The “Musica Viva” intergenerational program content is identified with an ecological-community orientation on “circles” that surround the child, who lives in various environments that are mutually interdependent in a system of contexts, processes and events. The child’s development is influenced by the quality of reciprocal relationships between the physical, social, emotional, and cultural environments in which he or she grows up (Darling, 2007).
For most children, the transition from home to kindergarten is the first and major ecological transition in their educational life. Since kindergarten is the first educational setting, children commute between the two cultural settings, operating as agents in the transition from home to kindergarten (Lam & Pollard, 2006).
The Bronfenbrenner ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) lays stress on the quality and context of the child’s surroundings. The chance for complexity appears as the child’s physical and cognitive structures grow and mature (Paquette & Ryan, 2001). According to Bronfenbrenner, the different circles of the environment of a person’s active interrelations influence development and socialization. This includes three significant assumptions: 1) the person is an active player, exerting influence on his/her environment; 2) the environment is compelling the person to adapt to its conditions and restrictions; and 3) the environment is understood to consist of different size entities that are placed one inside another, of their reciprocal relationships, and of micro-, meso-, exo- and macrosystems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).
The first circle, the microsystem, represents “the complex of relations between the child and environment in an immediate setting containing that child” (home, kindergarten) and involving direct face-to-face interactions with people who are influential in his or her life. The second circle, the mesosystem, is a system of microsystems. Paquette and Ryan (2001) define the mesosystem by stating that this layer produces the connections between the child’s various microsystems, or connections between the child´s teacher and the parents or the child’s neighborhood.
The exosystem encompasses the linkage and processes taking place between two or more settings, at least one of which does not ordinarily contain the developing person, but in which events occur, that influence processes within the immediate settings that do contain that person. An example for a child would be the relation between the home and the parent’s workplace; for a parent, the relations between the school and the neighborhood group (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).
The macrosystem is the sociocultural context, with particular reference to opportunity structures, values, and patterns of social and economic interchange that are embedded in each of these systems. The last circle in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory is that of the chronosystem, concerning the development in time of the external systems. The chronosystem models can cover
either a brief or longer period of time in which any system includes roles and rules that can have a strong influence on life (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).
All the circles described in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory are expressed in structural levels of the “Musica Viva” program’s intergenerational encounter. The interaction between the inter-generational circles and the broader circles is measured also according to the influenced of variables along a temporal axis, through which may be studied the extent of the program’s influence on the two generations participating during its two years.
Lev Vygotsky and Paulo Freire: Learning from others, learning in a social context and living well together
For the basis of these two theorists’ dialectical thinking, essentially the epistemological-philosophical source is associated with the concept of education as political-ethical praxis, liberating and instigating change. The dialectical praxis is influenced by Marxism that challenges paradigms: challenges theses, challenges antitheses — alternative paradigms — and brings about a synthesis based on change.
Vygotsky, influenced by the socialism of post-Revolutionary, early Soviet Russia, assembled a synthesis between the field of psychology and society, an innovative synthesis for those times. In his perception, every human phenomenon, all human behavior, is learned in a process of continual change and situated in the social matrix. The individual, society, culture, and of course education, are objects examined as dialectical processes, in a state of continual change.
This project was inspired by some basic components of a literacy method in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, such as the decodification by a “cultural circle” under the self-effacing stimulus of a mediator-coordinator who is not a “teacher” in the conventional sense, but who has become an educator-educatee in dialogue with educatee-educators too often treated by formal education as passive recipients of knowledge (Lichtensztajn, 2013). The ethical fundamentals of cooperation, synchronization, precision, reciprocal consideration, attending, discipline, and respect – all these are social-ethical fundamentals, personal and interpersonal, upon which to base the making of vocal or instrumental music in chamber ensembles. We are convinced that these fundamentals leave a deep impression on the listeners and influence their construction of “I-with-myself” and “I-with-the-society”.
Vygotsky and Freire relate to the individual as a subject connected to society and within history, and who has the power to exert influence toward those previously mentioned changes, on condition that in the educational process the subject’s socio-biographical and historical contexts are identified. Lev Vygotsky brought to our awareness the question of society’s role in the individual’s cognitive development, as for many years the prevailing opinion held that the development of cognitive abilities was dependent on physiological maturity (the theories of developmental stages).
However, with time this opinion was regarded as questionable, and it was clear that physiological maturity alone is insufficient to explain the development of cognition and consciousness.
Vygotsky saw development as a process influenced by the social surroundings of the human being in addition to variables of maturity. He directed our attention to the connection between the individual and the social environment. True, his theory has no means to differentiate between the individual’s consciousness and the sociocultural happenings; the one is the other, in the sense of
“the trees are the forest”. The socialization of cognition reflects a strong interest in the acquisition of values, responsibility, friendliness and prosocial behavior (Goodnow, 1999). At the same time,
the study of cognitive development reflects an interest in skills, strategies and capacities that unfold with age. Some scholars see cognitive growth as a result of social dialogue and conflict, others see cognitive skills as emerging out of cultural practices, or resulting from an expert’s transferring skills to a novice learner (based on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development;
Goodnow, 1999). But the acquisition of cognitive values should be considered by linking the areas of knowledge and skills with social identity.
On this basis, the Vygotskian and the Freirean approaches of negotiations and dialogue toward a transfer of skills or a shared task, for example the “Musica Viva” concerts scenarium and repertoire, and the Bronfenbrenner ecological theory, complement the theoretical framework of the
“Musica Viva” intergenerational encounters.
Summary
“It has to do with the spirit of dialogue in a cultural action, which is to say: experience that is transforming” (Freire & Shor, 1987, p. 12).
Based on the development of higher-level mental functions through social relations, learning as an activity is context-dependent in order to discover the meaning of every learned phenomenon (Vygotsky, 1966). The music and verbal dialogue created in the “Musica Viva” intergenerational encounter invokes this same context for discovering the meaning of every learned phenomenon.
In the egalitarian dialogue of “Musica Viva”, the responsibility for constructing the body of knowledge is distributed equally. However, we must not view the nature of the dialogue as a tactic we employ in order to make our pupils into our friends. Such an approach turns the dialogue into a manipulative technique rather than a means of illumination (Freire & Shor, 1987). Critical pedagogy exists on the basis of shared responsibility in the learning process, with the mutual object of learning being placed on the table shared by two subjects studying it, preparing for it, and developing it.
On the basis of a shared platform of the body of knowledge —or of the body of information, in this case: the music repertoire — the “Musica Viva” “big siblings” prepare for performing the repertoire by practicing and rehearsing, and the young listeners prepare for the concert by participating in class meetings in which they study the compositions that will be on the program.
For as much as the preparation of the two subjects taking part in the intergenerational concert scene demonstrates responsibility taken in that preparation process, so will the critiqued dialogue be enhanced, a dialogue unspoken and aloud, a dialogue extended on a shared platform of the bodies of knowledge and sensory experience. This is the essence of equality, when the body of information is placed on the table between the two generations (the performers as interpreter and the listeners as interpreter). At the start there is a move made that expresses the gnoseology and intellectual experience of the “big sibling” that makes possible the selection of repertoire, preparing it, presenting and performing it.
This intergenerational dialogue permits a historical and cultural basis for constructing a body of knowledge in a critical attitude. This kind of music dialogue leads a process in which the individual participates in constructing the critical ideology, forming an impression during the concert and verbal expression at its conclusion, on matters of repertoire, the composer, the performer, taste, judgment, degree of enjoyment, and degree of emotional response.
References
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