Critical New Perspectives in Early Childhood Music

Young Children Engaging and Learning Through Music

Susan Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315294551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Exploring and expanding upon current understandings of early childhood music education, this book provides a much-needed response to the rapid social, cultural and technological developments affecting children's experience of music today.

Critical New Perspectives in Early Childhood Music returns to the core question of how children engage, participate and learn through music, and how we are to best harness musical resources to their benefit. Chapters move beyond conservative or traditional models of practice and draw upon new and emerging insights from the fields of childhood studies, neuroscience, psychology and sociology. In-depth analysis of research and real examples from practice illustrate the strengths and possible shortcomings of each approach and acknowledge the diverse impacts of digitisation, increased child autonomy, intensive parenting practices, and cultural and economic diversity on the child's experience of music.

An invaluable theoretical overview of current thinking in relation to contemporary musical childhoods, this book will support and challenge students and early childhood music educators as they rethink practice for the present day.

1Some windows and a map

Early childhood music in new times

What I propose is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

Hannah Arendt, 1958:5

Imagine a nursery somewhere in central London where three-year-old Aya is singing to herself while playing on the floor with some toy cars. An educator passing through the room might notice that she is half-singing, half-speaking, and then recall a model of singing development that positions Aya at the stage of ‘has started to use a singing voice’. Another adult listening in might notice that Aya’s friend Ahmed begins to join her singing, and be reminded of ideas about music and learning as taking place in social interactions with others. Another eavesdropper on Aya’s singing might recognise the words and half-formed tune as a children’s popular media theme and be curious about how children’s everyday experiences beyond the nursery are incorporated into their spontaneous singing play. She might also know that Aya’s family arrived recently as refugees from Syria and wonder how Aya weaves her songs between her musical background, recent experiences and her new life in London. Another watching adult may notice that the educator responsible for this preschool classroom does not appear to hear Aya and Ahmed’s singing at all, but unthinkingly shushes them both and ushers them across to a number activity on the nearby table. She may reflect on the educational policy decisions that result in educators unthinkingly giving higher value to numeracy skills, even for three-year-olds, at the expense of their singing.

Maybe the adults briefly pausing to listen to these two three-year-olds shuffle quickly through many different viewpoints and recognise that each spotlights a different aspect of this small musical happening and each reveals a different version of Aya as musical. Each theoretical window creates and allows for different ways in which she can be and become musical. How parents, educators, therapists, artists ‘see’ children as musical determines what experiences and opportunities they offer, what they encourage, foster and teach. Viewpoints drawn from different theoretical perspectives help to bridge the gap between what we observe and hear, how we understand it, and then how we act in response and design experiences. In my imaginary scenario, the children’s own singing could flourish only in the moments when they were left to play freely and the formalised curriculum did not hear it. So while each spotlight illuminates one aspect, it can throw others into shadow. A developmental viewpoint that looks only at Aya’s singing skill, for example, may overshadow those aspects that are part of her home and background experiences and that vividly colour how she sings. Equally, when there are many viewpoints, one may unsettle another. Reflecting on Aya’s hummed song as perhaps echoing a children’s popular media tune provokes questions about the connection of Aya’s everyday musical experiences with those traditionally provided in nursery settings, and may throw up tensions between popular and traditional songs for children. Alternative theoretical viewpoints may suggest new and valuable combinations. A viewpoint that is very attuned to cultural variations, drawing on anthropological perspectives, for example, may then combine with others to create new ways of seeing, and reveal new hearings of Aya’s singing and how she participates in the educational environment of the nursery. So a well-rounded understanding of Aya as a singer requires the combination of many viewpoints drawn from a multifaceted theoretical approach.

This one small incident (of which there are many in a typical preschool day) can therefore be viewed from many different – and also complementary, overlapping and at times challenging – positions. In short, there are alternatives, many discourses or narratives, arising from different theoretical perspectives, that can be told about young children’s music. No one single perspective can capture Aya’s singing in any complete way. And the story – or stories – we tell ourselves about Aya’s singing creates an image of her as musical, configures both the child and childhoods as musical and determines how she can be musical and how we act musically in relation to her. That is the core theme of this book.

