This research aims to explore university textbooks of early childhood music education and analyze the exemplary classroom activities inside the textbook to examine the balance of the structure based on Nuri Curriculum.
For a thorough investigation,...
This research aims to explore university textbooks of early childhood music education and analyze the exemplary classroom activities inside the textbook to examine the balance of the structure based on Nuri Curriculum.
For a thorough investigation, reflecting the association between Nuri Curriculum and the textbook activity, the activity content was accordingly matched up with five curriculum domains; Physical excercise & Health, Communication, Social relationship, Art experience, and Nature exploration. The goal of activity in the textbook was put into three divisions; knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The activity content from the textbook was categorized into sound exploration, singing, movements, playing instruments, listening music, composition, and music drama. The theme of activity was reviewed according to the standard of Nuri Curriculum. Lastly, the teaching material fell into a number of categories; audio resource, video clips, music sheets, instruments, lyrics, photos and drawings, and living things or objects from nature.
Based on the purpose and objectives of this study, the following specific research questions were established.
First, which domain of Nuri curriculum has been reflected to the content of the music textbook activity?
Second, how does the music textbook activity state the goal?
Third, what musical content does the music textbook activity contain?
Forth, which theme of Nuri curriculum does the music textbook activity adopt?
Fifth, what kind of resources does the music textbook activity use?
The subject of this study were 576 music activities collected from 13 Nuri curriculum-reflected music textbooks for pre-service teachers. All activities were subject to contrast to the degree of relevance to Nuri curriculum, objectives, activity contents, activity theme and teaching material. Prior research were reviewed to develop the analysis standard. After the standard had been set, the frequency of the result was calculated and converted into percentage.
In summary of the research result, as for the first question, in terms of Nuri Curriculum, Art experience was highly related and adopted in music activity from the textbook. The rest of the other domains are listed in the order of Social relationship, Nature exploration, Physical exercise& Health, and Communication. Art experience took up more than 50% out of all domains, while Commucation showed the lowest frequency. This result explains the preference gap among each domain and need of balanced decision on planning music activity.
Second, after the activity goal was filtered into the domain of knowledge, skills, and attitude, it appeared that skill-related goals took a large portion among the textbook activities. It actually outnumbered the sum of knowledge-related goals and attitude-related goals. According to this result, It is suggested the curricular balance among knowledge, skills and attitude should be considered in lesson planning.
Third, activities showed high frequency from the textbook are as follows; singing, playing instruments, movements, listening to music, sound exploration, music drama, and composition. The most common activity from the textbook was singing. Playing instruments, movements, listening to music were comparably high, but lower than singing. However, activities like sound exploration, music drama, and composition were relatively rare in the textbook. It implies the lack of diversity in music activity that requires teachers to exercise various activities.
Forth, the frequent theme of activity based on Nuri curriculum was listed as follows: Four seasons(Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall), Animals, Plants, and Nature, Environment and Life, Appliances, My country, Kindergarten/Daycare Center and Friends, Various Countries in the World, Me and My Family, Health and Safety, Transportaion, My neighborhood, etc. There was little discrepancy among Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall, Animal, Plants, and Nature, Environment and Life, and Appliances, but showed similar frequency. On the other hand, themes like Various countries in the World, Health and Safety, Transportation, and My neighborhood displayed relatively low frequency in music textbook activity. Overall, there was noticeable gap among the theme, which calls for the effort to minimize the imbalance.
Fifth, the categorization of teaching resources in music textbook showed the order of frequently used materials as follows: instruments, tools from daily life, audio resource, photo and drawing/writing, lyrics, music sheets, living things and living nature, and video clips. Instruments scored the highest frequency, while video clips were the lowest, which explains the usage of instruments is fairly common.
In conclusion, music activities in university textbook generally showed a sign of disproportion in curricular domain, objectives, contents, activity theme, and teaching materials. Considering the impact of pre-service teachers' experience in the classroom, it seems necessary to put more weight on balance in planning based on the result of this research.