Music 3-5
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Music 3-5

Susan Young

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eBook - ePub

Music 3-5

Susan Young

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About This Book

This book gives information, ideas and principles for music with three to five year olds that are both down-to-earth and up-to-date. Written in a style which is engaging and readable, it integrates recent theory and practice illustrating the discussion with examples and ideas taken from real life.

Chapters in this inspiring and engaging book show practitioners how to:

  • connect with the educational concepts and principles of using music in early years settings
  • recognise and understand children's musical starting points
  • foster creativity through music
  • support listening and communication through music
  • learn the key areas of listening, singing, using instruments and dancing
  • develop children's musical understanding
  • widen opportunities for music through resources, new technologies and visiting artist projects.


Early years practitioners and students will find this a valuable introduction to music with young children. More experienced practitioners will find the contemporary ideas a source of inspiration.

Books in this series address key issues for early years practitioners working in today's Foundation Stage environments. Each title is packed full of practical activities, support, advice and guidance, all of which is in line with current government early years policy. The authors use their experience and expertise to write accessibly and informatively, emphasising through the use of case studies the practical aspects of the subject, whilst retaining strong theoretical underpinnings throughout.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136024382
Edition
1

PART 1

CONTEXTS

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First things first

This is a ‘slow book’. There are ‘fast books’ of activities and songs, quick-fix tips, lists, guidelines and ready-made lessons. Fast books of practical activities and teaching ideas promise quick solutions and corner-cutting but often leave the underlying principles and values untouched. This book is about the processes and principles behind music with three- to five-year-olds, rooting these in theory when it is useful to do so and then going on to discuss approaches to practice that build on those principles. It is a slow process, but the fundamentals that underpin music education practice need to be regularly reconsidered, particularly in times of rapid change – such as the present.
Today’s young children are living in worlds that have changed, bringing new uncertainties and new demands. The changing nature of family life and new technologies in the home impact directly on young children’s lives. Wider social, economic, ecological and political changes have a less direct, but no less significant, influence. Approaches to early childhood music education are slow to change. Methods conceived in the first half of the last century still have a strong influence on practice now. Not that they necessarily need to be abandoned – just thoughtfully reappraised in the light of contemporary times.
The three- to five-age phase, which is the focus of this book, is, in itself, a time of considerable change for young children. Typically three-year-olds move on from forms of home, childminder or day care into a preschool or nursery class, often with part-time attendance and mixing this with other forms of care. They then move on, barely a year later, to a reception class. The reception class is usually part of a larger primary school, drawing children into the formality and structure of primary schooling. Today’s children have to become adept at managing transitions between the different places where they are cared for and educated. So many shifts mean that it is particularly important that we think of music in the context of their whole lives, childhoods lived at home and within distinctive localities. Later chapters take up these themes.

WHY DO MUSIC?

Why do music anyway? In a recent project that I was involved in, it was interesting to discover, through interviews, that those participating held quite different beliefs about the purpose of the music they were providing for the young children in two London children’s centres. The project included professional orchestral players and, for them, although they joined in playing musically with the children, the real aim was the first steps on a road to formal music learning. They were looking for a spark of special interest among individual children or were concerned with what they perceived to be the first stages of learning formal musicianship skills. For the early childhood music specialist, music was something for all the children. Her commitment was to develop children musically in the widest sense. She was concerned to draw them equally and positively into the experiences she provided. For the early childhood professionals, music was, in the main, synonymous with singing, so some of the other playful and improvisatory activities perplexed them. Beyond that they were interested in how music could support children’s development in other areas, mainly in social skills, communication, concentration and language. So, although collaborating, each was working with a different mindset. The result was that they orbited around one another, never tussling over these fundamental issues and never quite appreciating one another’s aims and purposes.
The practitioner’s focus on music for its benefit to other areas of children’s development reflects the current educational climate. Early childhood education, generally, has become linked to instrumental purpose and the dominant message is that the goal of education is the achievement of competence in the core areas of literacy and numeracy. It results in pressures to formalise and accelerate children. The purposes of education are much more down-to-earth and achievement-focused, and much less about ideas of the good life and what is deeply important and worthwhile. I have some old early childhood music education books from the 1960s and 1970s and the idealism – although ringing quaintly in our ears now – shines through. These days music is not closely linked to the current goals of education and therefore is ‘useless’ and difficult to justify. What often happens is that its purpose is linked with things ‘use-full’, so that arguing for music in terms of its ability to support children’s social skills, their language and so on is what dominates. It is in this climate, incidentally, that I think the practice of Reggio Emilia holds out a beacon of inspiration for creative, artistic activity in times when inspiration is in short supply. We will return to talk more of Reggio Emilia practice in the next chapter.
I am not pessimistic, however. First, because I think early childhood professionals have held on to some important principles and values of play-centred practice. Their influence in the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum ensures learning through play, promotes creative and imaginative activity, and promotes approaches that start with the children’s competences and interests. There is a way to go before these are translated into music education practice, which still holds on to some conservative versions of practice. And these outdated versions infiltrate the curriculum documents so that the points that pertain specifically to music sit awkwardly and confusingly within the creative development strand they are primarily written into. But more of this too, as the book unfolds.
Second, I think that early childhood practitioners have an instinct for some of the important things about music. This is best explained via an example. I recently spent two days with teachers and groups of nursery and reception children on visits out to a theatre. Songs were sung on the bus when there were waiting times (of which there were several), when the children needed to wind down, when they were having fun to heighten the moment and when they were tired. The songs were being used and enjoyed for the present. We all use music in our lives to relax, to entertain ourselves, to liven up a dull moment. The early childhood settings are places for music, just like any other. I frequently hear music’s place in early years justified because ‘it is fun’ or ‘they love it’, which I take to mean this understanding that music’s value is because it is pleasurable and uplifting. This is so, and rightly so.
Third, I am optimistic because the children’s centres are new kinds of places for young children, offering more flexible forms of provision and serving specific localities. There is enormous potential for arts organisations, cultural centres and arts professionals to find ways to work with children through the framework of the children’s centres. As teams of multi-agency professionals come together to provide for young children in the children’s centres, the ideal is for one of the professional team to be a creative practitioner – whether someone specialising in performance or visual arts.

