Immigrant students and the “homeland music”: Meanings, negotiations and implications

This article builds from a multi-sited ethnographic study on immigrant students’ musical agency, conducted in three lower secondary school classrooms in the capital cities of Finland, Sweden and Norway. The focus of the article is twofold, and concerns what kinds of meanings the participating students ascribed to the music from their own or their parents’ homelands as well as how this music was negotiated within music classrooms and the wider school contexts to which these students belonged. The findings showed that students’ ascribed meanings and performed negotiations were rich and complex, and this is taken as a point of departure when discussing these findings’ potential for informing teachers’ practice in multicultural music classrooms.