Multicultural Music: My Discoveries

• Me’Haley Babich
• Posted 1/17/22
• 0 comments

Multicultural Music:

The Modern-Day Wonder in the Music Classroom

My Discoveries

The aim of my research was to determine if music teachers’ attitudes toward multicultural music education are affected by the teacher’s level of multicultural music education.

Most participants in this study agreed that multicultural music education is an integral part of elementary music education. However, 79% of participants indicated that they had insufficient training in multicultural music education during college courses. Further, only 28% of participants scored positively on the survey question asking if the teacher’s district offered educational programs and/or workshops dealing with cultural awareness/education.

I was surprised to see from the results that there were no significant positive relationships between teachers’ attitudes toward using multicultural music in the classroom and training in multicultural music education. Teachers believe that multicultural music is an essential part of elementary music classes regardless of their training.

I have also seen this valuation in my day-to-day interactions with music teachers and students. Music teachers believe there is a need for students to experience multicultural music. They will make that opportunity available to their students no matter how much time it takes to make this happen. Is this you, too?

In the future, this study would benefit from a larger participant group with equal numbers of participants that have training from each region of the United States. Such a sampling would indicate whether particular regions provide more multicultural training than others.

A more extensive study will also allow researchers to see any stronger correlations between teachers with and without training. Participants in this study noted that some of the most identifiable multicultural training came from personal experiences, such as a lifetime of travel or personal research.

Additionally, a study examining whether exposure to multicultural music at a young age significantly influences teachers’ attitudes toward teaching multicultural music in the classroom would be beneficial and complementary to this study.

This study and others like it provide evidence that most music teachers consider multicultural music to be an essential part of music education for all students. In combination with this belief and supporting studies that show the extramusical benefits of multicultural music, readers can see that there is a need for more training in this area.

I believe that this study and others referenced throughout this article series could be used to provide school administrators with an evidence-based illustration of the lack of training provided to teachers in college and during professional development for a required music standard. I hope further research in this area will increase advocacy tools for advancing teacher education in multicultural music.

In my final article I have identified music resources to help you increase multicultural music in your own classroom. Multicultural Music: The Modern-Day Wonder in the Music Classroom Part Five: Resources.

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Multicultural Music:
The Modern-Day Wonder in the Music Classroom

Article Series:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Research
Part 3: My Curiosity
Part 4: My Discoveries
Part 5: Resources to Get You Started