Felicity Burbridge Rindle and Ailbhe Kenny analyse how music education benefits newly arrived migrant children in a Norwegian primary school.
This article addresses the role of music in the school life of newly arrived migrant children, investigating the potential of music as a path to participation and belonging. It reports from an ethnographic study of their musical engagement in school. While music education is often seen as a vehicle for engaging with diversity and building community in schools, certain music practices in culturally diverse classrooms may also have negative effects related to power, exoticism, cultural labelling and exclusionary paradigms for marginalised groups (Kallio et al. 2021; Westerlund and Karlsen 2017).
Newly arrived migrant children are far from homogenous; their experiences range from voluntary relocation to forced migration, and the intersectionality of factors in their situations requires a high level of adaptation in classrooms. Some arrive seeking only skills in a new language to resume their schooling, while others arrive with no formal education and low literacy levels. Common to all are challenges of resettlement: adapting to a new country, culture and language, and often dealing with a degree of social isolation. Our study focuses on the transitional stage of resettlement in a new school community, which may lay foundations for integration into the wider host society... Keep reading on Taylor & Francis Online.
This article addresses the role of music in the school life of newly arrived migrant children, investigating the potential of music as a path to participation and belonging. It reports from an ethnographic study of their musical engagement in school. While music education is often seen as a vehicle for engaging with diversity and building community in schools, certain music practices in culturally diverse classrooms may also have negative effects related to power, exoticism, cultural labelling and exclusionary paradigms for marginalised groups (Kallio et al. 2021; Westerlund and Karlsen 2017).
Newly arrived migrant children are far from homogenous; their experiences range from voluntary relocation to forced migration, and the intersectionality of factors in their situations requires a high level of adaptation in classrooms. Some arrive seeking only skills in a new language to resume their schooling, while others arrive with no formal education and low literacy levels. Common to all are challenges of resettlement: adapting to a new country, culture and language, and often dealing with a degree of social isolation. Our study focuses on the transitional stage of resettlement in a new school community, which may lay foundations for integration into the wider host society... Keep reading on Taylor & Francis Online.