In this paper I will rethink the goals of music education in terms of the three functions of education as proposed by Gert Biesta: qualification, socialization and subjectification. I will argue that behind Biesta's three functions actually a hidden dichotomy is present: a dichotomy between socialization - of which qualification is an important part - and subjectification. I will also argue that Biesta's strong normative description of subjectification turns subjectification too much into a specific form of socialization.

I will as an alternative propose a less normative description of what subjectification is, placing the normative element of education in the tension between socialization and subjectification. On that basis, I will propose that music education essentially has the function to contribute to the musical subjectification of our pupils as musical 'idiocultures', and that qualification and socialization are present in music education as means to the end of musical subjectification.

In Germany, the lack of music teachers is increasing. For 2035, it is predicted that only one third of free positions in secondary school can be filled with young teachers, that completed a full study of music education (BA + MA; Klemm, 2024).

Thus, more than 100 researchers from Germany's music education community set out for a bottom-up study as crowd research. In more than 70 qualitative microstudies and additionally a handful of quantitative studies, they researched the question why young people from different backgrounds decide against taking on studies for a teacher's degree in music for secondary school. More than 400 interviews were conducted. The target group of these studies reached from students in secondary school courses to young people in regional choirs and orchestras, from students of other degrees to students of a different teacher's degree.

Finally, more than 70 microstudies were triangulated and combinedly re-analysed on a secondary level by a team, led by Andreas Lehmann-Wermser and Patrick Witte. In 2024, results were presented to inform practice, research, education and policy making.

Key results of the study are threefold: The decision against a teacher's degree in music education firstly depended on the entrance exam. People mentioned a fear of the exam that made them refrain from participating, mentioned a lack of resources to prepare for it, and also were insufficiently informed about the requested qualifications. Secondly, often the culture and offerings of the music departments did not seem to match perfectly with young person's musical identity and engagement and partly failed in preparing for the job. Thirdly, the quality of the teaching environment in schools was reflected upon critically, with "music" seen as a hard subject to teach. Results will be used on policy level to conduct changes in the sector of higher music education.

As part of a reform of Norwegian general teacher education in 2017 an obligatory master’s thesis was introduced. An ongoing critique against an obligatory master’s thesis is that it would lead to further academization of teacher education and widen the gap between theory and practice. To mitigate this and give student teachers a wider array of options for their master’s theses, to choose from, an entrepreneurial thesis was introduced in 2021/22 at Oslo Metropolitan University, and in spring 2024, the first student music teachers submitted their entrepreneurial theses. These theses consist of three parts: a didactical product, a written part and an oral exam. All student teachers employ design-based research (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012) as a method, and the product must be tested two times in a pedagogical context. In our presentation we will present results from interviews (Brinkmann & Kvale, 2014) with student music teachers, and our reflections from supervising and assessing entrepreneurial theses. Interviews with student teachers show that the entrepreneurial master’s thesis is thought of as more relevant for their future working life as teachers, and the thesis can be perceived as a boundary object (Star and Griesmer, 1989) positioned along three axes: theory and practice, pre-service teacher and in-service teacher, and the academic student and the creative student.

Supervision has been both individual and in seminars. A challenge has been that some student teachers struggled with the didactical part of the product, making teaching content without reflecting on the possibilities for learning.

Challenges for assessing has been to find the balance between the individual parts, and to recognize the students’ contribution when cooperating with external collaborators.

Despite these challenges the student teachers have produced didactical products with several qualities, and the entrepreneurial thesis has proved to be a valid alternative to the traditional master thesis.