Educar a través de la música en educación infantil. Incidencia del Proyecto EMI de la fundación Barenboim-Said en el desarrollo de niños y niñas andaluces desde la perspectiva de la teoría de las inteligencias múltiples

Abstract

In 2005, the Barenboim-Said Foundation started the Early Childhood Music Education Project (EMI) in Andalusia with the aim of promoting musical education in children aged 3 to 5 years. The project is inspired by Daniel Barenboim's idea of Education through Music, a concept that implies the ability of music education to influence extra-musical dimensions of development at an early age, such as cognitive, emotional and social competencies. With the theory of Transfer of Learning we provide the study with a theoretical framework with which to explain the mechanism by which musical education influences extra-musical areas. Likewise, the need to define the complexity of children's development has led us to adopt Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences as a theoretical framework to explain the dimensions of development. The work is therefore based on the idea of Education through music, on the theory of Transfer of Learning and on the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. From these three pillars, we will build the discourse, the theoretical base and carry out the empirical study. This is a quantitative study with a quasi-experimental design, composed of an experimental group and a control group, with a sample size of n = 2343. These children were distributed between 15 schools, which formed the experimental group, and 11 schools as the control group. The results, analyzed using independent samples t tests for comparison of means, Cohen's d effect size and analysis of variance (ANOVA), reveal statistically significant differences in the means of the dimensions of the experimental and control groups. This confirms the hypothesis that the EMI Project has a positive impact on the different dimensions of development, in accordance with Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences.