Defining discourse quality in collaborative discussions of music teacher students

Empirical approach to reconstruct reflective content in aesthetic debates

Abstract

There are hardly any empirical studies on collaborative discussions among music teacher students. Among other goals collaborative discussions can serve aesthetic reflection when argueing about different aesthetic judgments (e.g. Rolle & Wallbaum, 2011). However, the success of such aesthetic reflection processes depends on the discourse quality (Höller & Kranefeld, 2022) and it is still unclear how discourse quality can be operationalised and empirically studied. The article explores this methodological question and presents an methodical approach to measure discourse quality based on the reflective content of student interaction. The article derives theory-based activities and quality characteristics of collaborative, aesthetic reflection and combines them with suitable analyti-cal approaches for a sequential-reconstructive evaluation procedure. Finally, the article reports from a current Design Based Research study and shows, how the developed methodical approach is applied to a case study.