Music education, professionalism, and eco-politics (EcoPolitics) interrogates the knowledge gap between music educators’ professional self-awareness in music education and their civic responsibilities as professionals in an age of uncertainty, eco-crises, and systemic ‘wicked problems’. The project proposes a moral shift from the social and political neutrality of an inward-focused discipline-based expertise to an outward-focused relational, environmentally responsible, socially engaged, and imaginative eco-political professionalism.

Specifically, it will 1) reveal the hidden professional mental models that have shaped music teacher education 2) expand professional horizons by engaging music teacher educators in eco-political reflexive processes; and 3) identify ways to strengthen teacher educators’ deep ecological systems awareness, eco-political change agency, and capacity to imagine. Data is generated through workshops, discussions, and individual and group interviews, and analysed through Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and narrative inquiry. Findings will radically redefine the emancipatory agenda of music education professionalism and create an open-ended reflexive discourse on the ‘civic purpose’ of professional education in music.

The research team in collaboration with Monash University (Australia), North-West University (South Africa), and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Vienna) is based at the Sibelius Academy and Uniarts CERADA.