Music production as creative bildung in folk high schools

Music production as creative bildung in folk high schools
Magne Kolstad, Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University. Mail: makol@hum.aau.dk
This study is about social differentiation (Juteau, 2003), access to- and uses of- post-digital recording technology (Busby, 2017), and aesthetic learning in folk high schools (Bagley and Rust, 2009). Folk high schools are one of the few institutions of education in Europe that has not adopted an employability approach to creativity, as a consequence of EU educational policies on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. 
Instead, learning at Folk High Schools are concerned with becoming someone instead of something. In a test-safe, student-centred environment for learning, at the edge of the formal educational system, students are allowed to just ”muck around” (Gee, 2017) with music and recording technology. But even though the environment is formally safe, students may still experience a degree of discursive normative pressure from society, as no one can escape culture. However, in this context, learning music production and uses of the recording studio is not about being able to make commercially viable products, but instead part of a lifelong- and lifewide bildung pedagogy (Lund, 2010), where novice learners can have access to a creative system (Thompson & Mcintyre, 2013), that is not marked-up by neoliberal education policies (Rizvi, 2017). 
Some of the empirical questions explored in the study are; what matters in folk high school learners’ construction of music recordings? How does the students learn to use the equipment and translate the affordances in the creative system? Even when free to do so, to what extent can students at folk high schools resist societal discourse, and learn in the interest of enlightenment, identity development and musical participation, rather than for the imagination of future employment?
Keywords: music pedagogy; art of record production; arts-based inquiry; bildung; creativity discourses; social differentiation
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