A wide range of possible stories is to be welcomed. Different views can provoke experimentation and result in conceptual creativity and theoretical vitality. But the field of early childhood music education is barely listening, preferring to stick to well-trod theory and practice pathways and holding onto outdated images of musical childhoods. Lively discussions are taking place elsewhere, in the general field of early childhood and the broader field of childhood studies, but are not yet impinging on or being integrated into the field of early childhood music. While the field should be vibrant with debate and open-minded discussion, it remains conservative and, dare I say, hidebound by a few dominant perspectives held in place by traditional methods and narrow discussions of ‘what works’ or even, increasingly nowadays, ‘what sells’.

From that small vignette of Aya’s singing, it is obvious that not all perspectives or narratives have equal voice. The voice in the educator’s ear was not Aya’s singing but an urgent voice telling her to hustle the two children over to the number activity table. In England, as in many countries, early-years education is perceived as instrumental in raising standards of academic achievement. This has resulted in a narrow, skills-based view of curriculum content and learning that gives priority to literacy and numeracy. These are the dominant narratives of early childhood currently shaping and defining early childhood practice. Expressive and aesthetic areas – including the arts – have been marginalised and even silenced (Osgood, 2017). A cluster of theoretical approaches described as ‘postmodern’ or ‘critical theory’ seek to expose and challenge the dominant narratives, to quieten them so that other voices can be heard, and to reveal how they are not ‘truths’ about early childhood but stories and narratives built on particular worldviews that give privilege to certain versions of reality (e.g. Yelland, 2005). The postmodernist or critical-theory position points out that interpretations arising from different theoretical perspectives are never objective; rather, knowledge is socially constructed and built upon partial and subjective interpretations. So, for example, understanding children’s development as progressing in certain stages is not a ‘truth’ about their capabilities and competences, but an interpretation, a story, or a narrative. Crucially, it is the interpretations of the powerful groups and individuals – white, middle-class, able-bodied (Osgood, 2017) – that become embedded in prevailing ideas about music, children, education and what is valued – or not. It is this worldview, for example, which privileges maths over music.

The educator, deaf to Aya’s singing and giving priority to the number activity, implicitly accepted the dominant narrative about early childhood and what it is telling her about the value of an early start for school readiness, built on developmental theories, objective measures of recording children’s progress and the need for ‘evidence’ to monitor, measure and prove. What if the adults in my imaginary nursery room had paused for a moment, heard the quiet voices of the children’s singing, questioned their own actions, and asked themselves from where and why these dominant narratives have come into place? What if they had asked themselves who stands to gain, who will lose, who holds the power to decide, and what are the full implications for children’s education if their singing is silenced? They might then have paused to listen to Aya and Ahmed’s singing, encouraged them to sing more, heard the echoes of a Syrian lullaby, a TV theme or current UK pop tune, or whatever was musically buzzing in these two children’s heads at that moment, and imagined what their singing might have meant for them as they weaved imagination around the toy cars, affirming their friendship and sharing song scraps. A critical perspective aims to make explicit the underlying motives, assumptions, and how policies, practices and curricula operate. It tries to dislodge many of the established ways we have come to think about children musically. The critical edge is there to provoke, to cause trouble and deconstruct some of the commonly held truths and taken-for-granted assumptions that are held about children, music and their music education. Therefore, my aim is not only to introduce a wider range of viewpoints, but also to engage critically with images of musical childhoods and the larger structures that shape those childhoods.

So, in this book, I will discuss how an expanded range of perspectives drawing on different background theories can illuminate and explain young children’s musical experiences and, at the same time, I will be filtering them through a critical lens. Hopefully, this process will prompt alternative understandings that will then call for creative adaptations in practice. However, I am less concerned with the small part of children’s musical growing-up that takes place in formal educational settings, which may surprise some readers for a book that hopes to have much to say for early childhood music education. But I am very concerned with how babies and young children grow up being musical through a whole mosaic of different experiences in different contexts, and with how we understand contemporary musical children and childhoods, and only then do I move on to consider how that may impact on the educational practices we design for them.

This brings me to another core theme running through this book, which is that the nature of music and musical childhoods has changed profoundly in recent years, and that – crucially – music education needs to keep in step with those changes. To enable it to do so, we need to turn our attention to understanding those changes from within. And for that, we need theoretical approaches that allow us to study children’s everyday contemporary musical lives and, at the same time, to consider and conceptualise the wider contexts – social, material, technological, economic and cultural – that are shaping their musical lives. We need approaches which recognise the detail of children’s lives as they are situated in specific times and places. These theoretical approaches are to be found mainly in the direction of childhood studies strongly influenced by sociological and anthropological thinking, hence the emphasis on these disciplinary viewpoints in this book.

