Teaching Chinese traditional music in Hong Kong: Some pedagogical issues

Music teachers in Hong Kong schools are required to pay more attention to various forms of Chinese music after the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. This new emphasis gave rise to an additional dimension in the music curriculum as well as many teaching problems. For instance, teaching materials on Chinese music are found to be inadequate. Teachers of Chinese music needed more musical experience and training. Teaching methods of proven effectiveness in this area are also in short supply. And then there is the problem of over learning, as students are provided with considerable amount of information on both Western and Chinese music. A study was undertaken to develop an effective strategy to teach traditional Chinese music in the context of Hong Kong secondary schools. Experiments were designed to test three identified variables that are likely to affect the results of classroom teaching. The variables are: 1. teaching sequence, 2. proportion between information and direct music experience, and 3. degree of framing. However, the findings of the experiments are inconclusive. As a demonstration of the approaches to this study, the experiment involving two different teaching sequences is described in this paper. Copyright © 2003 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.