1st Edition

The Transformative Politics of Music Education

Edited By Tuulikki Laes, Gert Biesta, Heidi Westerlund Copyright 2025
152 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

152 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book introduces a unique approach to the interconnections between music education and politics. By taking a broader, more diverse, and explicitly ethico-political philosophical and theoretical stance, the book challenges institutional and structural conditions that may be resistant to change and expands the understanding of the professional responsibility of music educators in the 21st... Read more

List of figures

 

List of Contributors

 

Why music education needs transformative politics: Introduction

Gert Biesta, Tuulikki Laes, and Heidi Westerlund

 

Chapter 1. Reclaiming the education question for music education: Groundwork for a transformative politics

Gert Biesta

 

Chapter 2.  Expanding mental models in music education: Transformational praxis beyond the expert gaze 

Heidi Westerlund and Albi Odendaal 

 

Chapter 3. Music educators as imaginative "designers": Emerging transformative ecopolitics in higher education

Heidi Westerlund, Danielle Treacy, Katja Thomson, and Albi Odendaal

 

Chapter 4. The paradox of social innovations within music schools: Taking critical responsibility in transformative practice  

Hanna Backer Johnsen, Geir Johansen, and Tuulikki Laes

 

Chapter 5. Policy entrepreneurship: towards a new music education professionalism in a risk society

Patrick Schmidt and Tuulikki Laes

 

Chapter 6.  The Pædeia process in music education: Recuperating creativity as democratic education

Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos

 

Chapter 7. The transformative politics of music education research: Navigating public scholarship through transepistemic synthesis

Gert Biesta, Tuulikki Laes, and Heidi Westerlund

 

Chapter 8. A manifesto for transformative politics in music education

Gert Biesta, Tuulikki Laes and Heidi Westerlund

 

Index


Biography

Tuulikki Laes is University Researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, and an Academy Research Fellow appointed by the Research Council of Finland (2023–2027).

Gert Biesta is Professor of Educational Theory and Pedagogy in the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, UK; Professor of Public Education in the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Maynooth University, Ireland, and Visiting Professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Heidi Westerlund is Professor of Music Education at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, and Adjunct Professor at Monash University, Australia.