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see Orff-Schulwerk workshops in Rome

CDM: a presentation

The CDM Centro Didattico Musicale (Centre for Music Didactics) is a music education agency in Rome, Italy, founded in 1993. It has been directed until 2020 by Valentina Iadeluca and Andrea Sangiorgio. It is presently directed by Giuliano Stacchetti, Marta Guercini and Marta Gilmore.

The CDM provides music education services in a variety of ways: It serves as a private music school for individual and group instrumental lessons. It implements music and dance projects in nursery and primary schools. The CDM has organised different kinds of projects in collaboration with other public and private institutions, in particular interventions in which music and movement are used as tools to promote social inclusion and well-being for disadvantaged children.

The CDM is also active in the field of teacher education. It realises an annual Orff-Schulwerk teacher education course in collaboration with Rome University Tor Vergata (120 hrs), and provides teacher education initiatives all over Italy. The CDM is increasingly building a network of international relationships and has recently become an ‘associated institution’ of the Orff-Schulwerk Forum Salzburg.

The mission of the CDM

  • To create a milieu where music and movement/dance are means of expression, communication, social aggregation, creativity, self-actualization, and holistic well-being.
  • To develop as a research centre, producing and disseminating new educational ideas, strategies and materials, in Italy as well as internationally.
  • To create a working environment which nurtures professional as well as human growth.
  • To be a cultural enterprise inspired by the highest standards.

Basic educational ideas

Our concept of music education

We are a group of music teachers who have been working for many years studying, researching and experimenting in the field of music education. 

Strongly influenced by the pedagogical concept of the Orff-Schulwerk, we see children as competent, able and naturally inclined to build their own identity. We believe that educating – and especially educating through music – means communicating with children and teenagers, to enhance their natural attitude towards learning, seeking, understanding and expanding their horizons. 

We think that teaching means finding a way to get into contact and developing an active collaboration with students. We aim to create such conditions so as to provide a meaningful experience for the students: exploring, practising, reflecting and comprehending music. We believe that motivation can be developed if students feel they are the protagonists of their own learning process, considered as persons who can think autonomously and unfold their personality.

Music and dance belong to the human being. They are means of self-expression and communication, a way to encounter others. Music and dance are body, thought, emotion, group, and culture. It is this multi-dimensionality that makes them such a powerful educational tool. Educating to and through music and dance means developing motor, perceptive, listening skills, attention and memory. It means strengthening analytic and synthetic skills, nurturing creativity and enhancing learning through the group. It means educating to the arts. 

Our approach to music and movement education is holistic, addressing the whole person and his/her specific needs, aptitudes, interests, wishes. We are professionals in the area of music education for children and adolescents. We also transmit to adults the same clarity, spontaneity and joy for music, letting everybody feel at ease, irrespective of age and initial skills.

The ultimate goal of our teaching is to offer an experience through which children, adolescents or adults can positively enrich their lives.

 

Our pedagogical references

Our main reference for music education is the Orff-Schulwerk (OS) approach. Central tenets of our pedagogy which are derived from the OS are

  • the integration of music, movement/dance and speech (holistic learning),
  • the centrality of the body in music learning,
  • the value of voice as a fundamental expressive and communicative tool,
  • the use of Orff instruments,
  • the attention to group processes and to relational learning in the group,
  • the relevance of creative processes in contributing to a sense of ownership of and identification with the learning process.

Within the frame of the OS elemental music and dance education we have been integrating and further developing many theoretical and practical suggestions derived from a cognitive approach to the development of the musical mind: Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory. We value its coherent and systematic methodic-didactic vision and the planning of hierachically ordered curricula for the development of music literacy. We are also interested in more general cognitive aspects of music making, in particular the role of metacognition in music learning.

Over the last years the CDM’s pedagogical concept has gradually been shifting towards a wider music anthropological and sociocultural approach to music education. We conceive of music learning in terms of a culturally situated phenomenon, in which processes of social construction of knowledge are adapted to meet the unique requirements of each context, in order to foster the active, motivated, and meaningful participation of all learners.

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