Musikdidaktik i förskolan & förskoleklass : En kvalitativ studie om hur musikämnet kan leda till barnens deltagande, lärande och språkutveckling i förskola och förskoleklass

The purpose of this thesis is to study the value of music in children’s lives and to find out if music activities/lessons can affect children’s learning and development in preschool and preschool class. We want to delve deeper into the definition of music based on different perspectives. The first one is the sociocultural perspective, with two of its most important concepts; mediation and the proximal development zone. This perspective indicates in our study that the role of music activities/lessons in participation, learning and language development takes the best place in meetings with others by developing children’s social life. The other perspective is based on the developmental pedagogical theory and the seven teaching strategies which were presented through this perspective. In this study we want to highlight the idea of using music in different activities. What is the main purpose of having music in the visited preschool and preschool class? How can music activities/lessons affect children’s participation, learning and language development in the visited preschool and preschool class? And what does the interviewed and observed teacher’s competence look like when it comes to music activities/lessons? To get more information to answer these questions different perspectives have been studied and analyzed in our theoretical part and linked to relevant literature that illuminate music from different points of view. We have also interviewed eight teachers, three preschool teachers, three preschool class teachers and two music teachers from different schools and highlighted the interviews in the results section. Through these interviews we got that the use of music as a tool is more common than using it as a subject and reasons for this we focused on in our analysis and discussion section. Not only through interviews, but also through our observations in those preschools and schools we got information which complemented our study and helped us to achieve a large part of our purpose of this thesis