Together with third year students of the bachelor Music in Education at the conservatory of ArtEZ University of the Arts in Enschede, I will deliver a workshop at the EAS conference in Vienna.

Abstract of the workshop:

Recently, two new subject areas —Digital Literacy and Citizenship Education (SLO, 2025)—have been introduced in the Netherlands to define what pupils are expected to achieve in these subjects during primary education and the first years of secondary education. This development prompted last semester’s innovation assignment for third-year students (pre-service music teachers at a Dutch conservatoire) in the music education laboratory course called moLab (Author, 2021).

The 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. Last semester’s innovation assignment explored how democracy—as a key theme within citizenship education—can be taught through technology by integrating these new subject areas with music education.

In this workshop, participants will engage in the same innovation assignment while experiencing the key elements of the moLab course. Following a short introduction to the course and the assignment, participants work in groups through six stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, 2018) and implement. Each group will be joined by one or more moLab students.

In four short rounds (10 minutes each), the groups will: 1) briefly research the theme of democracy; 2) decide on the main design criteria; 3) generate ideas for possible technology designs that fit the criteria; and 4) the moLab students will then present their own prototypes. Participants will subsequently be invited to test these prototypes, which will be accompanied by posters to illustrate the implementation stage of the moLab course. We conclude with a plenary discussion in which participants reflect on their experience and leave with practical ideas for connecting democratic and digital literacy goals to music education in their own teacher training programmes.