Sharing Songs

Abstract

Teaching songs from a wide variety of cultures is commonplace in music classrooms around the United States. Students gain understanding of and insight into a wide range of cultures by singing their songs and listening to their music. The Afghan Children’s Songbook Project is a project focused on preserving and returning traditional songs, eradicated by the Taliban. This project opened up an entirely new level of awareness about the importance of not only learning traditional songs, but also the role they play in teaching tolerance and cultural understanding for a group of third to fifth graders in Connecticut. By adopting the Songbook Project as a service learning project, the students learned firsthand about bias and prejudice, but through many meaningful experiences that integrated not only music but all the arts, the students shifted their initial beliefs and gained true cultural understanding of Afghans.