Musical Childhoods

Explorations in the pre-school years

Berenice Nyland, Aleksandra Acker, Jill Ferris, Jan Deans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415740050
• eBook ISBN: 9781317805199
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Musical Childhoods is a culmination of more than a decade of research driven by the fact that music has been neglected in early childhood programs in favour of literacy and numeracy. Recent research has identified a connection between academic performance and musical programs and this has given music a renewed status in many schools.

This book promotes the idea of children's competence in the use of the language of music and argues that all children have a right to participate in musical discovery and celebrates children's engagement with meaningful and disparate experiences in music. Written by leading practitioners and researchers in the field, this book seeks to reaffirm children's communicative competence when exposed to high quality musical experience, provide new perspectives on children's ability to engage with music in many diverse forms and explore and promote the role of the musician as an artist and teacher.

The book is structured into three parts:

• The theoretical overview
• The children, the musicians and the music
• The research through the eyes of the protagonist and looking into the future

Early childhood students, researchers and academics with a specific interest in music and musicality will find this an insightful read.

Part I The context

1 Young Children, Music and Early Childhood Programmes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315814674-2

Introduction

The book Musical Childhoods: Explorations in the Pre-school Years is a culmination of more than a decade of research carried out in an early learning centre in Australia. The research was driven by two circumstances. The first one was that music in Australian early childhood programmes had been neglected as literacy and numeracy attained a privileged position. A report called Augmenting the Diminished (DEST, 2005) highlighted this situation in primary schools and smaller studies have suggested the same circumstances exist in early childhood educational settings (Anderson, 2002). The influence of the Reggio Emilia philosophy on early childhood programmes in Australia was the second driver in this research. From Reggio Emilia has come the idea of the ‘100 languages of children’ and a renewed interest in the arts was sparked in tertiary courses and in many early childhood settings.

The neglected position of early childhood music in tertiary education courses has been researched (Ferris and Nyland, 2007) and it was found that many universities no longer had stand-alone subjects for music and some had no arts offerings at all. A number of Australian music researchers had reported on the impact this had on daily practice within early childhood centres. De Vries (2006, 2013) carried out studies on early childhood teachers’ use of recorded music, Suthers (2004) reported on the lack of confidence teachers displayed in the area of providing for music and Barrett wondered why visual art seemed easier to provide for than music (1993). For many children, their daily musical experiences consist of recorded music, often used for ritual activities, such as clean up time, or basic dance sessions consisting of such pursuits as free movement to early childhood music – for example, The Wiggles. Suthers’ research reported that many teachers had no trust in their ability to ‘sing in tune’ and for many services even the daily sing-a-long has ceased to happen.

The second impetus to explore the presence of music in early childhood centres was provided by the influence of the Reggio Emilia early childhood programmes. These programmes are arts based and have been of interest for Australian practitioners. For Australians influenced by Reggio Emilia it was the visual arts that were privileged and, unlike the Reggio Emilia programmes, they were mainly trained teachers who delivered these art experiences. The artists in Reggio Emilia are artists first and foremost and often not trained pedagogues. There is even a suggestion in some of the early literature that pedagogical training might distract from artistic expression (Daichendt, 2009). The notion that an artist can best deliver the expressive arts in an early childhood centre, rather than a teacher, became a contested topic. The idea that art teachers should be able to do what they teach is supported in the centre where this research was based. There is a policy of employing artists with specific expertise, teaching qualifications being less important than technical skills in the arts. In this book we introduce three music teachers who were all musicians. None had teacher training. Their different styles, musical tastes and philosophical interpretations of their music made what each brought to the setting unique. The fourth protagonist described was a home-room teacher with a love of music and a family background of singing and performance.

