Journal of Early Childhood Education Programs (2)

research-article2016

RSM0 RSM 0 010.1177/13211 03X16640106R 03X16640106R esearchStudies inMusic Education esearch

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Early childhood music education research: An overview

Research Studies in Music Education 2016, Vol. 38(1) 9 –21 9 –21 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1321103X16640106 rsm.sagepub.com

Susan Young University of Exeter, UK

Abstract This article offers a short commentary on the “state of play” in early childhood music education research to accompany the articles published in this special issue. It provides an international overview of recent research trends in this field, with examples drawn from Europe, the Americas, Asia, t he Middle East, East and South Africa and Australia. Keywords birth to five music, early childhood, music education, research, review of research

This article offers a short commentary on the “state of play” in early early childhood music educaeducation research to accompany the articles published in this issue. The commentary that follows presents my personal views, offered of fered as someone who has been involved involved in music education first fir st as an educator and then researcher for all my professional life. Hopefully it will prompt others to share their views so that through dialogue we can help to shape the future directions for early childhood music music education research. Another author, author, from another part of the world, working working in a different diff erent educational system, from a different disciplinary background, with a different biography would no doubt offer a different view. Interest in increasing our understanding of music among very very young children has expanded considerably in the last 20 years. Contributions span multiple academic disciplines—psychology, sociology, musicology, ethnomusicology, folklore and cultural studies, neuroscience—as well as the areas of applied research, primarily education, but increasingly increasingly therapy, community arts, parenting studies and childcare practices. In this edition alone the articles are orientated by theories from social cognition, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, chology, social psychology and identity formation and phenomenology. phenomenology. So the field of early childhood music, although comparatively small and internationally dispersed, is characterised by varying theoretical frameworks and underpinned by different and often competing epistemological perspectives. The varying frameworks and perspectives may, in turn, be aligned and interrelated with policy contexts and pedagogical ideals, strategies and curricula that vary considerabl conside rably y from country countr y to country countr y. Corresponding author:

Susan Young, University of Exeter, Heavitree Road, Exeter, EX1 2LU, UK. Email:  Email:   [email protected]

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To compound this complexity, the places where young children engage with music are also varied. Mainstream music education is primarily concerned with music learning and teaching in schools, but music for preschool children takes place in a wide range of places and situations. The studies reported in this special issue have been carried out in contexts that range from the home, a piano lesson, a preschool children’s centre and the New York subway. Home may still be the place where the majority of infants and very young children spend most of their time in close proximity to their primary carers and so music at home and its integration with parenting practices has become an important topic of research (e.g. Addessi, 2009; Custodero, 2006; Dean, 2014; Street, 2006). Equally, many mothers are employed in paid work and need to find alternative childcare arrangements and therefore many young children attend a variety of outof-home provision ranging from care provided by extended family members, nannies, daycare, kindergartens and preschool. The setting, be it institutional or home-based, pedagogical or “everyday”, will impact on the possibilities for music, the expectations and aims for music, and the pedagogical or parenting strategies for achieving those aims. Carrying out research in such a variety of settings poses methodological and theoretical challenges for early childhood music researchers and, as the articles in this issue aptly illustrate, there are innovative approaches to research being adopted by early childhood music educators, particularly in endeavouring to access and research musical experiences and learning taking place in naturalistic settings outside institutional care and education. Researchers working in different countries are drawing attention to how early childhood music education in their country is inscribed with distinctive values, understandings, concepts and goals and how they impinge on children’s musical activity (Andango & Mugo, 2007; Ilari, 2007; Kiilu, 2010; Lum & Whiteman, 2012; Miya, 2007; Whiteman, 2014; Woodward, 2007). Theory and understandings of children as musical that have been forged in the affluent Euro-American countries cannot be lifted out of context to be applied to other countries. Adachi (2001, 2013), for example, discusses spontaneous singing among Japanese children in Japanese early childhood education, finding interesting differences from the accounts of spontaneous singing from North American and European contexts. Similarly, Girdzijauskienė (2011) discusses concepts of creativity in the context of a Lithuanian education system that provides and values a comparatively formal music education for all children from a young age. New theoretical concepts are starting to emerge that have relevance to diverse populations of children rather than just relevance to minority, affluent children living in Europe and North America (see Miya, 2007; Whiteman, 2014). A study by Lum (2016), for example, explores the parenting goals of Chinese parents in Singapore and how music learning is articulated within those goals. Similarly, Ilari (2007) has explored conceptions of music and early childhood in Brazil. Given the considerable variations in theoretical viewpoints, contexts, concepts, values and goals, it is little wonder that early childhood music education research can be a wide-ranging, disparate and often fragmented field. It can seem to comprise, particularly for newcomers, a bewildering array of different theories, aims, perspectives, methods and findings. This fragmentation highlights the value and usefulness of texts and review articles that aim to bring together, analyse and synthesise broad areas of research and find the links and commonalities (e.g. Young, 2013).

