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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 polarization. Foregrounding the intimate connections between music, society and education, this book suggests ways that music teacher education might be an arena for the reflexive contestation of traditions, hierarchies, practices and structures. The visions for intercultural music teacher education offered in this book arise from a variety of practical projects, intercultural collaborations, and cross-national work conducted in music teacher education. The chapters open up new horizons for understanding the tension-fields and possible discomfort that music teacher educators face when becoming change agents. They highlight the importance of collaborations, resilience and perseverance when enacting visions on the program level of higher education institutions, and the need for change in re-imagining music teacher education programs.

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 music and memory studies can be seen as a form of ocularcentrism. Second, due to this narrow gaze, the field also fails to recognise that the human memory system is characterised by a unique symbiosis of not just learning and remembering, but also forgetting, a potentially powerful theoretical aspect of memory in music education. Third, we argue that the recent 'genetification' of musical memory, together with the narrow expert gaze, may further reinforce old dichotomies between the talented and untalented, abled and non-abled. Through a critical lens towards the politics of knowledge production in memory studies, we argue that there is a need for a more critical, holistic and ethically reflexive understanding of memory in professional education in music and music education. ; Peer reviewed

Background:In western countries, patient participation is requested in policies on mental health services. Participation is built on ideas of democracy and individual responsibility. Mental illness has, however, been characterized by its irrational features.Aim:To investigate mental health service users' and providers' views on patient participation during episodes of mental illness.Methods:Qualitative interview study with 20 users and 25 staff from a mental health hospital in central Norway.Results:Both users and professionals saw poor illness phases as an obstacle to patient participation. Lack of insight, lack of verbal ability and difficulty cooperating made participation difficult. During such phases, patient participation was redefined. There was a shift in responsibility where professionals took charge through strategies of providing information, motivating patients and reducing choices. Respect and dignity were maintained and not redefined.Conclusions:In poor phases of mental illness, patient participation was redefined and weighed against what was perceived to be the patient's best interest.

Background: High-quality health services include both safe care as well as involving service users in treatment and decision-making. Material: The aim was to explore how mental health service users perceive the relationship between safe care on the one hand and increased influence and decision-making on the other. This was a qualitative study of 15 User Interviewing User evaluation reports, including 417 service users. Discussion: Safe and predictable care was essential in poor illness phases, while increased influence and independence were more important in better phases. Conclusions: High-quality services are flexible enough to adjust to users' varying symptoms and needs.

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 to critically consider the ways in which understandings about society are upheld or unsettled and the ways in which knowledge about diversity is produced. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarly foundations that this book builds upon before introducing the four sections of the book and contributing chapters. The first section of the book focuses on the politics of inquiry in music education research. The second section attends to the paradoxes and challenges that arise as music teachers negotiate cultural identity and tradition within the political frames and ideals of the nation state. The third section considers diversities that are often overlooked or silenced, and the final section turns to matters of leadership in higher music education as an inherently political and ethical undertaking. Together, chapters work towards a more critical, complex, and nuanced understanding of the ways in which the politics of diversity shape our ideals of what music education is, and what it is for.