International Music Education

People with a refugee background often encounter professional, linguistic and cultural difficulties in pursuing their professions in their new home country. This is where the International Music Education (IME) project came in. It was aimed particularly at refugees and immigrants with previous musical and/or pedagogical training in order to give them better access to the training and employment market.

To train them as music educators and to equip them for working with children in day-care centres and for early music education was the long-term goal of this project. For this purpose, a training programme was developed in cooperation with the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre and Stadtkultur Hamburg, the umbrella organisation of Hamburg’s district cultural institutions and projects. To begin with, the 36 participants received advanced training in music education (240 hours) based on Edwin E. Gordon's “Music Learning Theory”. Secondly, the practical part consisted of an 18-month federal voluntary service in which the participants worked 20.5 hours per week in tandem with their educators in a total of 18 kindergartens. Besides the fact that IME contributed to the integration of people with a refugee background, the project also expanded the educational offering in Hamburg’s kindergartens. Thanks to establishing early musical education on a regular basis, the childcare facilities received qualified professionals who were suitable for adequately addressing children with a refugee background. In the process, music was to be used as a tool to support intercultural exchange and to develop and promote a common identity.

Owing to the great demand for skilled music educators and the nationwide interest in IME, the project has been expanded as of 2019 and now enables people with a refugee background to gain practical and theoretical professionalisation in the field of early music education throughout the whole of Germany.