Paradigm shifts Broadly speaking, in recent years there have been two major paradigm shifts in research into young children’s music (see Young, 2005a, 2012). The first has been a major shift in how

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infancy and the first three years of childhood are viewed. The formerly “incompetent” infant of behaviourism, the infant as “blank slate”, has been eclipsed by the “competent” infant who is capable and skilful and is attuned and responsive to her environment (Tronick, 2007). This revised view of infancy has resulted in a considerable expansion of research into musical abilities, experience and activity in the first year and extended those interests into the first three years of childhood (see Trainor & Hannon, 2013 for an overview; also Trehub, 2004; Trevarthen & Malloch, 2002). Researching the musicality of infants has been greatly facilitated by tools and methods, mainly laboratory based, that have been developed to examine early infant behaviour (Trehub, 2010, 2016). The infant in her first year is now understood to possess and to use core musical competences to attune and engage with her world socially and for cognitive development (Adachi & Trehub, 2012). Moreover, via theories of musical attunement and entrainment, the infant is understood to be not merely the passive receiver of experience, but an active participant, intrinsically influencing her own developmental pathway (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2010; Young & Ilari, 2012). There have been advances in our knowledge of inherent musical proclivities (Trehub, 2010), how infants perceive and discriminate music (for representative examples see Costa-Giomi & Davila, 2014; Hannon & Trehub, 2005; Stalinski, Schellenberg, & Trehub, 2008) and have musical preferences (Lamont, 2003). This expanded knowledge of music in the earliest years has then increased our understanding of how these competences impact on infant and toddler musical behaviours (Delalande & Cornara, 2010; Trainor & Hannon, 2013; Young & Ilari, 2012). Research interest in the first three years of childhood includes a range of foci of which representative examples are music in the care of premature babies (Filippa, Devouche, Arioni, Imberty, & Gratier, 2015; Harmer, 2013), adult–infant musical exchanges (usually parent and infant) (Dionyssiou, 2009; Street, 2006), music in daily routines at home (Addessi, 2009), musical parenting (Custodero, 2006, 2008a; Ilari, 2005; Ilari, Moura, & Bourscheidt, 2011) and the musical activities of very young children in their families and homes (Custodero, Britto, & Brooks-Gunn, 2003; de Vries, 2005, 2009; Kida & Adachi, 2008; Young & Gillen, 2010). The revised view of the competent child has also generated considerable interest in the spontaneously generated musical activity of young children and studies have explored spontaneous singing (see Dean, 2014 for a recent review; also: Knudsen, 2008; Young, 2002, 2006) and music-making on instruments (Delalande & Cornara, 2010; Young, 2003, 2008a). More recently interest in neo-Darwinian theory, mainly from an anthropological perspective, and the possible evolutionary origins of music has given rise to interesting theoretical positions on the adaptive uses of music (e.g. Dissanayake, 2008) that have provided an additional theoretical lens for the interpretation of musical behaviours in infancy and early childhood. This perspective has motivated specific studies on musical competences that might have biologically beneficial origins such as rhythmic synchronisation and its relationship to prosocial behaviours (Kirschner & Tomasello, 2010). The age span of the children discussed in the articles in this issue reflects the strong leaning of contemporary early childhood music research towards the birth-to-three age phase. This revised view of the competent under-three-year-old has led to a rapid expansion (in affluent societies) of provision for babies and toddlers (usually accompanied by their parents) in the form of private classes, concert performances and multi-arts events. Arts and music organisations are interested in broadening their remit and widening their reach to be more inclusive of families with young children. Freelance individuals and companies are providing private classes. All of this increased activity has generated research projects interested to develop approaches, design artistic experiences and evaluate them and also to train creative practitioners who may not have an early childhood or educational background (e.g. T. F. Smith, 2011; Young, 2005b; Young & Rowe, 2010).

