Musical Fairy-tale – How a Teacher of Music/Art Classes May Develop Students’ Literacy and Music Skills and Imagination. A good Practice from Poland.

Aneta Rogalska-Marasińska, University of Lodz, Poland, ID LLCE2018-354;  Abstract: Mostly each of us – children and adults – love to listen to, read, and tell/create stories, fairy-tales, or sagas. They may base on real life or refer to imaginary situations. Thus creation may have various realizations, depending on personal knowledge, skills, life experience, cognitive horizon, individual interests and virtues. The mutual exchange of two communication systems – system of oral and written/digitally saved language and language of music/sounds gives a unique opportunity to human development. A good practice presented during LLCE Conference2018 will refer to the newest Polish compulsory school curriculum, to EU Key Competencies for Lifelong Learning (Communication in the Mother Tongue, Cultural Awareness and Expression), and to universal human values. It will also refer to philosophy of Hans Georg Gadamer, who believed that “who has the language, has the world”. It will show the effects of students’ work (instrumentalists and vocalists) of the Music Academy of Lodz, Poland who plan to become music teachers.

To create an expected educational fairy-tale students had to use a framework, which required: a story with an important human challenge (e.g. friendship, courage, empathy), characters (human, animal, or animated objects) being involved into unobvious adventure with an important problem to be solved, an end with a moral. Real or fantastic characters should have their own/personalized language or a way of speaking, so students had to use their imagination, “play” with words and pronunciation, and multiply vocabulary to differ each situation or episode to make it more pictorial. Students were forbidden to use images, photos or any kind of paintings. The task was totally oral. But as the musicians they could use every kind of music: from their own instruments, from natural environment, or gained thanks to sound experiments done by themselves. A sample of students work will be presented as a final part of my presentation.

Key words: creation of musical fairy-tale, pedagogical imagination, language of music, language of human values, communication, Polish compulsory school curriculum, EU Key Competencies for Lifelong Learning