“In-Between” is the title of this conference. If I am right, it focuses on the role of the artist as a middle-man, or middle-woman, between art and learner. It focuses, maybe, on the way artists are capable to transfer knowledge, skills, attitudes, insights, emotions of an artistic nature. And it focuses, maybe, on the way experiences from the domain of the arts may be transferred through the mechanism inherent in the domain of education; two domains which sometimes seem to have a rather problematic relation because the arts are seen as a domain of beauty, of expressivity, of individuality, of freedom, of creativity, whereas education is seen as the domain of standardization, of group work, of compliance to rules, and of mastering the existing.
Evert Bisschop Boele explicitly refers to different conceptualizations of culture by describing earlier concepts of culture in education in the Netherlands to explain the proposed logical shift to “idiocultural” music education. Idiocultural music education, according to him, encompasses the fact that each person is highly individual as well as highly social simultaneously, thus, idiocultural music education should take this into account and perceive individuals and social beings with complex and dynamic cultural backgrounds that deserve respect and should be the origin for the individual’s further musical development. Bisschop Boele’s description of earlier concepts of culture connects each concept prior to idioculture, e.g., monocultural, bicultural, multicultural, in five stages with a societal development throughout the last 70 years in the Netherlands. Two different theoretical lenses are applied to theoretically underpin these different conceptualizations of culture.
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