The centre that hosted this research is attached to a university, has a strong research culture and has an arts-based programme that has been influenced by ideas of Child Art, the progressive education movement, emergent curriculum and the Reggio Emilia programmes. The centre has employed many artists over the years with expertise including drama, dance, painting, literature, clay and music. The chapters in this book explore the research that involved the children and their music. The three musicians and their work are described and a number of the projects the children embarked upon discussed. Arising from the two drivers of this research are questions about children’s competence when presented with aesthetic and complex materials to explore (Chapter 3), the impact of adults and children experiencing music as a community endeavour (Chapter 4), an extended journey into the world of the fairy tale through Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Chapter 5), a qualified early childhood teacher supporting the music and musicians, through ‘intentional teaching’ (Epstein, 2005), which included an unusual collaborative effort that involved the whole centre (Chapter 6). Chapter 1 provides context for the book, Chapter 2 examines ideas underpinning an early childhood arts education programme and describes the centre where the musical events took place, the theoretical foundations of the approach to arts and early childhood education and some historical detail on how these practices emerged. The third chapter starts to give examples of the work of the musicians and the children. The book is structured into three parts: Part I is the theoretical overview; Part II is about the children, the musicians and the music; Part III revisits the research through the eyes of one of the main protagonists, as well as looking to the future.

This research was carried out in a national context where there has been a reduction of music and the arts generally. This is a phenomenon that has been reflected in early childhood teacher education programmes in many countries. As images of children increasingly focus on future lives as skilled workers in the global knowledge economy, the early childhood curriculum increasingly emphasises formal literacy and numeracy learning over other languages of childhood, such as music. We believe music, in all its forms, is a culturally significant activity, and is associated with a number of the 100 languages of the child (Edwards, Gandini and Forman, 1998) and is the right of a child, in a society like Australia, where music, as an expressive activity, is present in myriad permutations. In a diverse, multicultural society it provides a medium for meaningful exchange across different population groups. This book presents research findings that:

• Reaffirm children’s communicative competence when exposed to high-quality musical experiences
• Provide new perspectives on children’s ability to engage with music in many diverse forms
• Explore and promote the role of the musician as artist/teacher
• Support an argument that the arts are an important part of human experience and should be accorded citizenship rights in early childhood programmes.

In this introductory background chapter, we therefore discuss the role of music in early childhood education and care programmes, the importance of music in children’s programmes, historical influences in Australia and comment on the research that has focused on young children and music. This background has international relevance as Australia was subject to many of the same ideas influencing early childhood practice and theory, across the twentieth century, as many other countries. The research centre where these studies took place was established in the early 1990s and was, therefore, a part of the flowering of early thought that came to the fore at that time. Katz and Chard (2000) had felt the need for a more intellectual approach to young children’s early experiences, Jones and Nimmo (1994) were articulating the notion of the emergent curriculum, while educational thinkers like Bruner (1991) and Gardner (1990) were introducing new ideas. Into this zeitgeist came the discovery of the programmes of Reggio Emilia (Edwards, Gandini and Forman, 1998) and it was in this moment of history that this centre embarked upon a serious journey into project-based curriculum using the arts as a major vehicle. The first project to be recorded and written up in-depth was the Octopus Project. This project was heavily music based and is described in Chapter 2 as part of the background to the musical narratives detailed in Part II of the book.

The role of music in early childhood education and care programmes

Music has long been considered an important part of the early childhood programme as an expressive form to assist children in gaining a sense of self, as a cultural activity that indicates knowledge and connectedness to the wider society, as literacy and as an activity that could be emotionally satisfying. The influence of the developmental psychologists on early childhood programmes has meant that domains of development historically have been used to record observations of children’s growth and development (e.g., Lightfoot, Cole and Cole, 2005). For language and communication, children’s early speech patterns were observed to be prosodic and music, especially singing, to be a means to emotionally communicate with a very young child. Nursery rhymes and lullabies are examples of songs used to sooth, relax and engage in linguistic play. For those early childhood teachers of a more didactic nature, chanting and singing were considered to be important mnemonic strategies, as is instanced by such popular songs as the ‘Alphabet Song’ in English. Hearing is the first sense that is fully developed and it is, therefore, an important reference for the infant. Gardner suggests that because of this, music, which is based on active listening and expression, is the first of the multiple intelligences that is available to the child as a way of meaning-making and a source of pleasure: ‘The single most important thing in education is for each person to find at least one thing that he/she connects to, gets excited by, feels motivated to spend more time with’ (Gardner, 1981, p. 70).

