“You MAY take the note home an’… well practise just that”: children’s interaction in contextualizing music teaching

The article takes “music as symbol” as its analytical point of departure, described by Jorgensen (2003). In doing so, the authors stress the role of symbolic functioning in music, focusing at how children understand and make sense of music in talk and practice. The aim of this text is to theoretically explore the nature of dialogical music education. In order to do so we reuse empirical data from a previous study. These data contain four children’s instructional interaction in a teaching activity, that is, the task to teach each other singing songs. Further, we examine our data through the lenses of two theoretical concepts, based on communication theory: double dialogicality and communicative formality. Our interactional data point at the contextual nature of musical sense making. The children’s communication was not only merely interpersonal in nature. Rather, it also clearly referred to an embedded cultural context that existed beyond the local interactional context. This article illustrates how such kind of music-educational sense making is socially constructed in action.