Unit of Educational Methods

• Choir Con­duct­ing, Music Edu­ca­tion, Church Music, Rhyth­mics and Dance
  • Chair of Choir Conducting
  • Chair of Music Education
  • Interuni­ver­si­tary Chair of Aural Training
  • Inter­de­part­men­tal Unit of Com­pre­hen­sive Piano Studies
  • Unit of Edu­ca­tional Methods
  • Unit of Church Music
  • Unit of Dance
  • Inter­de­part­men­tal Ped­a­gog­i­cal Course

Act­ing Head: Pro­fes­sor Mag­dalena Stępień

The Emil Jaques-Dalcroze Team
The Zoltán Kodály Team
The Carl Orff Team

Unit of Edu­ca­tional Meth­ods is respon­si­ble for research and teach­ing relat­ing to a vari­ety of con­cep­tions, meth­ods and sys­tems of musi­cal edu­ca­tion in both music schools and gen­eral edu­ca­tion facil­i­ties. Since the Unit’s pri­mary inter­ests revolve around the approaches to musi­cal edu­ca­tion devel­oped by three great musi­cians and ped­a­gogues, Emil Jaques-Dalcroze, Zoltán Kodály and Carl Orff, it is divided into three dif­fer­ent teams named after these pio­neers.
Unit of Edu­ca­tional Meth­ods organ­ises sem­i­nars, courses, work­shops and other events for stu­dents and teach­ers. Their pur­pose is to pop­u­larise the ideas of Dal­croze, Kodály and Orff and to place the con­cep­tions each of them devel­oped within a state-of-the-art sys­tem of musi­cal and gen­eral edu­ca­tion. Unit of Edu­ca­tional Meth­ods also publishes.

The Emil Jaques-Dalcroze Team

This team is con­tin­u­ing the activ­i­ties of the Emil Jaques-Dalcroze School which was estab­lished within the Depart­ment of Choir Con­duct­ing, Music Edu­ca­tion, Church Music, Rhyth­mics and Dance in Octo­ber 2003 on the motion put for­ward by Pro­fes­sor Ryszard Zimak, Rec­tor of the Fry­deryk Chopin Acad­emy of Music.
The Dal­croze tra­di­tion has been fol­lowed at the War­saw acad­emy since 1974 when the Exper­i­men­tal Rhyth­mics Classes began to oper­ate within the Insti­tute of Musi­cal Ped­a­gogy.
As of 1983 the Dal­croze method has func­tioned as a didac­tic spe­cial­i­sa­tion (eurhyth­mics course) at the Department.

Pri­mary objectives:

• super­vi­sion and devel­op­ment of the knowl­edge base for the Eurhyth­mics course at the FCUM (work on a state-of-the-art model of instruction)
• organ­i­sa­tion of work­shops pro­vid­ing the ground­work for research and artis­tic endeavours
• prepa­ra­tion of pub­li­ca­tions pre­sent­ing and pop­u­lar­is­ing Dalcroze’s ideas and FCUM achieve­ments in this area
• devel­op­ment, organ­i­sa­tion and con­duct­ing of courses, sem­i­nars, lec­tures and work­shops for teach­ers spe­cial­is­ing in eurhythmics
• exchange of infor­ma­tion between ped­a­gogues using the Dal­croze method.

Activ­i­ties:

• Emil Jaques-Dalcroze — Music in Move­ment
  Exhi­bi­tion and National Sem­i­nar for Teach­ers of Eurhyth­mics, 27–29 Octo­ber 2006

A book on the his­tory of Ryth­mics at the Uni­ver­sity (ed. Alicja Gronau-Osińska) was pub­lished to cel­e­brate the twen­ti­eth anniver­sary of the Rhyth­mics course. Part II of this book, edited by Mag­dalena Stępień, is also planned.
Edi­to­r­ial work is also under way for the pub­lish­ing of mas­ters’ the­sis (whole works or frag­ments) writ­ten dur­ing the 20-year his­tory of the Rhyth­mics course. These the­ses are a valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to the devel­op­ment of this dis­ci­pline.
Any­one who is in pos­ses­sion of mate­r­ial which could enrich this pub­li­ca­tion is kindly requested to con­tact Mag­dalena Stępień, tel.: (22) 827 72 41 ext. 272 (Depart­ment 5).

The Zoltán Kodály Team

e-mail: e-mail: kodaly@chopin.edu.pl

The 11^th Polish-Hungarian Kodály Sem­i­nar (15–28 August 2004)
The 12^th Polish-Hungarian Kodály Sem­i­nar (13–26 August 2006)

I. Objec­tive and pro­file.This group’s objec­tive is to prop­a­gate Zoltán Kodály’s ideas relat­ing to musi­cal edu­ca­tion. It pays par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to: singing and live music-making as the foun­da­tion of music instruc­tion, the integrity of musi­cal instruc­tion (com­bin­ing solfeg­gio with the his­tory of music, styles and cul­ture, analy­sis of musi­cal works) and ver­nac­u­lar folk­lore as the foun­da­tion of edu­ca­tion (it helps to encour­age musi­cal com­pe­tency sim­i­larly to lin­guis­tic com­pe­tency — Kodály: one should first learn one’s own musi­cal lan­guage before pro­ceed­ing to learn for­eign lan­guages — and to gain com­pre­hen­sion of pro­fes­sional music). The pur­pose of music mak­ing is to con­sol­i­date the cog­ni­tion and com­pre­hen­sion of music; this goal is achieved in early musi­cal edu­ca­tion through so-called rel­a­tive solfeg­gio, a method of tonal ear train­ing.

