The Politics of Intercultural Collaboration in Higher Music Education: Challenges Seen from a Leadership Point of View

Sidsel Karlsen

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-65617-1_15

Abstract

AbstractInternationally, various mandates and policy directives require higher music education institutions to engage in intercultural collaboration. These include fulfilling national policy demands for internationalization in higher education, providing students with experience of working internationally to increase their employability, and conducting proper diversity management so as to facilitate diversity-conscious and responsible interaction with employees, students, and the broader educational community. In this chapter, the topic of intercultural collaboration in higher music education is approached from a different starting point, asking what, from a leadership point of view, creates obstacles to such collaboration and what makes it challenging or difficult either at the levels of individual participants, administrators, or the institution. Twelve leadership representatives from three different institutions of higher music education were interviewed about their experiences with intercultural collaboration and the benefits and challenges of engaging in such interactions. From the interviewees’ experiences, their work of attempting to govern or manage situations of complex intercultural interaction while simultaneously negotiating between the different interests expressed within the frames of their respective institutions featured prominently in the empirical material. In this chapter, these negotiations and deliberations are theorized and discussed attending to perspectives borrowed from literature on intercultural competences, leadership in higher education, and new managerialism.

Highlights

Various mandates and policy directives require higher music education institutions to engage in intercultural collaboration
Matters of intercultural collaboration have been explored from the experiential point of view of music teacher educators and their students as well as in-service music teachers, with the emphasis often focusing on the advantages of such endeavors
As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, the leadership representatives were interviewed about the challenges and the benefits of intercultural collaboration

Summary

Introduction

Various mandates and policy directives require higher music education institutions to engage in intercultural collaboration These include fulfilling national policy demands for internationalization in higher education (KertzWelzel 2018), providing students with experience of working internationally to increase their employability (Westerlund and Karlsen 2017), and conducting proper diversity management, understood as developing and enacting “an organizational strategy which emphasizes the need to recognize ethnic, cultural, gender and other differences” I have chosen to approach the topic of intercultural collaboration in higher music education from a different starting point, asking what, from a leadership point of view, creates obstacles to such collaboration and what makes it challenging or difficult either at the levels of individual participants, administrators, or the institution. Twelve leadership representatives from three different institutions of higher music education were interviewed about their experiences with intercultural collaboration and the benefits and challenges of engaging in such interactions.

Contexts and Sampling of Participants

Challenges of Intercultural Collaboration

Common Challenges

The Perils of University (or School) Life: Lack of Time, Resources, and Opportunities

Challenging the Local Culture and Creating Controversies

Institutionalized Distrust

Concluding Remarks