Teaching electronic popular music

Eirik Sørbø at the Faculty of Arts is defending his PhD with the title "Developing Practices and Approaches to Electronic Popular Music in Education".

Sørbø has followed the doctoral program at the Faculty of Fine Arts.

This is how Eirik Sørbø himself summarizes the thesis:

Teaching electronic popular music
In this thesis entitled Developing practices and approaches to electronic popular music in education, Eirik Sørbø examines different perspectives on how to teach electronic popular music. Electronic popular music education is a fairly recent area compared to most other artistic educational fields, and the relationship between various purposes of education, between the teacher and the student, and between technology and creativity is not as established as in many other fields.

Sørbø uses different perspectives through the four articles that make up the dissertation, and combines educational research related to popular music with continental educational thinking, particularly from educational theorist Gert Beista.

Based on the findings, Sørbø presents, in collaboration with Andreas Waaler Røshol, a teaching tool (model of the aesthetic dialogue) for the use of co-writing in music education. Furthermore, he develops the concept of middle ground teaching (based on Biesta's concept of middle ground education), which discusses the teacher's role and practices when meeting constantly changing technology, new types of prior knowledge among music students, and students with expertise that exceeds the teacher's own.

Sørbø hopes that his research will contribute to help music teachers, especially in higher education, to face the continuous changes that follow technological developments.