The purpose of this study is to develop teaching plans which help first-grade high school students to enhance their understanding of the international community and to appreciate the originality of Korean music. The 21st century sees that multi-cultur...
The purpose of this study is to develop teaching plans which help first-grade high school students to enhance their understanding of the international community and to appreciate the originality of Korean music. The 21st century sees that multi-culturalism is an aspect not unfamiliar in Korean society. Even though some textbooks used in the current high school curriculum mention the importance of multi-culturalism, it is not enough. Also it is not easy to find good pieces of music to teach multi-culturalism in textbooks and to get practical help to apply that to music classes.
The main objective of this study is to develop teaching plans applicable to real classroom situations. In order to achieve this objective, one country has been chosen from each continent and research has been conducted on the musical characteristics of the nations and how music is performed. To begin with, this study has dealt with why multi-cultural music education is important by going through past research studies and theoretical backgrounds. Then it analyzes music textbooks of high school and collects problems from those textbooks. The next step is to select nations which represent each continent and to research the history, culture, and musical characteristics of the nations and what kinds of musical instruments they have. This study has tried to develop singing-and-appreciation -focused teaching plans so that students can understand cultures of Mongol, India, Indonesia and the Arab area and they can find similarities between Korean music and Asian music from the countries mentioned above. Jazz and Tango have been chosen as the music of the American Continent, which are popular and easy to enjoy. As for Russian music, the research has been done around folk music and for African music, the study is oriented to classes of instrumental music using instruments found in everyday life in Africa.
The following are the effects we can expect as the result of this study. Students will be exposed to music unfamiliar to them in order to develop an interest in various kinds of music from other countries. In doing so, they will compare the music from other continents with Korean traditional music, which will lead them to have a new perspective on Korean music.
There are some suggestions so that more research on this subject may be done and more teachers can teach classes on this topic. First, teaching materials such as songs and video-materials for multi-cultural music education should be researched and developed because teachers are suffering from a lack of good materials applicable to class situations. Second, teachers should be given opportunities to get in-service training and teaching materials should be provided in an institutional way. Third, in-depth research should be done on where Korean music has come from. We should find the similarities between Asian music and Korean music so students can listen and appreciate music from other Asian countries and listen to them with affection. Finally, it is not easy to teach multi-cultural music to high school students to make them comprehend and embrace music from other countries. It is because their main concern is get a good score on the Korean SAT. We should strive to reform the education system which focuses only on college entrance exams and we ought to make every effort to strengthen education which builds students' character. We should produce a good curriculum to teach our students multi-cultural music from elementary school more effectively and systematically. Then our students‘ comprehension of multi-cultural music will be profoundly improved and they will be better citizens in this global village.