Artistic Learning as Emergent Sense-Making: An Enactive Understanding of Artistic Learning Processes in Higher Music Education
This PhD dissertation investigates how artistic learning processes can be understood when learning is not reduced to epistemological acquisition of knowledge, the development of skills, or the application of methods, but is instead approached ontologically as a relational and temporal process of sense-making. Drawing on an enactive, relational ontology, the dissertation analyses how subject, action, normativity, and world are mutually constituted in artistic practice, and how learning emerges as a reorganization of the horizon of experience in time.
Empirically, the dissertation is grounded in qualitative multi-case studies of conservatoire-level music students’ lived experiences in artistic creation, analysed within an enactive, ontologically emergent horizon. Musical practice functions as an ontological analytical prism in which the fundamental conditions of learning become particularly salient, as action is irreversible, time is experientially constituted, and normative evaluation is unavoidable.
Through two complementary multi-case studies, the dissertation examines, respectively, situated sense-making in the artistic present and transformations in experience, orientation, and existential stance-taking over time. The analyses show that dominant conceptions of learning in higher music education rest on substance-ontological assumptions, in which learning is rendered visible through stabilised phenomena such as technique, focus, and confidence, attributed explanatory status as inner properties of the learner. This establishes self-reinforcing logics in which resistance, uncertainty, and unfinishedness are interpreted as individual deficiencies rather than as relational and temporal signals.
On this basis, the dissertation develops an ontologically emergent understanding of learning in which relation, temporality, normativity, and subjectification are understood as mutually constitutive. Resistance is conceptualised not as a lack of motivation or competence, but as ontological information about the current organisation of the relation, indicating a tension between what is experientially meaningful and what can be realised in action. Consciousness-raising is understood as a practice that either closes experience within representational control or opens it towards the reorganisation of experiential horizons.
Learning thus appears as emergent sense-making: a movement in which meaning is not produced retrospectively, but arises in the way situated action is carried forward in time. The dissertation thereby contributes an ontological foundation for rethinking learning theory, education, and pedagogy as existential and meaning-oriented practices under normative conditions, in which artistic creation, resistance, and subjectivation constitute integral dimensions of learning.
The PhD project is a collaboration between DKDM and DPU (the Danish School of Education).
The project is funded with support from the Danish Ministry of Culture’s Research Fund and the Augustinus Foundation.
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