In an analysis of music teachers’ collegiate discourses on upper secondary students’ ensemble playing (Zandén 2010) the teachers’ discourses were of a surprisingly lay character; the discourses seemed to a large extent to draw on everyday conceptions of quality. In a subsequent study of how the Swedish words musikalisk (musical), talang (talent) and begåvad (gifted) are used on the internet (Zandén 2011) I concluded that these concepts were seldom used in ways that hinted at the possibility that they denote developable capacities. If music teachers subscribe to this commonsensical idea of musicality as a stable, innate gift and assign pupils roles and identities accordingly, it might well influence their teaching and their expectations of progress among their pupils.
This presentation focuses on how the role of the teacher and the roles of the pupils are constituted in music teachers’ dialogues with their colleagues. The data consists of ten hours of recorded music teachers’ group-discussions on pupils’ musical performances. Half of these discussions was recorded in 2007 and focused on 17-18-year old pupils’ ensemble playing while the other half was recorded in 2011 and focused on 15-16-year old pupils’ ensemble playing and musical compositions. Both sets of data were originally used for analysing music teachers’ assessments and conceptions of quality. Thus, the ways in which the teachers expressed themselves about teachers and pupils as such were not the focus of discursive attention, neither in the discussions nor in the ensuing analysis. In this study, the data are reanalysed in order to elicit the music teachers’ construction of pupils’ and teachers’ roles and identities as expressed in the dialogues.