The Arts (Music, Arts&Crafts and Drama) as a procedure for learning pre-school content: Grupo Edebé Project

Abstract

There is nothing as amazing and fascinating as children learning process. Between 0 and 6 years old, a child brain develops in a way that will never be repeated. At this age, children are eager to discover and they have great potential of active and affective life. Because of this, their learning capacity in this period is incalculable. (Jordan-Decarbo y Nelson, 2002; Wild, 1999). Pre-school Education is a unique and special stage, with self identity, which aims are: attending children as a whole, motivate them to learn, give them an affective and stable environment in which they can grow up and get to be balanced and confident people and in which they can relate to others, learn, enjoy and be happy. Arts, Music, Visual Arts and Drama (Gardner, 1994) can provide a framework of special, even unique, personal expression.With the aim of introducing qualitative improvements in the education of children and to ensure their emotional wellbeing, and having noticed that teachers had important needs and concerns as regards to diversity in their student groups, we developed a program based on the detection of needs and concerns explained by professionals in education. This program of Grupo edebé, object of our research, is a multicultural, interdisciplinary and globalizing project the aims of which are: developing children's talent and personality, keeping their imagination and creativity and using these as a learning resource, promoting reasoning, favouring expression and communication, providing children with the tools to manage their emotions, and especially, introducing Arts as a procedure to increase learning. We wanted to start the research by studying the impact (Brice, 2003) that this last point had on the learning of five-year-old children schooled in multicultural environments. Therefore, the main goal of the research was the assessment of the implementation of a child education programme attending to diversity in a population of five-year-old children, specifically in the practice of procedures based on the use of Arts (music, arts and crafts and theatre) as a vehicle or procedure for learning contents in Pre-school stage. Because children emotional welfare was a subject of our concern, and bearing in mind that the affective aspects are of vital importance for learning and child development (Parke and Gauvain, 2009), Grupo Edebé has also evaluated the starting, evolving and final impact in five-year-old children given that they finish Pre-school education at that age.