Second international conference CALT: "Creative Approaches to Learning and Teaching"

Transdisciplinary Interpretations of Historical School Songbooks: Creative Music Activities with Digitised Heritage 

The aim of this poster is to present proposals for transdisciplinary music activities based on digitised historical school songbooks from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing on a selection of Croatian songbooks and melodies preserved in digital collections, the project develops tasks designed for students in initial teacher education and arts education programmes, with the aim of using their own creative experience as a basis for designing activities for children. The proposed activities are grounded in an analytical review of selected historical school songbooks and in contemporary theoretical perspectives on creative and transdisciplinary teacher education.

The poster outlines several types of activities: creative language-based interpretations (adapting and extending song lyrics, writing short stories and poetic miniatures inspired by historical tunes), music-and-history activities (linking songbooks to the wider socio-historical context, everyday life and school culture), and the design of a contemporary class “songbook” that combines musical notation, lyrics, drawings and digital elements (e.g. QR codes linking to students’ performances or short multimedia presentations). The examples are developed in the context of higher education, but are intended to be transferable to primary and secondary school settings, especially within integrated project-based activities.

Special attention is given to the potential of these activities for developing student teachers’ creativity, aesthetic sensitivity, language and historical awareness, as well as their didactic competences, alongside opportunities for transdisciplinary collaboration between music, language, history and visual art educators. The final part of the poster discusses how the mode of retro-digitisation (high-quality facsimiles, machine-readable musical notation, searchable text and pedagogically meaningful metadata) can support the planning and implementation of such projects in university courses and in school practice.

Keywords: digitised school songbooks; creative music activities; language and historical context; creative teacher education; music heritage; transdisciplinarity