Abstract:

The article studies the problem of early music didactics applying the pattern of contrast of variation theory approaching it as a new phenomenon that emerges in the context of interpretative paradigm ideas.

The article analyses the child’s learning as a teacher-child interaction, their communicative encounters, which create conditions for a child to engage in educational activities, to act and think together with the teacher and other children as well as to build own knowledge. Communication becomes one of the most significant mechanisms of child’s self-directed learning (Magnusson and Pramling, 2016; Veraksa et al., 2016). With the help of targeted communication, a teacher introduces a child into a domain of certain phenomena and categories (concepts), encourages children to explore and get an in-depth understanding of them. All this allows transforming those phenomena and concepts into child’s knowledge (Pramling et al., 2019).

One of the most innovative approaches of modelling the learning process is grounded on variation theory (Marton, 2018, 2015), which enables a child to build own knowledge and develop abilities with the help of the pattern of contrast and other models. Using this approach of modelling the process of education, child’s learning is directed to the object of learning and its critical aspects and the pattern of contrast is applied helping a child to see, feel, understand, perceive, discern, discover and get a deep understanding of the differences in the qualities of the critical aspects of the chosen learning object (Ljung-Djärf, Wennas Brante and Holmqvist Olander, 2013; Marton, 2015; Zitkeviciene, 2018; Wallerstedt, 2011).

While conducting the empirical research, attempts were made to identify the ways of teacher communication with the child, which are grounded on the pattern of contrast of variation theory and target at facilitating the child’s penetration into the qualities of music sounds. The research disclosed two groups of ways of teacher communication that encourage children to listen to music: ways of teacher communication that promote children to feel, understand and discern the critical aspects of the learning object, i.e. pitch, duration, timbre of music sound, while listening to music (group one) and after it (group two). The revealed ways of teacher communication with children applying the pattern of contrast of variation theory are new and enrich didactics of early music education.

Keywords:

Variation theory, pattern of contrast, communicative teacher-child encounters, qualities of music sounds.