RESEARCH EDUCATION ON UMUADA MUSIC TRADITION: TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE MUSIC EDUCATION

Abstract

Scholarship on classroom music education is huge and has extensively been criticized amongst other things is its divorce from Nigerian music culture. Huge studies as well abound on umuada as gender studies but there is paucity of literature on their musical arts as an indigenous music pinpointed on their engagement with environmental humanity. The contention of this thesis therefore, is for research education where the school music education is complemented with the indigenous music of a community towards preserving our indigenous music tradition and making our school music education Nigeria culture relevance.The research adopted a qualitative research design. The population of the study was a consensus population of the 300 level NCE music students (3) and (10) music lecturers of Alvan Ikoku Federal University of Education, Owerri, Imo State. We purposively sampled ten members of the umuada. We used participant observation, interviews, musical and textual analysis in the context of ecomusicology. Umuada whose musical works represents the dominant trends on environmental humanities: be nnam kam obodo oyibo, kchikwe, onye aworo ala and others were reviewed. Eclectic theory guided the study. Arising from the finding, we argue that research-education towards connecting the community and the school is sine qua non to having a inclusive music education in the contemporary. We recommend a music tradition where our indigenous music forms the content of school music instruction thereby preserving our cultural heritage to print and preserve our identity in the global confluence.