Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemMusic education in day care and pre-school( 2002)When I started out on this research I had two concerns. The first of these related to the general neglect of musical development in early childhood and its broader social and cultural significance. The second related to the special challenge associated with being an itinerant music specialist concerned with teacher education in the performing arts in day care centres and kindergartens. A window of opportunity opened up for my research in 1998 with the Federal Government's adoption of a National Framework for Accreditation of Child Care Centres that specified amongst its criteria the fostering of creative development and aesthetic awareness in early learning centres. My career background as a performing musician and music specialist in schools had provided me with essential knowledge of classroom music teaching and provided some awareness of the need at a practical level to conform to the social logic and community storylines of new settings. I had also been a proprietor of an early education centre in which I had taught music so was aware of the rules, regulations, procedures and protocol that operated in these settings as well as public interest in improved educational services in the day care centres. It was never my intention to measure the level of musical attainment or basic skills of the children. I sought initially to research and represent existing provision and practices of music education in the early childhood centres through a collaborative research agreement with directors and proprietors of the centres and to appraise the potential influence of a peripatetic music specialist in encouraging or empowering the generalist preschool teachers in this area. My initial view was that this was an issue of making staff more comfortable and confident in delivering a form of participatory community music programs in early learning centres. The research was re-defined after a pilot study showed that the poor employment practice and the regulatory regime in the centres meant staff had little or no time for personal-professional involvement in my sessions with the children and a lack of experience or training among staff mitigated against discussion. The redefined collaborative research agreement was a more conventional autoethnography in which I would represent my experiences as a provider over extended periods as a visiting music specialist in each of 5 centres. The research is still a social representation of the dilemma of early childhood music in the sense that arts education was understood at a number of symbolic levels, corporate and educational, to be worthwhile but neglected, but the representations do not quote staff in the centres to the same degree that I had anticipated. To understand this change in research direction is to understand in large measure the problem of music education in the centres. These social representations of music education in each centre are constructed at the intersection of my purposes and social reality in each centre where I was trying to understand the prospects and the conditions for Arts Education. The social representations are primarily theories of lay knowledge in early music education in Australia. The focus of the research has been on a form of thought and its products of which the staff seemed largely unaware. I was seeking to anchor and objectivize music education in these representations. These are globalizing processes. In the representations I sought to anchor my music teaching in each centre by a globalizing process that shows how I made the world of each centre simpler and more manageable. I was showing myself and attempting to show others how one copes with the complexity of music education at this level by grouping musical events and instruments or equipment used together with the children and showing them as similar or equivalent in my accounts. Similarly, I sought to objectify or reconstruct events for the reader that were technical and complex, into something that was less differentiated, similar to something already known and into something conventional. My hope is that these representations can be incorporated into the symbolic social environment and become ontologized in the artistic work of staff and others in early childhood centres.