Music is considered important in early childhood in a number of forms, including movement and dance, sound-making, listening and singing. Linked to the idea of kineaesthetic learning, children, through these musical activities, are combining expression with emotion, non-verbal communication and cognitive understanding when they combine theorising with intent and possibly performance. Music lends itself to Dewey’s ideas about learning by ‘doing’ (1944). Piaget could view music as a language, sensory motor experience and symbolic play (1962). Vygotsky’s theories on the role of language in development and that learning can lead development are also relevant to musical explorations (1978). Vygotsky has become a major theoretical influence on early childhood services internationally, so it is worth identifying the approach to music taken in this book – that is, as a language of childhood – and finding resonance for this idea in a Vygotskian framework. Music is an important expression of personal preference and also a reflection of the cultural setting. Music has both social and historical significance. In early childhood services, music can be viewed as a language through which children can express knowledge and interpretations of their worlds and, therefore, is central to the development of thought and consciousness. It is through internalising musical encounters shared on the physical, social and cultural plane that the child interprets experience and gains a means and form by which to express this interpretation of reality.

Theories of children and competence in this research arose from the influence of Vygotskian ideas that children’s construction of meaning is contextual. Actions take place within cultural and historical contexts with other actors. Dewey argued that children will be selective and reactive to knowledge encountered. Personal tastes, desires and previous experience will influence what the child takes from the learning situation. The children described in this book are participants in musical endeavours and protagonists in their own learning. The musical experiences that the children were exposed to were of high quality and this is crucial to the competence, understanding and meaning-making displayed.

To say that education is a social function, securing direction and development in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which they belong, is to say that education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in the group. (Dewey, 1944, p. 81)

Vygotsky’s (1962) statement that learning can lead development has changed attitudes to children and perceptions of their competence. Educationalists have suggested that this concept of Vygotsky’s should be linked to Gardner’s ideas about ways of seeing and preferred styles of learning (Beliavsky, 2006). For Vygotsky, language was the major cognitive tool and his views on the relationship between thought and language represent the child’s development of understanding of the world and culture in two ways. Exposure to formal language provides the opportunity to learn the language of the social group; through a process of internalisation the child can use the language to think and interpret the social milieu. Therefore, the child learns about the world and others in it through social mediation and is able to creatively interpret, adapt and make meaning of experience through cognitive processes. The relationship between language and thought is summed up by the famous quote from Vygotsky: ‘A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and the thought unembodied in words remains a shadow’ (1962, p. 153). In the same way, children’s experimentation with musical forms and their interactions with music and more knowledgeable members of the music culture will scaffold children’s musical skills, conceptual understandings and ability to use music for creative expression. In the music projects described in the chapters in this book, children are observed exploring instruments in mindful ways, showing interest in words and sounds and being able to converse using instruments to make symbols that give meaning to the exchange. These children display competence in listening, reading non-verbal language, a sense of the dramatic and use of duration and many other elements important for musical communication as they engage in musical play and activity.

Changes in technology have brought about important developments for children and music. In recent years, digital technology has become an important literacy that has the potential to enhance the connection between the home and the early childhood centre. Conversations about how to use digital technology are not n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviation and terminology
• Part I The context
• 1 Young children, music and early childhood programmes
• 2 Early childhood arts education: a case study
• Part II The music
• 3 A search for meaning and communicative competence through the language of music
• 4 Singing: a way of life
• 5 Young children, music and musical content
• 6 An early childhood educator
• 7 The Early Learning Centre choir
• 8 The child’s voice
• Part III Conclusion
• 9 Revisiting and concluding remarks
• References
• Index