German-Dutch Colloquium on Research in Arts Education

Mono –> bi –> multi –> inter –> trans –> idio? On operationalizing concepts of culture in Dutch (music) education.In the past five decades, the concept of culture has played an important role in Dutch (music) education. Operationalizations of the concept of culture in education – answering the question: how do we take ‘culture’ into account in our education and in our teaching practices? – initially based themselves on more essentialist, static and reifying concepts of culture, but through the decades shifted towards more constructivist, dynamic and processual concepts of culture.In this paper I will discuss the attempts to shape the concept of ‘idiocultural music education’ (e.g. Bisschop Boele 2015; Bisschop Boele & Van der Meer 2019) as the logical result of this shift, and as an attempt to formulate the concept of culture eventually from a Theory-of-Practice perspective (cf. Reckwitz 2017). I will first reflect more generally on the concept of culture, outlining four different levels on which the concept can be defined. I then will discuss the concept of idioculture, and will place that concept in a historical perspective by comparing it chronologically to monocultural, bicultural, multicultural, intercultural, and transcultural (music) education.