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The second paradigm shift has been a move away from attempting to identify and define normative models of musical development that can be applied universally to all children, to a view that recognises that children develop in individually nuanced ways. The developmental perspective views “the child” as self-contained and detached from context. However that view has shifted to a recognition that children are embedded in sociocultural environments, and their musical actions and experiences are therefore influenced by and contingent upon their environment (e.g. Barrett, 2010a). Adhering to this paradigm shift, research now takes account of the real circumstances of children’s everyday lives in all its ramifications; the resources and activities available to the children and the values, expectations and aspirations held by the adults and culture surrounding them (Young, 2009, 2012). On the one hand this perspective has motivated an expansion of research activity into the diverse cultural contexts of children’s music worldwide (see, e.g. Koops, 2010; Lew, 2005; Lum, 2008, 2009; Marsh, 2008) and on the other hand motivated research close to home to be sensitive to sociocultural context and how it impinges on the nature of children’s experiences (Young & Gillen, 2010). Important volumes representing this domain of research are Musical Childhoods of Asia and the Pacific (Lum & Whiteman, 2012) and Campbell and Wiggins’ (2013) seminal text on children’s musical cultures, both of which include a few chapters that focus on early childhood. Sociological and anthropological perspectives on childhood have been influential in this turn to understanding how the musical child is constructed within social and cultural contexts. These approaches emphasise children’s own cultural worlds and their agency in shaping these. Some leading examples of work in this vein are Gluschankof’s study (2002) of musical style among kindergarten children in a range of musical activities and Marsh’s (2008, 2013) studies of playground games in multiple cultural contexts. The articles in this journal issue reflect the turn to sociocultural perspectives and incorporate to varying degrees the influence of environment on the musical behaviours of the children they study. Meanwhile, interest in understanding musical development has not been abandoned. Continuations of this traditional, but nevertheless valuable, lens through which to view children’s musicality have continued to occupy the interest of some researchers, with children’s singing, as has always been the case, occupying the lion’s share of attention (e.g. Gudmundsdottir, 2014; Stadler Elmer, 2000). Greater consideration, however, is being paid to the impact of environmental affordances on development, reflecting the sociocultural turn (e.g. Barrett, 2010b). This second paradigm shift, in taking account of the social and cultural realities of children’s everyday lives could not ignore the rapidly changing circumstances of contemporary children’s lives. There has been increased movement of populations, which adds rich diversity to the societies of many countries. Incoming families bring with them a variety of musical traditions and will hold different expectations for their children as musical when compared with resident populations. The importance has been recognised of studying music as sociocultural practice among families and young children of diverse ethnicities now living in the same countries as a result of migration for historical or recent reasons (Gluschankof, 2015; Huynh, 2014; Marsh, 2013; Wu, 2015). One of the features of the changing demography of many societies is that divisions and differences are opening up along new fault lines. Differences have tended to be simply etched along ethnicity lines, under loosely defined conceptions of “culture”, for which music education must adapt by incorporating “multicultural” materials that positively acknowledge cultural difference and assist with integration. But, increasingly, it is being recognised that there are intersecting divisions of poverty, gender, religion and urban/rural location and that genuinely accommodating difference to avoid replicating disadvantage, even unwittingly, is complex.

