The practical training of music teachers is a complex, contextual, and idiosyncratic process (Flores, 2019). School internships, in which students are expected to develop their teaching skills, form a central and formative part of this training process. These practical situations reveal which concepts and plans are successful in the reality of school life (Goodrich, 2023). At the same time, it becomes clear that in real-life situations, there is very little scope for exploration and innovation—the framework conditions and pressure to succeed seem to have too strong an effect on students. 

It is a challenge for universities to create suitable settings in which students are supported in developing innovative approaches to teaching and expanding their leadership skills with a democratic attitude. The presentation will introduce a course conducted over four years that focuses on three aspects of teaching innovation: peer mentoring, democratic understanding, and leadership (Goodrich, 2023). Through collaborative learning and socially responsible leadership, students are expected to expand their democratic competence. The presentation discusses the results of accompanying research, raising the question of whether, by demanding participation, the institution can fulfill its responsibility as a democratic place of learning (Theison, 2025). 

Imagination enables us to think beyond familiarity and explore ‘conditions of possibility’ (Reichenbach, 2025, p. 163). In the five-member research group of the doctoral project “Die Pädagogische Imagination” (Mommartz, forthcoming), consisting of the research head and four university students, a methodically structured model for pedagogical work on the musical self-concept was developed and tested in this reflective grounded theory study (Breuer et al., 2019). This presentation will outline the process of this development. In this process, the researchers' individual involvement was systematically monitored using various reflection loops. In the process of searching for and comparing the data with their own theoretical premises, a common understanding was negotiated. The challenge was to “translate” the highly individual ways of understanding for the other group members (Ricœur, 2016) while bringing them together to form a common understanding of a material theory (Niessen, 2006), that incorporated all individuals' perspectives. Through imagination and the development of common metaphors and linguistic symbols, the participants could develop a new common sense (Gemeinsinn), both in relation to themselves and in the sense of a 'sensus communis' (Reichenbach, 2025, p. 34). In this way, common references environment were established (Jung, 2017; Moser, 2000; Whitton, 2018), and the knowledge of all participants has been incorporated into the model.

In the third input of our symposium, I will enter “the feared emotional terrain” (Nussbaum, 2013, 214), and argue that music educators who want to practice a democratic education need to be aware of this terrain. According to Martha Nussbaum (2013), Claudine Nierth & Roman Huber (2023), and Maren Urner (2024), the human capacities to perceive and to also cultivate our individual emotions is key if we want to preserve our democracies and our human ability to find common sense. Their line of reasoning is that humans are emotional, and emotions are not private, but deeply political: They influence our actions in the public sphere. This means that they also influence actions in all kinds of communities—in universities, in schools, or in music groups in general. When confronted with values that differ from one's own values, humans can become emotional, and certain emotions are problematic, because they can impede participatory teamwork. I will illustrate this line of reasoning with an autoethnographic narration that stems from my own practice as a music educator who enjoys creating musical encounters between university students and people who live their lives outside of academia.