Music and Visual Research: Inclusive Learning Environments and the Shaping of Time and Space

The paper explores the potential of video ethnography concerning educational research on music as contributing to an inclusive learning environment in elementary school (research objective). In music education research, the use of visual data provided by video seems to be a relevant choice of method, because music as a school subject encompasses multiple ways for the pupils to participate and interact in the learning environment, and music itself provides a whole set of complex linguistic rules that will escape traditional observation and interview methods in ethnographic research. Therefore, ethnographic video observation was chosen as a way of handling complex data and analysing complex interaction.
Preliminary analyses of the findings indicates the ability of music to both contain and express experiential, sensory, emotional and cognitive complexity in ways that allow for differences in participation. In the video material from our study, the pupils do participate in a wide range of ways, from sitting with closed eyes over listening to their class-mates singing to engaging in the activity as a rock star on stage. The analysis of video data indicates that, paradoxically enough, the complex nature of music may create exactly the space for containing pupils’ differences in participation-and-learning styles, and maybe even expressing other complexities of the children’s experiences in school.