Date of Award

7-2006

Type

Thesis

Major

Music

Department

Schwob School of Music

Abstract

"Understanding music in relation to history and culture" is the ninth standard for music education developed by the National Association for Music Educators (MENC) in 1994 (Mark, 1996, p. 50). This principle is very broad and it is up to individual teachers to make sure they include history and multiculturalism in their curriculum. The term multicultural education is extensive and because many teachers do not understand what all it entails, some students do not get a comprehensive multicultural education. In the general music class for example, teaching students a Japanese folk song is a typical multicultural lesson. I do not believe this would be an adequate multicultural lesson unless the students learned about Japanese culture and how it relates to our own culture in the post- industrial world we live in. The purpose of education is to produce citizens that can function in our society. Due to our rapidly changing international society and the globalization occurring, we should have different goals for our students, and multiculturalism should be included in those goals. This restructuring of our society is why I chose this topic. It is almost impossible to live without contact with someone from another culture. Many of our future graduates will become professionals who work with people from many different cultures and many of them will have to travel internationally as part of their jobs. Interaction with other cultures is inevitable in this day and age and we should prepare our students for this in every school subject, including music. The purpose of this project is practical and I wanted the use of this project to be practical too. I intend to implement the research and lessons plans in my own classroom, and hopefully other music educators will as well. Multicultural music is so broad. There are countless numbers of cultures from all times periods that students should know about and it seems impossible to integrate them into a music class, but it is not impossible. The research that attributed to this project and the lesson plans provided prove that multicultural music is necessary and easily applied to music education.

Download
DAISY

Share

COinS