La incorporación de las preferencias musicales de los estudiantes como aproximación a una educación crítica. Análisis curricular y desarrollo didáctico

One of the purposes of formal education is for students to acquire civic and democratic competence that allows them to develop as critical citizens in addition to achieving adequate academic training. From this perspective, the recognition of their cultural identities, their participation in curricular design and the construction of critical ethics-based thinking are distinctive educational dimensions. In this regard, the objective of this thesis is to contribute to the development of a critical approach in primary music education by using a musical repertoire related to the students’ musical identities that allows them to reflect on contemporary social issues. The study focuses on the 5th and 6th grades of primary education in the province of Valencia. To achieve the objective, a 2-phase research design including curricular analysis and didactic development was adopted. In the first phase, the narrative review around issues such as the conceptualization of critical music education or the contributions of the new musicology and ethnomusicology has been combined with systematic reviews related to each of the empirical works. Thus, the state of the art of the analysis of the official curriculum in primary music education (n=49), the study of school manuals in music education (n=74), the beliefs of primary music education teachers (n=112) and the educational use of urban popular music (n=159), were elaborated. In the second phase, the aim was to determine the degree of representation of the students’ musical preferences in educational policies, textbooks and teaching practices. This question expanded into studying the repertoire used at these three curricular levels, its evolution in the first two levels during the current Spanish democratic period, and any possible relationship between the third level and the teachers’ beliefs on music and music education. In this phase, content analysis was used to study the local policies (n = 3) and the most commonly used textbooks (n = 31) in addition to a questionnaire to obtain information on the music teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices (n = 399). The third phase investigated the teaching possibilities and difficulties of a critical educational approach that incorporates the students’ musical preferences. In this case, a two-cycle action-research process was implemented (n = 91). Among the results found, it was observed that students’ musical preferences were not represented at any of the three curricular levels analyzed (official, edited and taught). Instead, the academic repertoire, particularly the classical-romantic one, predominated together with folk-traditional music, with a nationalist or local identity treatment. On the other hand, when implementing the action-research process, the findings included increased student motivation and participation, the development of critical thinking with an ethical basis linked to some contemporary social problems, the practice of democratic decision-making, and the possibility of recognizing the students’ musical identities. For all these reasons, the use of this type of methodology is recommended as a way of implementing democratic education during the last years of primary education.