Sub-Theme 3.1 Intercultural Understanding

The following attachments are the mid-term reports submitted by collaborators and sub-theme leaders for sub-theme 3.1:

This project is an initiative by Dr. Lily Chen-Hafteck (Kean University, Co-leader of 3.1 sub-theme) which involves school children from ages 9-12 in Brazil, Canada, China and Kenya learning the cultural information and traditional songs of these four countries to see if learning these has any influence on children's attitudes towards other children from these countries.  There are currently eight schools involved (two from each country) in this project.  

The full set of photos may be found in the Digital Library

Documents

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From the AIRS Milestone Document

Led by Godfrey Baldacchino (UPEI) and Lily Chen-Hafteck (Kean University), researchers will examine singing in the promotion of cross-cultural understanding and the reduction of prejudice through four approaches: (1) extension of Felix Neto’s original quantitative studies in Portugal of a 3-month singing intervention, with the aim of replication and determining long term influences (2) in a more qualitative study within Canada, China, Kenya, and Brazil, providing children in their classroom with four two-to-three-week music-cultural modules from each of the four countries, and tracking the attitudes to these cultures in the short and long term in a multi-year 4-country- site experimental design (3) studying resilience and fragility of songs and singing styles within minority cultures particularly in Islands where several researchers have expertise and connections (4) studying the origin and maintenance of multicultural choirs such as Common Thread as the basis for developing new choirs beginning with such a choir at UPEI.

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