II. Loca­tion. Another of this team’s objec­tives is to con­sol­i­date and con­tinue the work of the Zoltán Kodály School which ceased to oper­ate in Octo­ber 2006. The Team is cur­rently part of the Unit of Edu­ca­tional Meth­ods. It co-operates with The Pol­ish Zoltán Kodály Soci­ety (Sto­warzysze­nie im. Zoltána Kodálya w Polsce) and mem­bers of the Kodály Cir­cle and with teach­ers who teach at music schools and gen­eral schools, choir­mas­ters and Kodály fol­low­ers abroad. Another impor­tant form of activ­ity is co-operation with the Kodály Insti­tute in Kecskemét and the Inter­na­tional Kodály Soci­ety.

III. Activ­i­ties. The Kodály Team has two main lines of activ­ity: 1 — music edu­ca­tion and 2 — research and pop­u­lar­i­sa­tion.
Ad 1. As far as music edu­ca­tion is con­cerned, the team gives lec­tures and work­shops at the AMFC devoted to famil­iar­ity with Kodály’s ideas and folk­lore in gen­eral. As of 1983 it has also organ­ised Polish-Hungarian Kodály Sem­i­nars (in co-operation with the Acad­emy of Music in Katow­ice). These are pro­fes­sional advance­ment courses. The 12th Sem­i­nar took place in 2006 (cf.: Report). The Team also offers infor­ma­tion and con­sult­ing. For exam­ple, it organ­ised exper­i­men­tal music lessons in gen­eral schools in the nineteen-eighties and nineties (Maria Czar­necka in school no. 320 in 1995–7 and J. K. Dadak-Kozicka in school no. 158). The pur­pose of these exper­i­men­tal lessons was to develop the Pol­ish adap­ta­tion of the Kodály Method (Dominika Lenska is cur­rently con­duct­ing Kodály classes at school no. 1 in Katow­ice).
Ad 2. The research and pop­u­lar­i­sa­tion activ­i­ties involve research on the Kodály method and its for­eign adap­ta­tions (espe­cially the Pol­ish one). Among the out­comes of this work were sev­eral con­fer­ences (some of them held at the FCUM), par­tic­i­pa­tion in sym­posia organ­ised by the Inter­na­tional Kodály Soci­ety and a num­ber of pub­li­ca­tions.

IV. Plans for the future. The Team plans to con­tinue its edu­ca­tional and research activ­i­ties in co-operation with the Kodály Insti­tute in Kesck­émet.

V. Achieve­ments
The fol­low­ing works have been pub­lished to date:

• prin­ci­pal works on the Kodály Method (in WSiP):
  • Zoltán Kodály i jego ped­a­gogika muzy­czna [Zoltán Kodály and his musi­cal ped­a­gogy]. M. Jankowska & W. Jankowski (ed.), 1990;
  • J. K. Dadak-Kozicka Śpiewa­jże mi jako umiesz [Sing as you can]. A man­ual for stu­dents and teach­ers, 1992;
• Text­books for grades I-III and teach­ers’ method­ics man­u­als (in STENTOR)
  • M. Czar­necka & A. Waluga Rozśpiewana szkoła [The singing school] (1995–97);
• AMFC Press
  • Zoltán Kodály O edukacji muzy­cznej — pisma wybrane [On musi­cal edu­ca­tion — selected writ­ings]. M. Jankowska (ed.) 2002. In co-operation with the Hun­gar­ian Cul­tural Insti­tute in Warsaw;
  • pro­ceed­ings of the Kodály con­fer­ences, includ­ing Inte­gru­jące wartości muzyki [The inte­grat­ing val­ues of music]. 2002;
  • works on Pol­ish adap­ta­tions and method­ics mate­r­ial (series: Ped­a­gogika muzy­czna Zoltána Kodálya. Mate­ri­ały źródłowe i opra­cow­a­nia [Zoltán Kodály’s musi­cal ped­a­gogy. Source mate­ri­als and elab­o­ra­tions]. M. Jankowska (ed.);
  • Ildikó Herboly-Kocsár Nauczanie poli­fonii, har­monii i form w szkole pod­sta­wowej [How to teach polyphony, har­mony and form in pri­mary school]. 2005;
• arti­cles in:
  • “The ISME Quarterly”,
  • “Ruch Muzy­czny”,
  • “Wychowanie Muzy­czne w Szkole” (no. 3, 2003, this whole issue was devoted to Kodály).

Par­tic­i­pa­tion in world Kodály sym­posia bore fruit in the form of arti­cles pub­lished in “The Bul­letin of the Inter­na­tional Kodály Society”.

The Carl Orff Team

This team is involved in the fol­low­ing forms of activity:

• organ­i­sa­tion of two-day sem­i­nars (in the form of work­shops or lec­tures) attended by a for­eign musi­cal edu­ca­tor who spe­cialises in the Carl Orff musi­cal edu­ca­tion sys­tem. These sem­i­nars are addressed to FCUM stu­dents and indi­vid­u­als (teach­ers and stu­dents) from other col­leges etc and take place once or twice a year.
• one-day con­tin­u­ous learn­ing courses organ­ised when pos­si­ble and led by Pol­ish musi­cal educators.

We encour­age every­body who teaches music to nurs­ery school chil­dren, at inte­grated teach­ing classes and in grades 4–6, as well as teach­ers from non-musical fields to attend these courses. They will have the oppor­tu­nity to improve their prac­ti­cal teach­ing skills — to intro­duce more vari­ety into the ways they teach music, to learn new songs, new forms of music and move­ment play, children’s, folk and his­tor­i­cal dances (Pol­ish and for­eign), to mas­ter the lead­er­ship of Orff groups, to use the Orff instru­men­tar­ium in class, and to dis­cover new sug­ges­tions for active lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal music. Cre­ative exer­cises for the encour­age­ment of cre­ative atti­tudes and multi-dimensional expres­sion are another very impor­tant part of these courses.