Korean music education has been more stressed and expanded whenever the national curriculum has been revised. Although the curriculum currently gives a lot of weight to Korean music, school education fails to keep up with the curriculum.
Teachers wh...
Korean music education has been more stressed and expanded whenever the national curriculum has been revised. Although the curriculum currently gives a lot of weight to Korean music, school education fails to keep up with the curriculum.
Teachers who didn't receive proper education about Korean music from their childhood face difficulties in providing practical and theoretical education about that and mostly do nothing more than merely having students sing textbook songs in class. The textbooks, which could be said as the most important teaching materials, provide a variety of hands-on activities for students to understand our music, but the textbooks that are overly activity-centered make it hard for teachers and students to clarify what they learned from the singing and appreciation activities. The curriculum deals with understanding as well as activities, but the textbooks don't give weight to the understanding section, and teachers don't center around it in class, either. Similarly, earlier studies have just focused on the understanding section of a particular grade or of a specific field without covering the entire part of it.
The purpose of this study was to produce systematic supplementary teaching materials geared toward the whole category of Korean music in the understanding section of the curriculum. The supplementary teaching materials prepared in the study dealt with seven different conceptions of Korean music and consisted of 26 study aids.
The teaching materials were produced in the following procedure:
First, theories and earlier studies of the conceptual guidance of music were reviewed to discuss the necessity of conceptual guidance for Korean music and lay the foundation for the production of the supplementary teaching materials so that students could have a better understanding of the conceptions of music.
Second, the understanding section of the revised 7th Korean music curriculum related to Korean music was analyzed to select the concepts of Korean music that should be taught when the third- to sixth-grade textbook songs are instructed. The selected concepts were defined again to be appropriate at an elementary level.
Third, what problems the current textbooks were confronted with were discussed, and in which process the supplementary teaching materials should be developed was determined.
Fourth, the supplementary teaching materials named 'Kookaksam' were developed according to the process and in the form of books, and how to utilize the materials was explained. The supplementary teaching materials were arranged in the following stages: teaching the concepts of Korean music, solving questions, learning activities, evaluating and wrapping up. In the stage of the concept of Korean music and problem solving, students are informed about what they are going to learn. In the stage of learning activities, materials such as photos, pictures and diagrams are presented to ensure the easy understanding of learners about the concepts of Korean music. In the stage of evaluating, they double check what they learned, and they sing familiar traditional children's songs or folksongs to put what they learned in order in the final stage of wrapping up. Thus, the supplementary teaching materials were designed to teach learners to keep in mind the concepts of Korean music in an easier and more interesting manner.
The supplementary teaching materials prepared in this study are expected to help improve Korean music and to be of use to a lot of teachers who just rely on textbooks and eventually have difficulties in teaching it.