THE FIRST METHODOLOGICAL TRAINING OF MUSIC COLLEGE TEACHERS

November 6-8 2020, Lviv

The First Methodological Training of Music College Teachers within the framework of the international project “Folk Music Education for Future Generations” (Folk_ME) under the Erasmus + program took place on November 6-8 at the Academy of Music. Four teachers (Svitlana Gleba (Uzhhorod), Vira Rybak (Rivne), Roman Skobalo (Lviv) and Svitlana Tsymbalyuk (Khmelnytsky)) from different cities of Western Ukraine took part in the training. The event was organized by the Laboratory of Music Ethnology and the Department of Music Folkloristics under coordination of the Laboratory Chairman Yuri Rybak.

First of all, during the training each teacher reported to the audience about the specifics of teaching music folklore in their colleges, shared relevant experiences and talked about the main problems in this process. Yu. Rybak then presented the main achievements of two related projects – “Polyphony” and “Folk_ME”. The “Folk_ME” project has been specially developed by the Hungarian team for secondary schools.

Online speech of the authoritative teacher and ethnomusicologist Professor Bohdan Lukanyuk was very informative for the participants. He presented his own concept of teaching ethnomusicological disciplines at different educational levels – school, college, university. At the same time he mentioned a number of very important problems of the modern science and pedagogy without the solution of which one cannot expect any improvement in the process of musical folklore education.

Researcher Larysa Lukashenko was the next one in the program who discussed the educational systems of Finland and Hungary (two partner countries in the project) namely the role and place of folk music in the process of teaching and educating of young people.

Another online discussion took place from Hungary, where the main project manager Miklos Both explained the main provisions of the joint work on including digital technologies in the educational process.

Finally, at the end of the first working day, Yu. Rybak and L. Lukashenko demonstrated a test version of the Folk_ME website designed for the most complete digital presentation of several folk music samples (currently only from Hungary and Ukraine) with the options to watch, listen and study them with various devices (computers, smartphones, tablets).

On the second day, Lina Dobrianska, a senior researcher of the Laboratory, introduced the teachers to the structure, achievements and opportunities of the Archive of Laboratory of Music Ethnology. In this largest folk music archive of Western Ukraine one can use simple operations in the electronic database in order to find the necessary source information from different parts of the region for the use in the pedagogical process or in scientific work, as well as in various forms of popularization of musical folklore.

The training ended, as it turned out, with a very productive singing workshop, during which all participants, organizers, and teachers were testing the electronic resource of the Folk_ME. Many questions and constructive remarks were collected, which intended to improve the characteristics of the site and thus contribute to the successful implementation of Folk_ME project.

At the end of the meeting teachers received certificates of participants of the training, also they got valuable guidelines for the nearest future and, most notably, – useful scientific and methodological experience for the digital implementation of folk music information in the educational process.