Introduction
In 2021, three small adult education providers joined on a KA210 Erasmus+ small-scale partnerships in adult education.
The Persian term Ham’avaaz has two meanings: while it refers to someone who sings with another person, it may also indicate that two people agree on an issue. We have chosen this double signification to title a transcultural music project, which aims to expand the creativity and self-efficacy of basic education participants and language learners, assuring their active participation through linguistic and music pedagogical methods.
Main objetives
The main objectives of the project can be defined as follows:
- To achieve an appreciative learning environment in the field of basic education and language learning for educationally disadvantaged adults who have frequently faced discriminatory and negative learning experiences, through an innovative combination of music and language learning.
- To strengthen learning competences and memory strategies for participants with low literacy competences, and/or are facing concentration problems caused by experiences of violence, discrimination and trauma.
- To foster social competences, such as developing participants’ articulation skills with regard to their feelings, opinions, expressions and dialogues. At the same time, the applied methodologies aim at enhancing learners’ ability to listen more actively, processing and analyzing information in a social context.
- To help participants recognize, acknowledge and use their potential resources and capabilities, such as the ability of using one’s own voice, sense of rhythm, or multilingualism, which they may be (partially) unaware of. It encourages learners’ self-awareness by activating manifold ressources.
5.To establish intercultural and social dialogue, by using a variety of different linguistic and cultural elements, making comparisons, finding similarities, combining and reforming them into a new output.
Opening up a polyphonic space, Ham’avaaz wishes to create a safe learning environment that underlines transcultural relations. Through the development and transfer of a methodology on how to implement and benefit from music pedagogy in basic education and language learning classrooms, the project aims at improving the competences of adult educators.
By designing practice-based exercises and didactic suggestions, it expands learning opportunities tailored to the needs of basic education participants.
Conclusion
The project is designed to involve adult learners and their musical and linguistic heritage during its first steps by creating the learning and teaching material together with the participants, according to their interests and needs. By working on a wide-ranging variety of melodies, rhythms and multilingual lyrics, we aim to deepen our basic education work with an artistic point of view in order to bring more creativity to our classrooms and engage various cultural (music) heritages in dialogue with each other. Being able to draw from a heterogeneity of cultural and music backgrounds (including Spanish, Catalan and Austrian), as well as languages and migration trajectories, is also a strong motivation for carrying out the project transnationally.
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