Toward an Integrated Curriculum: A Music Education Perspective.

Overview & Synopsis

This project was designed to develop a model for teaching general music methods for elementary/early childhood education majors using musics of diverse cultures as discrete and infused entities, integrated across the curriculum. The proposed model's primary goal was to develop student awareness of sources of culturally diverse music and related materials. A second goal was to develop student awareness of how to infuse diverse musical material into both the musical and non-musical curriculum. Two groups of preservice teachers, 30 elementary education majors and 29 early childhood education majors, took the music education course. Six core musical activities were introduced and illustrated with examples from African and African-American, Latin American, Native American, and Asian cultures in addition to standard American folk song material. Students completed an "Integrated Model" form for each example, which included focus on both the musical and non-musical understandings to be developed from the experience. The second half of the course focused on the discrete musical cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, Native America Latin America, India, and Japan. In a final assignment, students developed a modified 10-entry, annotated bibliography. When these bibliographies were evaluated for cultural diversity, results indicated that 73 percent of the elementary education majors and 65 percent of the early childhood education majors included one or more culturally diverse entries. (JB)