Music teachers' attitudes, classroom environments, and music activities in multicultural music education

Multicultural education has been defined as a movement that values diversity and educational equity for ethnically diverse, exceptional, and low socioeconomic status students. Its main purpose is to develop the ability to recognize and prize diversity and to encourage positive and productive interactions among people of all cultures.;Music is a very powerful approach to multicultural education, for it is through the arts that people of the world share and transmit their cultures. Music teachers are accountable for providing music education for all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, or culture. Music teachers must therefore have an understanding of multicultural education and what teaching from a multicultural perspective entails. The instruction and study of music from a multicultural perspective involves performing, listening to, and experiencing the music of many different racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural groups.;The attitudes and perceptions of music teachers concerning multicultural education are significant because these attitudes are manifested in the music teachers' teaching strategies, the lesson activities planned by the teacher, and the music classroom environment. This study examined music teachers' attitudes toward multicultural education and investigated the impact of those attitudes upon the music classroom environment, music activities, and teaching strategies.;Thirty elementary and middle school teachers in two suburban and one urban school district in Ohio were surveyed to sample their attitudes, philosophies, and level of comfort with diversity and multicultural education. Ten of the 30 surveyed teachers were also interviewed to gain more in-depth information concerning attitudes toward multicultural education.;Most teachers, regardless of the district, believed that multicultural education is important to the education of the elementary school child and that multicultural education is essential for all children, regardless of ethnicity. Teachers also considered music to be a manner of cultural expression for all cultures and that the ethnicity of the child should not be a prerequisite for an introduction to the abundant diversity of the world's music. Teachers did not believe that multicultural education was about minority people, neither did they believe that Afrocentric education and multicultural education were synonymous.;Although all teachers appeared to believe that multicultural education was good and beneficial to all children, there was inconsistency in the definition of multicultural education, the most important goals of multicultural education, and uncertainty in how multicultural music education should be approached.