Possible pedagogic effects of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest on pre-school learning contexts : a critical multimodal evaluation

Abstract

In 2013, Malta celebrated its first victory of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest (JESC). Back then, the island not only enthusiastically transformed Gaia Cauchi (i.e. the 11-year old Maltese winner) into a national hero but also started preparing to host the November 2014 contest. History repeated itself a couple of months later, when in 2015, Malta through 12 year old Maltese singer Destiny Chukunyere won the contest for the second time. Keeping the popularity of the contest at its forefront, after an overview of the JESC history, this paper will present the main outcomes of a researched thematic analysis conducted by Balzan (2015), one of the past undergraduate students under my supervision. Balzan analyzed each of the thirteen winning songs which have won the festival since its launch in 2003 in Denmark. Using the original MIRROR socio-semiotic text analysis framework (Cremona, 2015b) I will then add the social-feature interpretation to Balzan’s multimodal interpretation of the JESC winning songs. Based on these reflections and as a reaction to them, in the third part of the paper I will then move on to formulate a list of practical suggestions through which once the JESC winning songs are used critically as educational tools, the stakeholders at the preschool classroom could benefit pedagogically. Furthermore, I conclude the paper suggesting that educators in contexts where the JESC might not enjoy great popularity could eventually adapt and adopt the suggestions presented in this paper to critically evaluate other non-JESC related musical resources which they might consider to use with preschoolers under their supervision.