Lifelong engagement with music: Learning through the lives of Portuguese music educators

This thesis adds to the growing body of knowledge of lifelong engagement with music but with a new emphasis on Portuguese music educators’ lives. This investigation places its focus on the importance of Portuguese music educators’ narratives in understanding the experiences of music education and its lifelong impact.
This is a qualitative study, based on 64 questionnaires used for recruitment purposes and contextualization, and 26 life-history interviews. The aims of this research are: to analyse early musical experiences in the lives of music educators (in various settings such as philharmonic bands and specialised music institutions); to provide an in-depth, up to date analysis of their experiences in formal music education and how these affect their lifelong engagement with music; to identify the reasons that led them to choose music teaching as a career and to analyse their attitudes towards music education and how those were shaped by their previous experiences. The interviews each provided one to four hours of recorded verbal data and have been analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis approach.
The findings indicate that these participants’ experiences as music students showed great impact in their musical engagement, their career decisions and their attitudes towards music education. This thesis reports on participants’ experiences within the Portuguese music education system and argues that it places its focus on performance leaving aside other possible selves in music. Furthermore, these findings suggest that music educators’ attitudes towards music education are constantly evolving rather than bound to previous attitudes and experiences.
The importance and originality of this study are that it explores Portuguese music educators’ life stories for the first time and offers important insights into the role of music education in lifelong engagement with music and in music teaching careers.

Key-words: life stories; music education; Portugal; music educators; possible selves.