Toward an Interdisciplinary Learning Approach to Foster Students’ Outlook of Universally Connected World: Starting from Music and Beyond

Music never exists for its own sake. On the contrary, it connects to the universe including Nature, society, and human beings. Music originated from people’s labor and life and has always reflected human conditions related to temporal and spatial elements. It is our belief that music can function as an educatively meaningful window through which the students explore the world with wider views and deeper thoughts. Based on these beliefs, we postulate an interdisciplinary approach starting from music and beyond it to foster students’ outlook of universally connected world. A conceptual model is conceived by the authors which describes the students’ hierarchical progress possibly gained from purposefully designed learning in an interdisciplinary manner. To further rationalize the feasibility for such a learning approach, we propose a down-to-earth way of thinking that music relates to language in lyrics of songs, bears geo-historical footprints because it originates temporally and spatially. From these clues, a common attribute can be found to thread the whole learning process involving several subjects integrated as a whole, rather than the school subjects learned separately. Given an exemplary project for the students to explore two types of folk songs in the North and the South of China, they are led to find a common attribute focusing on isomorphic direction of move between dialect tones of lyrics and tunes of folk songs, discover the inner connections hidden beneath the surface of present phenomena, and dwell on the significant insights which enable them to act like a thinker. The interdisciplinary learning illustrated as a case project here purports to prompt our colleagues that the educative values of music are far from fully recognized and these values should function to a full degree for the young generation to emancipate the constraints of thinking and develop creative minds.