Elementary Music Practice International

Being accepted into a new home country and the corresponding education system involves a number of hurdles. For example, many people who have come to Germany in recent years have worked in professions in their home countries whose expertise they cannot easily contribute to the local labor market. This applies to musical as well as other professional fields. In order to offer immigrant music teachers and musicians with and without refugee experience an opportunity to integrate into the German job market as quickly as possible, the Department of Elementary Music Education (EMP) at the University of Music and Drama, together with the Kulturpalast Hamburg Foundation, launched the International Music Education (IME) initiative in 2014, which is also supported by the Edwin E. Gordon Gesellschaft Deutschland e.V. is also involved.

Following its initiation in collaboration with the HfMT, the IME project is offered in conjunction with the Kulturpalast Hamburg's "Klangstrolchen" as one of three further education opportunities in the context of early musical education.

Due to the great demand for well-trained music professionals in the field of early childhood education and the supra-regional interest in the IME project, the EMP department decided to open a Germany-wide further education course from August 2019 for immigrant musicians and music teachers with a first professional degree in non-EU countries, which is offered as a certificate course "Elementary Music Practice International" (EMI). Participants from outside Hamburg are also reached here, as the face-to-face seminars take place in blocks on weekends and in intensive weeks at the HfMT Hamburg. The qualifications or training in the field of music or music education acquired in the home countries, which in most cases are not congruent with German qualifications, can be supplemented at EMI by a certified professional specification in the field of early musical education in daycare centers.

The theoretical and practical cornerstones are current findings from elementary music education and the audiation-based music learning theory according to E. Gordon. The latter approach to music education is based on listening to and experiencing a repertoire that is as varied as possible and thus offers good opportunities to incorporate different musical styles and folk music traditions into this work. Participants gain their qualifications by working in tandem with nursery teachers, who can also acquire higher musical qualifications for their work in nurseries as part of the training.

Through the practical projects in tandem and attending seminars together, educators and musicians or music teachers learn from and with each other in order to benefit from each other's knowledge. In addition to building blocks of audiation-based music learning, subjects of elementary music practice and music and movement, the seminars also cover voice training (in groups and individually), early education and the basics of applied music theory. The seminars are partly face-to-face and partly distance learning. In addition, the tandem assignments in the daycare centers are accompanied by HfMT supervisors on site or digitally in order to ensure the best possible supervision of the music education internships in the daycare centers.

In the 2019/20 round, which started in August 2019, this was initially implemented in daycare centers in northern Germany in cooperation with FRÖBEL Bildung und Erziehung gGmbH. Despite the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, 11 participants in this cohort were able to complete the measure by fall 2020. EMI was then opened up to daycare centers in other regions of Germany. Daycare centers and music teachers from Berlin, Darmstadt, Essen, Cologne, Lübeck and the greater Hamburg area are involved nationwide.

This video offers a brief insight into the project.