Presentation by Katharina Witt on her doctoral dissertation at the 2026 conference of the Working Group on Music Education Research in Kassel
At the annual conference of the Working Group on Music Education Research (AMPF), Katharina Witt presented the initial findings of her video-based doctoral study. Her presentation, “What Becomes the Subject Matter?—On the Co-Construction of Expertise in Music Education,” focused on the role of teaching materials in shaping the subject matter of music instruction.
She reconstructed how the same teaching materials take on different functions within a music class as students work with them: On the one hand, students’ own musical ideas are limited by their adherence to the prescribed materials and are channeled back into the order pre-structured by the teacher. On the other hand, the materials become a starting point for the students’ differentiations and aesthetic negotiations, which break through this order. In this way, the study contributes to praxeological research on subject-specific expertise by empirically reconstructing the effectiveness and limits of material-bound structuring in the process of subject formation.