From 2019 until 2025, eight international exchanges have brought together pre-service music teachers from Turkey, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Greece to experience various international and intercultural environments, in order to increase their personal and professional development. These exchanges aimed to offer holistic learning experiences, connecting five dimensions:

1. School visits.

2. Reflecting music education in dialogues.

3. Making music together.

4. Informal encounters between music education students.

5. Participating in local cultural practices.

Those five dimensions let the students collect experiences simultaneously in foreign, mostly asymmetric, various environments (Nettl, 1995). Τhis encourages music education students to question their cultural environments and to promote transformations in their self-concepts (Slee 2012), their musical practice, and their future perspective on music education. After the presentation of interim results at the EAS conference 2022 in Belgrade and the EAS conference 2024 in Dublin, research continues and we will present a follow up project with music education students from four (instead of two) countries.

In a first step, our research has analysed all projects qualitatively through questionnaires before, during, and after the projects (Mayring, 2022), and participative observations (Bohnsack, 2010). First data gave a clear sign that for our music education students, “leaving the familiar comfort zone” and getting into dialogues with - partly overwhelming or contradictory - new cultural environments, seems to be an important condition to make new learning experiences and to influence their way of teaching music in the future.

Through the analyzed data, individual and group transformations can be found in different dimensions (e.g. self-concept, roles in the group or understanding of own vs. othering in cultural contexts) and will be discussed from an intercultural point of view, analyzing their impact on students’ own personal and professional development, and their limitations. The project was first conceived to better understand international music lessons via creating new social rooms (Busch, 2015) in different dimensions. Afterwards, the data showed that offering those various international and intercultural environments simultaneously made a greater impact on sustainable transformations for the students, than letting them experience them one by one in their familiar environments.

• Ιστορικές και πολιτισμικές διαστάσεις και σύγχρονες εκπαιδευτικές πρακτικές
• Μουσικές εμπειρίες με νόημα
• Μουσική και κοινότητες

Mercé Bosch Sanfélix is a doctorate with international mention by the Universitat de Vic – Universitat de Catalunya (Spain) in the field of inclusion and educational innovation. Currently, she is a teaching and research associate at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen (Germany). Among her areas of interest in music educational research are inclusion, participation and accessibility, intersectional studies, and the transformation of social areas in learning processes. She has participated in international conferences and has published articles and book chapters in Spanish, German and English. She is currently pursuing her postdoctoral studies on the topic of transnational musical identities.

Prof. Alexis Kivi worked for six years as a gymnasium teacher and taught from 2009 until 2015 music education as an assistant professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the University of Arts Berlin. In 2015 he got his doctoral degree for a dissertation about models of interdisciplinarity in teaching music. After visiting and deputy professorships in Koblenz, Berlin, and Dresden, he was working as a regular professor for music education at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Oberösterreich in Linz (Austria). Since 2023, Alexis Kivi is Professor for Music Education at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg (Germany).

Dimitra Koniari works as Laboratory Teaching Personnel (Department of Music Science and Art, University of Macedonia). She is a graduate of the Department of Music Studies (AUTh), holds a DEA in Cognitive Sciences (Free University of Brussels), and a PhD from the Department of Education and Social Policy (University of Macedonia). She is a member of EAS (European Association for Music in Schools), of GSME (Greek Society for Music Education), and head of the editorial board of the journal of GSME, "Music Education". Her research interests lie in the field of music psychology, music education and music neurodidactics.

Sezen Özeke is a professor in the Music Education Department at Bursa Uludağ University. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in music education from Arizona State University. Her research focuses on music teacher training, comparative studies, Kodály and Orff pedagogy, and community music education. She was a Visiting Professor at Mahidol University (2022–2023) in Thailand and has been invited as a guest lecturer at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. Currently, in addition to her role at Bursa Uludağ University, she serves as a board member of the European Association for Music in Schools (EAS).