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There are longstanding beliefs, often backed by convincing evidence, that quality early childhood experiences in music can contribute to improving the life chances of children who experience disadvantaged childhoods, mainly due to poverty. The controversial El Sistema project, for example, which originated in Venezuela and has been taken up in other countries, aims to increase the life opportunities of low income children (Baker, 2014). Recent research and writing casts doubt on the “silver bullet” claims of this and similar programmes (Baker, 2014). Family life and work are transforming (Dencik, 1989) with increasing par ticipation of women in the workforce, the reduction of family size and loss of extended family networks (Clarke, 1996), and changing constructions of childhood in contemporary family life. These transformations have resulted in more out-of-home care and an important paradigm shift away from a focus on education to a unification of education, care and upbringing for very young children (Dencik, 1989), in which music as a tool for enhancing care and communication comes to the fore. This shift can be seen in early childhood music with studies that have developed models for music practice in daycare for babies and toddlers (Suthers, 2004) and the contribution of music to a holistic view of children’s out-of-home care and upbringing (de Vries, 2006; Young, 2008b; Young, Street, & Davies, 2006). Greater access to forms of technology, certainly for resource-rich children, but also increasingly accessible for greater numbers of children living in less affluent circumstances, is profoundly altering the nature and kind of musical experiences for young children (Young, 2008b, 2012). Research interest in new technologies has two sides: interest in everyday digital music experiences of young children (de Vries, 2007; Vestad, 2010; Young, 2012) and interest in how new technologies may be incorporated into and enhance practice (Kim, 2013; Koops, 2012). The topic of new technologies in practice can be further divided into technologies specially designed and developed for music education practice (Ferrari & Addessi, 2014) and adaptations of ubiquitous and hand-held technologies such as the use of tablets (Burton & Pearsall, this  journal issue). The media (including social media), enabled by new technologies, is another rapidly evolving dimension that has prompted interest in exploring the influence of new media and how young children engage with it (Brooks, 2015). Gluschankof (2011) has been interested in how young children’s music is presented and represented in social media such as YouTube. The impact of new technologies and new media on early childhood music, although profound and far-reaching, represents a new area of research activity, as yet in its infancy.

Connecting research and practice Many of these advancements—the recognition of children’s musical competences from birth, the diversity of early childhood musical experiences, the impact of new technologies—have deepened and developed our understanding of children as musical and are influencing the design of pedagogical interventions (see, e.g. Gruhn, 2009, 2010). Many applied research projects have problematised early childhood music practice, seeking to change and improve it (e.g. K. A. Smith, 2008). Early childhood music education conferences routinely include many interesting and valuable reports of explorations into pedagogical innovations (e.g. Nyland & Acker, 2012) or the testing of new strategies to assess their impact on children’s learning (e.g. Persellin & Bateman, 2009; Retra, 2010). The major pedagogical shift in general early childhood pedagogy has been from a constructivist-developmental framework to a sociocultural pedagogical approach influenced by Vygotskian theory (Vygotsky, 1978). There have been some projects that have investigated how Vygotskian pedagogical theory might be adapted to music education (see Custodero, 2008b; Hsee & Rutkowski, 2006; Nyland &

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Acker, 2012; K. A. Smith, 2008; St. John, 2006, 2010). The distinct pedagogy developed in Reggio Emilia nurseries in Italy (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1993) and inspired by the philosophy of Malaguzzi (1998), has motivated many innovations in general early childhood education and some specifically in music education (Bremmer & Huisingh, 2009; O’Hagin, 2007; Reding, 2014). However, as Gluschankof (2007) reminds us, the often referred to “gap” between research and practice remains a continuing challenge for early childhood music education researchers. Arguably, the aim of research should always be to improve the musical experience and learning of all young children and therefore researchers would wish to emphasise knowledge-for-use rather than knowledge for its own sake. However, scientific, objective knowledge tends to be privileged in academic circles and professional advantage for researchers tends to accrue from the production and publication of “pure” rather than applied research. Some academics have written highly valuable syntheses of research that are accessible to practitioners and help to bridge the divide (e.g. Flohr, 2010; Persellin, 2009). On the part of practitioners in a profession still blighted by low standards of pay and qualification, there is little incentive or support to engage in research-led practice. Valuable studies on the development of teaching practice for new (Gruenhagen, 2012) and experienced teachers (Bremmer, 2015) are few and far between but draw attention to the complexities of what can be neglected dimensions of early childhood music education practice, the process of teaching itself and how that might be theorised. The reasons, therefore, for the research/practice “gap” are set deep in the professions of early childhood practitioner and academic researcher, for each are bound by institutional demands and role expectations that impede the integration of research and practice. An additional point is that the increasing commercialisation of music for very young children as a commodity that is purchased by parents in the form of private music classes or one-off music performances and events, can bring liaisons between research and practice. However, the commodification of music for very small children can skew the way research is adopted and used. Here, parents and children are framed as consumers and research may be valued primarily for its usefulness in adding marketable attractiveness to the consumers, which then converts into financial gain to the providers.

