Challenges of cultural diversity and a multicultural approach to teaching music artPaper
Slovenia, like many other European countries, is becoming increasingly multicultural. We are facing increasing cultural diversity at all levels of schooling, especially in kindergartens and primary schools. For several decades now, mostly immigrants from the countries of former Yugoslavia have been immigrating to us. Children of immigrant parents thus face difficulties, not only in understanding the Slovene language, but also in accepting Slovene culture. Namely, these children within their families learn folk songs, fairy tales, tales and adopt their family habits, culture and environment from which their parents come. Also, these parents use their own mother tongue with their children, which is most usually not the language of the environment. When entering school these children are expected to have some knowledge, such as being familiar with national holiday, which children from culturally different background cannot have as their families do not celebrate these particular holidays at home. If the teacher ignores this, these children may experience difficulties and feeling of exclusion. It is not unusual that the children who come from other cultural background often experience difficulties with social integration.
As a teacher of music art in an elementary school where the number of immigrant children is higher, I noticed - when handling learning material - that these pupils have difficulty identifying their music culture with Western European. For this reason, I also include the goals of the multicultural approach in the curriculum more intensively. The purpose of this paper is to present the goals of a multicultural approach and to present practical examples of including these goals in the curriculum.