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The purpose of this paper is to show that lesson study by including elements from music and music education can sustainably expand and improve the dialogical space for teaching and learning in higher education, especially for primary and secondary teacher education students.

For the first time under the topic “Lesson Study: Music in Dialogue,” corresponding study programs were prepared at the University College of Teacher Education, Lower Austria. The data material from which answers to research questions can be generated are the “Didactic Design Pattern” and classical research lesson planning, observation and discussion instruments. Moreover, discussion protocols of the reflection meetings offered insights the participants gained through sharing their experience of a series of lesson study cycles including focussed collaboration between mentors, teachers, teacher education students and primary school pupils.

Within the lesson study groups, the space for cooperation and dialogue widened considerably and the interest in the work and expertise of each other increased. Based on the principles of a “community of practice,” this study shows the positive effects of professional collaboration on primary and secondary teacher education students and a lasting impact on their pupils’ learning. Thereby, the dialogical principle was found to play a central and important role. In connection with music- and art-related processes, previous limitations in teaching and learning with music can be exceeded for pupils, teacher education students and teachers.

This study, therefore, provides new insights into questions of organization and implementation, as well as scientific and didactic support in professional learning communities.

So far, there has been little practitioner research through lesson study in the field of music education. In particular, lesson study enhancing the cooperation between music education and other subject areas through dialogical-integrative work has brought about knowledge and insights of great importance for the further development of an appropriate didactic approach in dialogic music education.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for an improved conceptualisation of health service research, using Stengers' (2018) metaphor of “slow science” as a critical yardstick.

The paper is structured in three parts. It first reviews the field of health services research and the approaches that dominate it. It then considers the healthcare research approaches whose principles and methodologies are more aligned with “slow science” before presenting a description of a “slow science” project in which the authors are currently engaged.

Current approaches to health service research struggle to offer adequate resources for resolving frontline complexity, principally because they set more store by knowledge generalisation, disciplinary continuity and integrity and the consolidation of expertise, than by engaging with frontline complexity on its terms, negotiating issues with frontline staff and patients on their terms and framing findings and solutions in ways that key in to the in situ dynamics and complexities that define health service delivery.

There is a need to engage in a paradigm shift that engages health services as co-researchers, prioritising practical change and local involvement over knowledge production. Economics is a research field where the products are of natural appeal to powerful health service managers. A “slow science” approach adopted by the embedded Economist Program with its emphasis on pre-implementation, knowledge mobilisation and parallel site capacity development sets out how research can be flexibly produced to improve health services.