Developments in research method Early childhood music education research now routinely employs qualitative methods, including observation, both participatory and non-participatory and a range of ethnographic approaches to capture and seek to understand children’s musical activity in naturalistic situations (see, e.g. Niland, 2012). There are some variations in methodological approach according to historical-cultural traditions and reflecting the academic environments in different countries, with researchers in North America tending to lean towards quantitative approaches within a more positivist paradigm and researchers in Europe, particularly Northern Europe, adopting more qualitative approaches within a phenomenological paradigm. One important development has been the shift from viewing children as the subjects of research to children as equal participants in the research process, a shift which brings methodological challenges in research with young children. There have been some innovative attempts to engage children as equal participants, including “show and tell” (Ilari & Young, 2016), the use of video replay to collect very young children’s responses (Arculus, 2013; Koops, 2012) and children taking photos to explore their notions of music (Whiteman & Campbell, 2012). The digitisation of sound and video and new, hand-held portable technologies have probably contributed the most to revolutionising music education research methods in recent years by

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providing easy video and audio recording techniques for the collection, cataloguing, analysis and sharing of data. New technologies have facilitated, speeded up and expanded the scope, precision and efficiency of research. As everyday, hand-held technologies become more sophisticated, so they become more adaptable to research; iPhones for example, can capture video and audio clips quite unobtrusively, then easily replay for shared viewing. Moreover, even quite young children can use these devices and become active participants in the research process (Whiteman & Campbell, 2012). Equally, music education practitioners studying early childhood music can now routinely collect and analyse video data “on the hoof” with considerable benefits to their knowledge and understanding of children’s musical participations. Technology can also facilitate the process of analysis by quickly converting audio and visual files into displays and enabling measurements that can be attuned to quite subtle criteria (e.g. Dean, 2014). As added advantage, for lone researchers living in internationally dispersed locations, social media provide many means for fruitful research communications (Young & Perez, 2012).

Conclusion In this overview I have highlighted the considerable advances in early childhood music education research. In the last 20 years, research has expanded downwards in age and much increased our knowledge and understanding of the birth-to-three age phase. It has also expanded outwards into sociocultural worlds and increased our knowledge and understanding of the interactions between the social, cultural and material environments and children’s musical participations. What challenges remain? There is still a shortage of research on very young children from diverse economic, social and cultural backgrounds. The bulk of research has been carried out in Western contexts, among Western children. If early childhood music education research is truly to adopt a global perspective the Euro-American orientation of research has to be decentred, and the white, middle-class child who all too often is the unchallenged central figure of research has to be dislodged (see Ilari, 2013). As a result of the expansion of interest in the birth-to-three age phase, children in the transitional ages of five to seven seemed to have slipped from focus. Yet these are the children for whom recent social and technological changes have a major impact on their musical childhoods (Ilari & Young, 2016). These children move between family and home, school and peers, community and cultural groups, live music and digitised media-music worlds, musics that are traditional to their family or drawn from children’s popular culture and are knitting these together musically in agentive and innovative ways (Ilari & Young, 2016). Research quite rightly focuses on the musical experiences of young children—that is its core purpose and endeavour—and the music-making of young children is, for the majority of researchers, what we find endlessly fascinating and absorbing in our work. However, this focus on children’s activity per se can be short-sighted and can allow research and theorising to overlook the wider sociopolitical issues (see Bond, 2012). The danger is that we leave these political issues which impact significantly on music education to be handled and decided by those who are detached from and may not have its genuine concerns at heart. An issue of Arts Education Policy Review (2007) contained commissioned articles dedicated to international accounts of policy for early childhood education (see, e.g. Andango & Mugo, 2007; Ilari, 2007; Persellin, 2007; Woodward, 2007), and prompted authors to review and in many cases challenge the institutional and policy context for music in their countries. However, aside from this one issue and its valuable articles there is no research-based literature describing, analysing and critiquing early childhood music education policies, programmes and systems or doing so comparatively across multiple societies.

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I suggest also that future research should ask more probing, fundamental questions (Bowman, 2005) and look more closely at the disciplinary and theoretical perspectives that have most influence on the constructions, discourses and policies for music education in different countries. Any research inevitably adopts a particular theoretical perspective which is partial—illuminating some aspects and occluding others. What is important, however, is to be aware of the theoretical choices and the consequences of those choices, to be aware of whose voices are heard and whose voices not heard, which children stand to gain and which, importantly, may lose out.

