Digital literacy (DGL) is recognised as one of the key 21st-century competences (EU, 2018; UNESCO, 2021), yet access to digital resources and knowledge remains unequal, raising concerns of inclusion and participation. In parallel, school music education often prioritises performance and reproduction, leaving less scope for experimentation, ownership, and creative uses of technology. The project Digi-skills with Music Tech addresses these dual challenges by integrating music technology into classroom practice as a means to foster digital inclusion and creative participation, with the central aim of equipping teachers to embed digital literacy goals into music lessons.

Developed by SKVR in collaboration with O21, HKU Music & Technology, and the music teacher community SKVRTech, the project offered two four-lesson series in primary and secondary schools. It reached 991 students across 60 classes across 19 schools, with support from the City of Rotterdam’s Digital Inclusion programme. SKVRTech - a community of 30 diverse music teachers founded in 2020 - played a central role in co-designing, testing, and refining music technology lesson materials, ensuring scalability and sustainability. HKU contributed expertise in creative agency and process pedagogy, while O21 embedded the DGL goals and co-developed a self-evaluation tool enabling students to reflect on both musical and digital growth.

Evaluation combined interviews, surveys, and 926 self-assessments. Findings demonstrate strong impact: students enhanced listening, composition, and collaboration skills, while experiencing joy and ownership through creative experimentation. Digital literacy outcomes were notable: in primary education, students reported mastering 83% of goals (90% for tasks), and in secondary education, 82%. Operational and information skills showed the greatest grains, while conceptual understanding also processed. School teachers reported high engagement and observed students continuing music technology independently at home.

Digi-skills with Music Tech demonstrates how music and technology can be combined to nurture creativity, strengthen inclusion, and equip students with future-oriented skills.

This paper presents the professional development format Maker Music Expeditions, situated within the KuMuS-ProNeD network at the University of Education Freiburg. The project responds to the challenges of digital transformation in music education by establishing teaching-learning labs (Kirchhoff et al., 2024) as interfaces between school practice, teacher training, and higher education. The design of the Maker Music Expeditions builds on the emerging concept of maker music education (Treß, 2024). Informed by postdigital perspectives (Buchborn & Treß, 2023; Clements, 2018), the format emphasizes hybridity of technologies, creative musical action, ecological awareness (Schmid, 2024) and co-construction as core design principles. These principles aim to empower teachers to explore technology not merely as tools but as catalysts for participatory and sustainable forms of music-making, aligning with critical perspectives on educational technology (Selwyn et al., 2020).

In our presentation, we offer a multi-perspective situational analysis (Clarke et al., 2022) of the Maker Music Expeditions. Drawing on interviews, video data, and teaching materials, it provides (a) insights into the practices of teaching-learning labs, (b) a critical reflection on our roles as project leaders, trainers and facilitators, and (c) implications for further development. The analysis shows how our design principles evolved through situated collaboration and professional learning. Findings indicate that role fluidity is central: teachers often act as learners, students as co-teachers, and lecturers alternate between guiding and exploring. While participants valued the creative impulses and institutional support, challenges remain regarding scalability, sustainability, and curricular integration.

In resonance with the EAS 2026 themes of encounter and exchange through music education and critical engagement with current and future trends, our study explores how collaborative partnerships with schools and teachers, situated within postdigital learning environments, can foster reflective, sustainable, and critically informed uses of educational technologies that may contribute to a more democratic and inclusive society.

“How to teach about democracy through technology that connects learning objectives from three subject areas: music, digital literacy, and citizenship education?” This was last semester’s innovation assignment for third-year students (pre-service music teachers at a conservatoire in the Netherlands) in the music education laboratory course called moLab(Author, 2021). This practice paper presents the context, process and outcomes of this assignment.

Education in the Netherlands is guided by national Core objectives—set by the government for different subject areas—that describe what pupils are expected to achieve during primary education and the lower grades of secondary school (SLO, 2025a). These objectives are now in the final stages of a national curriculum reform. In addition, learning objectives for two new subject areas—Digital Literacy and Citizenship Education (SLO, 2025b)—have recently been introduced to be integrated across the curriculum, with democracy as a key theme within citizenship education.

The moLab course aims to help students innovate music education through the iterative development and implementation of technology, while also practicing research skills and learning how to design technology as domain experts in music education.

To integrate the new Core objectives with music education, four groups of moLab students worked systematically on the assignment introduced above (two hours per week for 14 weeks), following six stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, 2018) and implement. This resulted in four different approaches: a technology-enhanced music board game; a technology-enriched escape-room activity (based on the historical Silk Roads) to teach about diversity and inclusion, and two different apps to musically teach how elections may be influenced by (social) media.

Finally, we reflect on these results. Participants leave with practical suggestions for using design thinking to link democratic and digital literacy goals to music education in their own teacher training programmes.