School and Concert - from Transmission to Dialogue

School and concert - from transmission to dialogue or DiSko 2017-2020 is an innovation project intending to innovate school concert practices in Norway produced and implemented nationally by Kulturtanken/Arts for Young Audiences Norway (AYAN) and regional partners around the country.

DiSko will look into how concerts and other art events in school can be produced and distributed in a manner in which ownership for all participants can occur. The academic approach is based on the assumption that visiting school concerts must be well integrated into the daily plans and activities of the school, and that the teacher should be an equal professional partner in the design and implementation of processes and productions offered through the Norwegian school concert programme.

This research-based innovation work  will be carried out over four years with a selection of schools and groups of musicians and producers. The project activities will take place at schools where a music group and a producer will collaborate with a class and teachers to create musical productions in an innovative and dialogue-oriented manner. This work will provide a research-based basis for how to produce school concerts and other art events for schools. 

The project research questions are:

• How can dialogue based concert practices be produced in order to be integrated as meaningful and professional elements in the day-to-day life of the school?
• How can schools facilitate such integration in their work with teaching, learning and Bildung?

The researchers will produce new interaction models through didactic design research, a method of innovation through tests and improvements. Parallel with the production activities, there will be a continuous discussion in Kulturtanken and Den kulturelle skolesekken (the national Norwegian arts in school programme) about changes in the school concert practice.

Facts: DiSko is owned by Kulturtanken and the research partner CASE center (Center of Creativities, Arts and Science in Education) at Stord/Haugesund University College, Bergen, Norway. Project leader is Kari Holdhus, Associate Professor at CASE. The project will run until the end of 2020 and is funded by the Norwegian Research council (NFR).

The project website can be found here (in Norwegian)

Photo credit: Lars Opstad