Last word: A vision If I venture a vision for the future of early childhood music education research—and to initiate the dialogue that I hope this article might prompt—it is for international and interdisciplinary research networks that carry out long-term research projects among quite diverse populations of children, collecting data across the age phase from birth to seven, and ideally longitudinally. The team of researchers would adopt integrated and varied methodological approaches both quantitative and qualitative, including ethnographies, observational studies, surveys, formal testing and ideally laboratory-based imaging techniques. They would take advantage of everyday hand-held technological devices for the collection, sharing and analysis of data and actively involve children, parents and practitioners in the research process. The data would then be shared collaboratively and interrogated from a number of theoretical viewpoints in order to build up a rich description of the variability of very young musical childhoods worldwide. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-forprofit sectors.

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Woodward, S. C. (2007). Nation building - one child at a time: Early childhood music. Education in South Africa. Arts Education Policy Review , 109(2), 33–42. Wu, Y.-T. (2015, May). The socio-cultural musical environments and development of young children of the Chinese diaspora in London . Paper presented at the MERYC conference, Tallinn University, Estonia. Young, S. (2002). Young children’s spontaneous vocalisations in free-play: Observations of two- to threeyear-olds in a day-care setting. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education , 152, 43–53. Young, S. (2003). Music with the under-fours . London, UK: Routledge. Young, S. (2005a). Musical communication between adults and young children. In D. Miell, R. MacDonald & D. Hargreaves (Eds.), Musical communication  (pp. 281–299). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Young, S. (2005b). Changing tune: Reconceptualising music with the under-threes. International Journal of Early Years Education , 13(3), 289–303. Young, S. (2006). Seen but not heard: Young children’s improvised singing. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood , 7(3), 270–280. Young, S. (2008a). Collaboration between three- and four-year-olds in self-initiated play with instruments. International Journal of Educational Research , 47(1), 3–10. Young, S. (2008b). Lullaby light shows: Everyday musical experience among under-two-year-olds. International Journal of Music Education , 26(1), 33–46. Young, S. (2009). Towards constructions of musical childhoods: Diversity and digital technologies. Early Child Development and Care , 179(6), 695–705. Young, S. (2012). Theorizing musical childhoods with illustrations from a study of girls’ karaoke use at home. Research Studies in Music Education , 14(2), 113–128. Young, S. (2013). Musical childhoods: A survey of contemporary research. In O. N. Saracho & B. Spodek (Eds.), Handbook of research on the education of young children  (3rd ed., pp. 250–264). New York, NY: Routledge. Young, S., & Gillen, J. (2010). Musicality. In J. Gillen & A. Cameron (Eds.), International perspectives on early childhood research: A day in the life  (pp. 27–36). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, S., & Ilari, B. (2012). Musical participation from birth to three: Toward a global perspective. In G. McPherson & G. Welch (Eds), Oxford handbook of music education  (pp. 279–295). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Young, S., & Perez, J. (2012). “We-research”: Adopting a Wiki to support the processes of collaborative research among a team of international researchers. International Journal of Music Education , 30(1), 3–17. Young, S., & Rowe, V. (2010). Chamber tots in the community: Summary report . London, UK: Wigmore Hall Learning. Retrieved from http://wigmore-hall.org.uk/learning/4-chamber-tots-summary-report/ file Young, S., Street, A., & Davies, E. (2006). Music one-to-one: Final report . Exeter, UK: University of Exeter.

Author biography Susan Young  recently retired as senior lecturer in early childhood studies and music education at the

University of Exeter, UK. She is also senior research fellow at the University of Roehampton, London, Research Associate at the Centre for Research in Early Childhood, Birmingham and is affiliated with the University of Bristol. Her career has combined university lecturing with a range of freelance research, evaluation and consultancy specialising in early years arts, music and education. Originally trained as a pianist at the Royal College of Music London, she went on to study Dalcroze Eurhythmics in Switzerland and the Kodaly method in Hungary. She spent her early career teaching music in secondary and primary schools and in a range of early years settings before gaining a PhD in early childhood music from the University of Surrey. She has published widely in professional and academic journals and is frequently invited to present at conferences, both nationally and internationally. She has written several books, including Music with the Under-Fours  and Music 3-5.