The apparent ideological tensions between popular musics and formal school contexts raise significant issues regarding teachers' popular repertoire selection processes. Such decision-making may be seen to take place within a school censorship frame, through which certain musics and their accompanying values are promoted, whilst others are suppressed. Through semi-structured interviews with five Finnish music teachers, the narrative instrumental case study reported in this article aims to explore secondary school music teachers' understandings of the school censorship frame and its influence on their popular repertoire decisions. The findings suggest that the school censorship frame is composed of dynamic and interrelated big stories: teachers' cultural, religious and curricular narrative environments; and small stories: stories of school, staff, parents, themselves as a teacher, and stories of their students. This study illustrates the complex, situational and multifaceted negotiations involved in including or excluding popular repertoire from school activities, suggesting that teachers' decisions require ethical deliberation in aiming towards an inclusive, democratic music education.

Whilst increasing attention is paid to decolonizing music education practice in the classroom, the research processes by which scholars identify, understand, and evaluate anti-colonial or decolonizing work are often entrenched in colonial logics themselves. The politics of knowledge and knowledge production between indigenous epistemes and the Academy thus raise questions as to the methodological responsibility of music education research in indigenous settings, particularly when conducted by non-indigenous researchers. Drawing upon a recent music education study conducted together with indigenous Sámi peoples in Finland, this article argues that despite the good intentions of music education scholars methodological responsibility may well be an unachievable goal. However, if we understand research ethics as more than the procedural accountability to institutional review boards or funding committees, methodological responsibility may better be understood as a condition of possibility found in relation with others. Thus, in order to decolonize music education practice, researchers are challenged to step outside of their epistemic and methodological comfort zones, and to consider how we may also decolonize music education research.

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Recognizing and ethically engaging with the inherent diversity of music education contexts demands a continuous interrogation of the norms and values underpinning policy and practice in music teacher education. In doing so, teachers and students in higher education are challenged to question why and how students are socialized into particular music education systems, traditions, or perspectives and to consider alternatives. In this chapter, we explore such reflexive processes, employing a theoretical reading analysis through Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, and doxa. The data consists of group reflections and interviews with student-teachers that the authors conducted as part of an intercultural arts education project between Finnish masters students and two Cambodian NGOs. Based on our analysis, we argue that stepping outside of one's cultural, musical, and pedagogical comfort zone is a necessary component of constructing and (re)negotiating teacher visions in music teacher education. However, this renegotiation may be discomforting for student-teachers, unsettling deep-seated visions of what good music education is and ought to be-the taken-for-granted doxa of music teaching and learning. Therefore, for music-teacher education to become transformative and reflexive, there is a need for such educational experiences that engage with processes that are related to the art of living with difference.

Stories have been one means by which qualitative researchers have attempted to engage participants and construct, analyze and present data or findings in a meaningful way. In this article, I look at the impetus for, and potentials of crafting and sharing researcher-written factional stories with research participants as a means to generate rich, meaningful data, and facilitate collaborative inquiry. Factional stories may be understood as a bricolage of previously collected data, analyses and fictive elements, combining research participants’ and researcher voices and presented as a short, first-person story. Through the use of factional stories in my own research study as illustration, I examine how factional stories may create a methodological space, within which participants and researcher may collaboratively construct meaning and engage in reflection, negotiation and inquiry. This article suggests that as a heuristic methodological tool, factional stories may be a particularly appropriate methodological means to attend to the complexity so often characteristic of teaching and learning music.