Another core argument is that the contemporary world for very young children – both generally and in terms of music – is changing. These changes are full of exciting new possibilities, but are also fraught with contradictory developments. Much is new, and somewhat confusing, and cannot be accounted for with old theoretical concepts. Heeding Rosi Braidotti (2011), we need new theories, new concepts and new terms that can engage with the present time, and we need to learn to think differently and to think differently more quickly, on our feet. To explain what I have in mind, let me move on to talk about the present time for young children and their musical experiences.

Young children in changing times

We only have to look back a generation or two to recognise that children’s lives are continually changing in response to social, cultural and political situations. My 1950s childhood is a world away from that of my grandchildren. The present period, many are suggesting, is marked by both the accelerating pace and the nature of the changes (Sommer, 2012). If I spell out the most obvious widespread changes, these are changing patterns of family life and parenting practices, innovations in technology and increasing migration resulting in cultural diversity within societies. At the same time, we must immediately pause to remember that, viewed globally, the changes differ across diverse groups of children. Only one third of households across the world have electricity, for example, so up-to-date innovations in technology may be meaningless for a majority of children worldwide. If we look more closely at the structural changes to babyhood and early childhood in what is often referred to as the ‘minority’ world (the affluent countries of Europe and North America, in particular), the birth-rate is falling, families are smaller, the survival rates of babies and their health are much improved, family groupings are much more varied, more mothers are employed outside of the home and many more very small children are cared for and educated by professionals (Boocock & Scott, 2005:52–56).

Focusing on musical childhoods, we live in an exciting age in which new technologies are transforming musical lives. The digitisation of music and multimedia has brought far-reaching changes to the nature of music and musical practices. Young children hear considerably more music than generations before and they can hear it repeatedly, the same each time. The sheer richness and variety of music and how it can be accessed now means that a tapestry of every kind of music can be downloaded into young children’s lives, portable in tiny devices and instantly accessible wherever they are, whatever they are doing. Young children can now be surrounded by music and musical sounds: at home, in the car, in waiting areas, as they go shopping; embedded in toys, smartphone apps, video games and video clips accessed via touchscreen devices. Music pops out from everywhere. My dishwasher plays a tiny tune for each of the function buttons, which has become a fascinating plaything for all the small children who visit my house. A large number of homes in the minority world contain a wide range of digital devices that include TVs, mobile phones, computers, iPods, mp3 players, digital cameras, interactive toys and games, and video game consoles (Ilari & Young, 2016). There has been a key shift from fixed technology (e.g. music centre, TV) to handheld, touchscreen devices (e.g. mobile phone, tablet), many of which young children, even babies, can now manipulate for themselves (Holloway, et al., 2015; Hourcade, et al., 2015). Young children are growing up immersed in a digital world that changes at lightning speed. Touchscreen technologies have brought about a very recent major revolution in early childhood technology use that I will discuss further in a later chapter. It is also clear that not only have the devices moved on and will continue to do so, but so too have the kinds of musical activities they enable. Media forms are now multimodal and integrated, with music as just one embedded element. New kinds of musical practices, musical play and ways of using and engaging with music are possible (Katz, 2010). As Andrew Brown writes, digital technologies enable us to ‘amplify our musicality’ and ‘the globalised technoculture in which we find ourselves calls for a re-examination of the musical life of today’s child’ (2015:18). The changes strike me as profound if I think back to my own 1950s non-digital, screen-free childhood with only occasional light music programmes from a large fixed radio in one room and my mother’s playing on an old piano. It must have been a surprisingly silent childhood. Children bring all their musical experiences with them into the music session. Those experiences are there, present in the ears, bodies and musical memories of the children we work with. And so what does this mean for how we design educational practices with young children?

What is more, even the youngest children can be active in selecting and activating these musical sources independently, particularly via touchscreen devices, making them highly personalised and interactive. Parents encourage children to have autonomous preferences and express those preferences as early as they are able, looking for signs and attributing preferences in the non-verbal actions of babies. Vast quantities of commodified music, apps and video clips for very young children are produced, bought and sold. This leads, in turn, to unprecedented possibilities for consumption and, while very small children may not be targeted directly as consumers, they are targeted indirectly through their parents (Cross, 2016). Patrick Hughes (2005) describes the way that parents are targeted by baby and toddler product companies – and we can include franchises selling musical products here – which redefine babies as learners whose potential to learn will be stimulated by these products. Thus, in a consumer society, private music providers and companies sell not merely musical products but the promises which their products embody.

