”Dubbelt uppdrag blev trippelt”: måluppfyllelse, värdegrund och… marknadsföring! : - En kvalitativ studie av musiklärarens utåtriktade verksamhet

Sammanfattning: My research interest in the upcoming paper is the increased need for promotion of schools. I. e. the individual school´s needs to be able to show its existence, in the huge flow and availability of information; schools and universities, study circles, streamed lectures on the Internet, public schools and private schools, different educational directions, et cetera. The schools’ needs to market itself, make good PR and sell their pedagogical idea, and that has become increasingly important.   My purpose is to clarify how music teachers, in the Swedish primary and secondary school, skills and competences are used in outreach activities within but also outside, the school premises. With outreach activities I mean here the kind of official events that have cultural, tradition-bearing moves and where music teachers often have an additional responsibility for implementation, such as Speech Days, Lucia celebrations, “Open School days”, PTA meetings, et cetera.   Research issues 1) What is the significance of outreach activities expressed by music teachers and principals?   2) Which motives are expressed by the two occupation categories when it comes to outreach activities arranged by the school and how they can be related to the current governing documents?   3) To what extent are these activities and music teacher's work with these integrated in music as a school subject?   Results Outreach music activities play a big role in getting students to develop and demonstrate the basic knowledge and the breadth to which they dedicated themselves through the school’s music classes. As a consequence of that all students have been able to assimilate basic music skills outreach activities has been important to show the excellence of the pupils which they are happy to show, both for their own lifelong and life-wide learning and the school's ability to do PR for it’s well-functioning music activities. This allows the school to continue the good pedagogical work when new students secure the economic basis for the future. If outreach activities are used to give students control over their learning in the right way, it can additionally help to ensure that students stimulates to take an active part in school development at various levels, locally, nationally and internationally.   Music Teachers' motives for carrying out outreach activities varied between unequivocally curriculum-related goals, didactic goals at the individual level as well as PR and marketing-related reasons, with strong emphasis on the curriculum. A concrete motive for music teachers in the study was that all outreach activities are considered as good opportunities to "jam" with students, to gain experience through music situations similar to those that you can meet as a professional musician in the future, such as "master-apprentice" meetings. The strongest motive was to conduct outreach activities in relation to the substance in the curriculum, such as solo singing, choir, accompaniment, melody playing and to reflect on and discuss the importance of music, different genres, sound engineering, et cetera. For a couple of the principals the promotion of the school was of greater importance than for the others. They simply had to be so well performing that they each fall semester can attract a new first year class with students. Several of the principals in the study made a connection between the schools’ outreach activities and its work with values.   There was an almost unanimous agreement that outreach music activities are an integral and very important part of school music education, both among music teachers and principals. However, there were a couple of principals and even music teachers, who argued that the very large outreach activities were not optimally timed opportunities for assessment. Especially the music teachers in the study were in this respect divided into half’s, where the majority on the contrary argued that outreach activities are very important formative and stimulating opportunities for assessment. Even in this respect, i. e. when it comes to how outreach activities can be integrated in music as a school subject, strong arguments can be made to have requirements of curriculum related issues like singing, ensemble playing, accompaniment, melody playing, sound engineering and really almost everything in the curricula.   A polarization or loyalty conflict between prioritizing curriculum-related goals or PR did not seem to be verifiable, empirical data rather told that the participants in this study saw it as two activities in symbiosis. In contrast, some of the experienced music teachers spoke about the importance of "peeling off" unnecessary and costly project, and instead prioritize things that create greater opportunities for the student's musical learning.