Making sense of democratisation: a case study about extracurricular music workshops in France

Abstract Since the early 2000s, education policy in France has strongly encouraged publicly funded conservatoires and music schools to forge partnerships with various stakeholders in sectors outside of specialised music education. This change in the objectives traditionally assigned to music schools and conservatoires has given rise to new ‘pedagogical projects’, among which extracurricular music workshops are quite widespread. This study investigated the views of specialised music teachers in relation to these new pedagogical formats through an analysis of their evaluations of a workshop led in a French school between 2018 and 2019. I interviewed the music teachers who participated in the project (n = 8), those who refused to participate (n = 7) and also the administrative staff (n = 4). The results indicate that far from the ecumenism traditionally associated with policies promoting the democratisation of culture, conservatoire teachers think about and are involved in these projects in different ways, reflecting a wide range of considerations around pedagogy, project quality, purpose or politics.