Parents are having fewer children and at later ages. Not only that, but they want ‘higher quality’ children, investing more time, money and emotion in those children. In certain groups of the population, in particular the middle classes, an intensive form of child-rearing has emerged that involves the early cultivation of children’s cognitive skills (Gopnik, 2016; Hays, 1996; Lareau, 2003). Children have become a kind of project involving work, replacing relaxed family spontaneity and love with a long ‘to do’ list. This intensive child-rearing falls primarily on the mother, resulting in a tendency to over-emphasise the mother-child relationship and downplay the many other relationships in a child’s life. These characteristics of contemporary childhood are immediately apparent in what has become a focus of interest and emphasis in both music theory and practice. Musical parenting (a relatively recent term) and music as a medium for interactive exchanges between babies, toddlers and their mothers have become primary topics of research and a main plank of early childhood music theory. This is something I will contest later in this book. It is also evident in all kinds of provision of early childhood music, and particularly in the rise of private music sessions, whose promotional materials often seek to appeal to this image of intensive parenting. The rise of the word ‘parenting’ came with the rise of this particular cultural image of being a parent and the belief that the job (and it has become more of a ‘job’, less a relationship) of a parent – invariably the mother – is to gather expertise and information, as well as items and equipment, to help shape their child.

At the same time, mothers with preschool-aged children are returning to work, which results in more young children in childcare and early education. Young children are increasingly taken care of, supported, but also monitored, outside of the home within care, educational, welfare and health institutions which, in the UK and many other countries, have a wider reach and influence than hitherto. At the same time, certain parents – those considered to be experiencing forms of social disadvantage – are often deemed to be ‘in need’ of extra support and intervention from welfare services (Gillies, 2014). Here, too, the impact on early childhood music education is apparent, with early childhood music that receives state or charity funding often designed as a means of supporting parents and children deemed to be in need. Increasingly in the UK, the result is a two-tier system of music education provision, with private music sessions for middle-class mothers who can afford to pay and free music sessions as support for so-called ‘vulnerable’ and ‘disadvantaged’ children and their parents (Young, 2017a).

Attitudinal and ideological shifts accompany these demographic, economic, technological, commercial and musical changes to childhood. Young children are watched and worried over. Much has been written about the anxieties that have become a hallmark of middle-class parenting. Anxiety about the risks to children outside the home result in greater restrictions on children’s freedom of movement, fewer opportunities to play out-of-doors and to play independently in mixed-age groups (Frost, 2009). In common with all children of my generation, I walked to school independently at the age of five, joining with all the neighbouring children in small mixed-age friendship gaggles and getting up to playful adventures en route. Now, as a result of restrictions on movement, adults manage and organise children’s time and space – seen clearly in the rise of the private music class – and provide more home-based activities (Valentine, 2004:70). At home, even for very young children, bedrooms are typically set up as a play and entertainment space making use of home-based technological activities and media. But it can be a solitary childhood, with fewer siblings, parents who work, and little opportunity for outdoor play with friends. It dawned on me, during a study I made of young girls singing at home with karaoke, that the equipment (along with a plethora of other playthings) had been provided by parents as a means of occupying their children safely indoors, in solitary play, and in two cases releasing parents to work in home-based offices (Young, 2012).

The changes to early childhood have resulted in mixed responses. It has even been argued that childhood, or childhood as we want to imagine it, is disappearing. ‘Too fast, too soon’ is the cry from those who claim that children are missing out on the genuine experiences of early childhood and growing up too quickly. Young children can use modern-day technologies independently (even babies can swipe touchscreen technologies), accessing YouTube clips and imitat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Some windows and a map: Early childhood music in new times
• 2 Shaky eggs and hello! songs: The view from childhood studies
• 3 Bone pipes and brain cells: Biological perspectives
• 4 Pathways and pigeonholes: The view from developmental psychology
• 5 Karaoke kids and digi-tots: Sociological perspectives
• 6 Paper sheep and camels: The view from other places
• Afterword
• References
• Index