Aleksandra Acker

Young children's musical explorations: the potential of using Learning Stories for recording, planning and assessing musical experiences in a preschool setting

This article focuses on the early childhood years and describes research that has examined children’s music experiences in formal care and education settings in Melbourne, Australia. This research uses a contextual view of children and their learning and is based on an assumption that learning is social, involves engagement with others and is appropriated by children as protagonists in their own learning and development. The children’s experiences have been recorded using Learning Stories. These have become an increasingly popular method of recording and analyzing children’s activities for both practitioners and researchers. Learning Stories are a sociocultural analytic tool that emphasize children’s dispositions for engaging in relationships with the social and physical context. The concept is derived from Bruner’s notion of story to record and interpret children’s emerging narratives about their learning. The authors have investigated the use of Learning Stories as a way of sharing children’s explorations of music with early childhood educators in a setting where there was little evidence of musical activity and staff felt they lacked expertise and confidence in this area of practice.

Pre-school children's encounters with The Magic Flute

Abstract This article describes a music programme in an Australian early learning centre. Through a repertoire of songs, games and instruments, the children were introduced to music forms, including opera. Mozarts Magic Flute was presented to these children by watching the Metropolitan Operas latest film performance. Because this opera seized the childrens imagination, their interest was scaffolded for eight weeks. This musical adventure was recorded through naturalistic observations, including videos, photographs and drawings with the childrens own responses a focus of this event. The experiences of one child, Ruby, are used here as an example of childrens potential when the adult world engages them in intelligent dialogue.

Music as a Platform for Intercultural Understanding: Early Childhood Curriculum and a Growing Neoliberal Imperative

This chapter discusses the significance of the language of music to encourage intercultural dialogue within educational settings. We argue that the development of intercultural understanding is of particular importance in the early years as it is during this time that attitudes and perceptions are formed that will have a profound influence on future relationships. Neglect of the arts in education is therefore to be decried, as early childhood curriculum, a feature of educational reform across the globe, has tended to become an expression of neoliberalism and reflect a view of children as an investment for the future knowledge economy. In this context, the arts, especially music, are marginalised in educational reform agendas. An emphasis on formal literacy and numeracy prevails. This is not an evidence-based choice but an ideological one. We explore the intercultural potential of music by observing children in early childhood settings in Australia, China and Serbia. Our observations illustrate children singing across languages and engaging in social and complex ideas in a purposeful manner that encourages social meaning making. Music is a tool in promoting intercultural understanding, and its dwindling presence in the early childhood curriculum is a social-justice concern. As there is an ever-increasing movement across borders, with globalisation, wars, regime change and other causes of displacement of people, removing aspects of the education curriculum that promote social and cultural cohesion becomes a rights issue.