Abstract
Music never exists for its own sake. On the contrary, it connects to the universe including Nature, society, and human beings. Music originated from people’s labor and life and has always reflected human conditions related to temporal and spatial elements. It is our belief that music can function as an educatively meaningful window through which the students explore the world with wider views and deeper thoughts. Based on these beliefs, we postulate an interdisciplinary approach starting from music and beyond it to foster students’ outlook of universally connected world. A conceptual model is conceived by the authors which describes the students’ hierarchical progress possibly gained from purposefully designed learning in an interdisciplinary manner. To further rationalize the feasibility for such a learning approach, we propose a down-to-earth way of thinking that music relates to language in lyrics of songs, bears geo-historical footprints because it originates temporally and spatially. From these clues, a common attribute can be found to thread the whole learning process involving several subjects integrated as a whole, rather than the school subjects learned separately. Given an exemplary project for the students to explore two types of folk songs in the North and the South of China, they are led to find a common attribute focusing on isomorphic direction of move between dialect tones of lyrics and tunes of folk songs, discover the inner connections hidden beneath the surface of present phenomena, and dwell on the significant insights which enable them to act like a thinker. The interdisciplinary learning illustrated as a case project here purports to prompt our colleagues that the educative values of music are far from fully recognized and these values should function to a full degree for the young generation to emancipate the constraints of thinking and develop creative minds.
Highlights
To design an interdisciplinary learning approach that starts from music and goes beyond music, one should understand that this approach is not to make music learning as a tool to crutch learning of other disciplines, but to learn in music first while making it become a window through which students explore into the whole universe far beyond routine experiences, search for charming networks in the society or a community around them, and reflect on themselves in daily life
During many years of practicing interdisciplinary learning approach, music has been used to assist learning for other areas or subjects
We believe that the educative values of music are far from fully recognized and these values should be cherished and fully used in educating the young generation, assisting them to develop ways of thinking with an interdisciplinary mind, free of constraints and limitations
Summary
The purpose to motivate students to learn across different aspects of the world can be found early in the educational philosophy of Confucius. The traditional Chinese medicine insists on a holistic way to treat the illness to synthesize the prescribed herbs with related complicacy, just like what has been sought after by interdisciplinary pioneers to let students see and think of the world in related ways, always linking one thing to the many, whereas the way to store the medical herbs separately placed in isolated containers - is in no way like the core philosophy of Chinese medicine. This analogy illustrates school disciplines or subjects to be learned by students in distinctly different ways. We advocate the interdisciplinary learning because it results in the minds connecting the world and recreating a new world, not for reciting the messages from textbooks to test papers
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