WHO DOES THE MUSIC?

Young children’s music education – and by this I mean education in its broadest sense of all learning experiences – is spread across the whole range of different contexts from home, the home of carers and extended family members, early childhood settings, community and cultural centres and, among the different people, family, friends, early childhood professionals and community artists. So, in this sense, all these people have a hand in young children’s musical upbringing. However, this is a book about music in the Foundation Stage, which puts it in the hands of two groups of practitioners: the general early childhood practitioners and those music professionals who offer early childhood music. The second group have often re-routed themselves professionally from other spheres of activity, such as instrumental tuition, primary or secondary music teaching, community music and music therapy. They either specialise in the early years or it is part of a portfolio of activity.
The variety of different professionals with different backgrounds, qualification routes, priorities and allegiances, sometimes to certain methods or philosophies, makes the whole field complicated. And complicated, too, to address in a book such as this. For, if I address early childhood educators alone, it ignores the fact that there are increasing numbers of professionals offering music in early childhood settings. It is a rapidly growing field. But if I address those music professionals alone, it neglects the general early childhood practitioner. I have endeavoured to write in a way that is relevant to everyone but there may be places where the discussion inevitably leans a little one way or the other.
While the diversity of practitioners being drawn into working in early childhood music is to be welcomed, it also raises some problems and concerns. Chief among these is the absence of a proper, preliminary professional qualification to equip practitioners to work in music with young children. A recent influential research project into the effectiveness of preschool provision – overall provision, not just in music – has shown that the prior qualifications of staff are critical in ensuring good-quality practice. In the absence of any qualification requirements, practitioners, whether general or specialist, tend to be largely self-taught, developing their own formulae for ‘what works for them’ based on experimentation and ideas picked up in an ad hoc way from a range of sources. Those offering early childhood music as specialists may enjoy a high level of autonomy and independence, are outside any kind of regulatory system and are rarely challenged on what they do.
Short courses in early years music abound and are well attended. The ever-present use of the term ‘training’, however, implies a fairly straightforward process of being instructed in how to do something practical – a set of procedures, rather than the complex, subtle self-development of ‘education’ or ‘professional learning’. Behind the term ‘training’ and the plethora of short courses lie hidden assumptions: the notion that working with young children is uncomplicated and simple and, being facetious, that it is simply a question of knowing a few cute children’s songs and having a few activities up your sleeve.
The problem too is that ‘training’ drives a wedge between practice and theory. A training course is definitely concerned with practical activity.

A PLACE FOR THEORY

Those of us working with young children in music will all have ‘working theories’ – sets of ideas about the value and purpose of music for young children, how young children learn in music and how activities should be presented and structured. Quite often these remain largely below the surface, are taken for granted and are unexamined. Some even hold the view that theory somehow gets in the way, that it threatens the naturalness or intuitiveness of what they do. This is, in itself, of course, a theory for practice. If this book aims to be about the underlying principles and values of music education – as well as what they might look like in practice – then we should search for good ideas from theory to help in the process of exploring principles, appraising them and looking for alternatives. Theory can suggest directions to explore and can give confidence to try out new things.
That said, there is comparatively little research into early childhood music – not if viewed across early childhood as a whole, or music education as a whole. From both directions it is neglected. Music education research mainly focuses on children of secondary school age. Early childhood education tends to focus less on specific subject areas and to take broad, general foci. Music is considered marginal and the preserve of specialist practitioners. As a result, early childhood music education research – and the theories that might evolve from it – is in short supply and what there is tends to be mostly small-scale studies.
There are, as I see it, three important strands of research activity that carry serious implications for how we conceive of young children musically and, therefore, how we conceive of educational practice. The first of these is children’s spontaneous, self-initiated musical activity either as singers or in playing instruments (Davies, 1992; Pond, 1981;Young, 2003a). These studies have mostly taken place in early childhood settings when children were playing freely. The second is children’s participation in playground singing games and rhymes, which, although three- to five-year-olds are on the fringes of, watching and just beginning to join in such activities, nevertheless has implications for music education practice (Marsh, 2008). The third, and most recent, is an interest in children’s musical activity at home. Television and radio and the music they bring into the home have been part of musical childhoods for many years now, but the recent influx of new technologies and the popular media they bring with them is profoundly changing the nature of music for young children. These strands of research, taken all together, show what children are doing of their own motivation and are therefore capable of. Findings and ideas from these areas of research will resurface in the chapters that follow. But each of them highlights different shortcomings in the way that music is generally provided for young children in educational settings, so I wanted to introduce them here briefly in order to set thoughts running.
To cut a long story short – and it is a long and very interesting story – time a...

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