Elevperspektiver i kulturskolen

The dissertation is a contribution to research on the Norwegian Municipal Schools of Music and Performing Arts (hereafter named: kulturskole) with a focus on the pupils' stories and narratives about their doings with the kulturskole and the kulturskole`s doings with the pupils. I hope these stories can add new understandings that can inform the development of the kulturskole in new ways. Pupils' perspectives can develop the kulturskole in a democratic direction where the pupils' stories convey their wishes for how this school-form should be developed as a center for art education for children and young people. The work also tries to develop knowledge about new approaches to research with children and young people. Approaches where differences and "not yet seen possibilities" are emphasized, through creative, affirmative, and relational approaches. The pupils’ perspective on the kulturskole seems to not have been examined largely in previous research. To the extent that research has previously focused on the pupils, the pupils have largely been interviewed and observed, while this work tries to allow the pupils to describe their relationships in their own language, bodily verbal and relational in intra-action. Empirical material for this summary is three published articles. The first article is a study that looks at collaboration between kulturskole and other actors seen through the pupil’s perspective. It presents a qualitative approach in that the material was analyzed by coding and using constant comparative methods. Complexity became the core category of the analysis process. We (Hauen and Emstad, 2021) found by drawing out the answers using lines and colors, that it could be read with poststructural understandings such as rhizome and assemblages, and thus the researchers theoretical standpoint made a turn from a qualitative to a postqualitative paradigm. The next sub-study develops methods for conducting research with pupils in the kulturskole by exploring performative approaches in creating data material. It also explores understandings of what (data)material can be in research with children and youth. In the last sub-study, three phenomena that are central to the pupils are explored and connected: togetherness, selfexpressiveness and perfor-managing. These three phenomena are connected tothe pupils, the world, researchers and the kulturskole to create new understandings seen through the pupils’ perspectives. In the cap/mantle, the three articles are