the individual and private at the expense of the social and public aspects of music in education. This article highlights the educational value of school rituals in festivities and celebrations, a...

Disability is a neglected field of diversity within music education scholarship and practices. The study reported in this article sought alternatives for the hierarchical practice-model and ableist discourses that have thus far pervaded music teacher education, through a reconceptualization of expertise. The focus is on a Finnish university special...

In this chapter I argue that the profession of education needs to engage more actively in reflecting how the current societal changes challenge our prevailing understandings of diversity and suggest that intercultural identity be considered as a project identity for teachers who wish to meet the social needs of 21st-century superdiverse societies....

The music classroom in any country is increasingly affected by globalisation, immigration and ever-widening access to new media. This article examines identity formation in school on the collective and daily interactive level, as related to agency and as identities might appear and have been studied within the contextual frames of localised but inc...

Research in the field of anthropology supports the notion that music is a universal feature of human society and a foundational capacity for all (Dissanayake, 2000, 2006, 2009, 2012; Mithen, 2005, 2009). Music is an important part of our collective celebrations and statements of beliefs, values, and issues, and is an integral component of human gro...

Cambodia’s recent history of conflict and political instability has resulted in a recognized need to recover, regenerate, preserve and protect the nation’s cultural heritage. Many education programmes catering for disadvantaged youth have implemented traditional Khmer music and dance lessons, suggesting that these programmes share the responsibilit...

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 be...

Assessment in music is of considerable importance in the context of higher music education, with major projects focusing on assessment principles and practices in a number of locations, including the European community and Australia. This instrumental case study explores assessment practices in two higher music education contexts, namely within fol...

This handbook seeks to present a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of social justice in music education. Contributors from around the world interrogate the complex, multidimensional, and often contested nature of social justice and music education from a variety of philosophical, political, social, and cultural perspectives. Although many chapt...

This chapter deals with the basic principles in developing doctoral studies in music education at the Sibelius Academy, Finland. Research is understood as a practice that demands not deep practice-based knowledge and understanding of the subject, music education. It also requires knowledge that is believed to develop most effectively through variou...

In an increasingly globalized world, characterized by diversity and change, the relevance of authenticity in classroom contexts has been questioned in recent multicultural music education scholarship. This article examines the academic discourses of authenticity in music education, and explores the epistemic issues and knowledge-related discourses...

Perinteiset käsityksemme muusikkoudesta ovat oleellisesti muuttumassa musiikkikulttuurin muutosten myötä. Näihin muutoksiin on vaikuttanut erityisesti digitaali- ja virtuaaliteknologioiden kehitys, joka on tuonut mukanaan siihen liittyvän sosiaalisen median tarjoamia uusia kommunikaatiotapoja. Digitaaliteknologian avulla yhä useammat ihmiset ovat s...

This qualitative instrumental case study examines collaborative composing in the operabyyou.com online music community from the perspective of learning by utilising the concept of a ‘community of practice’ as a heuristic frame. The article suggests that although informal music practices offer important opportunities for people with varied backgroun...

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the community music field (CM) and its educational significance in the Nordic countries, with a special emphasis on the current situation in Norway, Sweden and Finland. While the Nordic countries appear to share a collective vision of musical access for all, this vision varies. It is our aim to exam...

In higher music education, learning in social settings (orchestras, choirs, bands, chamber music and so on) is prevalent, yet understanding of such learning rests heavily on the transmission of knowledge and skill from master to apprentice. This narrow view of learning trajectories pervades in both one-to-one and one-to-many contexts. This is surpr...

In this chapter, we suggest that recently emerged informal learning environments and new digital and virtual technologies have brought forth a democratic revolution in terms of the wider opportunities available through music-related social participation, musical learning and artistic expression. As an extensive cultural phenomenon, this revolution...