Listening to music as a teaching area in Croatian primary schools: the teacher's perspective

Since the school year 2006/2007 in Croatian primary schools the music teaching programme has been an open model. According to the open model, listening to music is the default activity, while other activities are selected by the teachers. The teaching area of listening to music in pupils develops the ability of auditory concentration, hearing specifications, analysis of the listened work and establishes basic aesthetic criteria for evaluating music. This paper presents research findings aimed at examining what are teachers’ attitudes about listening to music as an area of music teaching. The results show that listening to music is very often carried out in music teaching and that the teachers’ competences for conducting these activities are very good. Teachers are aware of the importance of listening to music as a teaching area, although in their view it is the least attractive to the target group, which are the pupils. This is due to pupils’ disinterest in listening to music. Because teachers are not provided with sufficient content in the field of music as part of professional development and lifelong learning, teachers are unable to enhance their competencies further and extend their methodological knowledge in the field of music listening.