In this article, the concept of competence is studied from the point of view of the semiotics of education. It will be claimed that it is a central key concept when we are trying to analyse the meaning of education. Educational action can be reasonably understood as an insecure and complicatedly mediated trial to affect another person's competence. First, the recent discussion about the concept of competence and its relatives is shortly reviewed. Then, competence is analysed and defined according to (...) Greimassian semiotic theory as a basic determining character of an acting subject. At the same time as competence is indispensably central for understanding the subjects of action, it is problematically empirically ineffable. This ineffability has a special meaning in education, where we must try to both plan our own educative action and evaluate the learning of the student according to these invisible features. It is proposed that in the recent discourse of education, the very popular use of the concept of competence is misguided and problematically mixed with its conceptual counterpart performance. From this viewpoint, the concept of competence should rather be connected to the ontological concept of disposition. The problem of multi-dimensionality of competence is considered with the help of the Greimassian conception of modalities to create a richer and more detailed picture of the role of competence in action, and especially in education. (shrink)

Ever since its publication in 1947, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus,1 his last major novel, has triggered many discussions and scholarly analyses. Evidently, the fictitious life story of Adrian Leverkühn, the genius composer who strikes an unsavory bargain with the devil, abounds in literary artifice and ingenuity, drawing to that end from a nigh bottomless reservoir of extremely variegated cultural references.2 Leaving out strictly literary analyses, most critical attention for Mann's version of the Faust myth is centered on its politico-aesthetical motifs—its (...) allegedly strong Nietzschean-Adornian bias.3 This is understandable, not only considering Mann's vocal interest in these philosophical traditions but also... (shrink)

This paper employs aspects of Hannah Arendt’s thought to explore different but interrelated questions that haunt contemporary music education. We see the importance of a return to Arendt now more than ever as we find ourselves, three authors in three different countries, trying to contribute to democratic music education practices and to researching the conceptual base of such practices, in countries where technocratic approaches to policy development prevail. More specifically in this article we address the following questions: how can we (...) re-think the political and creative dimensions of music education pedagogies in the face of recent educational policy trends? How can we go beyond linearity in our everyday educational encounters? How can we create forms of music education practice and research that induce a continuous interplay between acting and thinking? We pursue these questions through reference to three specific forms of music education practice: research seminars for PhD-students and senior researchers, pre-service music teacher education, and teaching music improvisation. In the first part of the paper, Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist elaborates upon how Hannah Arendt’s thinking influences our teaching, taking an on-going research seminar in music education as an example of a common place. In the second part, Cathy Benedict writes of ‘meeting’ Arendt and coming to an awareness of how Arendt can help us interrogate practices we have come to assume as ‘the right ones’. Seeking to create together with her students an epistemological space of appearance she challenges common teaching strategies that seem to ‘work’. Working within a teacher preparation program she comes to realize that students must also reflect on these moments so as to name what has occurred; thus they need to engage in acts of performative listening, setting aside their own desire and need to speak and be heard first. Finally, in the third part, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos raises the complex issue of how we should respond to the current deluge of entrepreneurial approaches to creativity, its use value, and its role in education. Based on the proposition that acts of musical improvisation belong to the realm of action, Kanellopoulos revisits Arendt’s notion of conservatism with the aim of outlining a possible way through which contemporary improvisation pedagogy might be re-thought. Taken together these three sets of reflections serve to offer a framing of Arendt’s thinking for music educators in different contexts, showing how Arendt's ideas might serve as a fertile ground for thinking over our own teaching, our curricular decisions, and the choices we daily make over space and time that connect us through our distinctness. (shrink)