Special Issue: Language, Literacy, and Singing

Children's singing has been extensively studied in music education over recent decades by emphasising effective vocal skill-development and vocal pedagogy, as well as by approaching children's cultures through song repertoires. However, little is known about the meanings young children ascribe to singing and their experiences of singing in increasingly diversifying educational contexts, in times when global (e.g. UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child) and national policies (The Child Strategy in Finland) are urging societies to better take into account children's perspectives on decision-making that concerns their own lives. The objective of this study is to develop a new, interdisciplinary understanding of young children's singing, conceptualised as singing ecologies, and to highlight that singing in schools may have a much wider role than mere musical learning and vocal expression. The knowledge gap is addressed by asking: What meanings do children ascribe to singing within their ecologies? The ecological framework for exploring children's singing was constructed through four interconnected dimensions: 1) the ecology of children's development and its constituent processes as an existential matter; 2) the child's voice and the production of space and the power relationships as embedded in diverse spaces in children's everyday lives; and 3) ecological agency and singing as affordances; and 4) social-ecological systems thinking, which allows considering the school as 'a bridging organisation' in a culturally diversifying society. The concept of children's spaces, drawn from childhood studies, is used to conceptualize children's singing spaces as the core for understanding singing ecologies and the potential of singing to become an affordance in school. The case study's empirical material was generated in an ethnographic framework through semi-structured interviews with 6-7-yearold first-grade children (N=22) and their teachers (N=4) in one culturally diverse school in the capital area of Finland. In addition, the empirical material included researcher observations and a diary. Narrative analysis methods were combined with thematic analysis within an ecological framework. The findings show that first-graders are already aware of how their singing relates to their social-ecological relationships and are able to reflect verbally on their experiences. They furthermore show how children navigate between public and private singing and produce spaces of trust and freedom through singing. They produce singing spaces for their own uses: to handle everyday life struggles, to create new ways of acting and participating, and to exercise their political voice by addressing their stance. The findings illustrate the importance of the qualities of the relationships that children experience in i places of singing. Children also recognise the difference between singing in school and singing outside school, as well as the meanings of singing in school, in which singing appears as an adult-led activity that is sometimes resisted. For the children, feeling connected with and accepted by others in school is fundamental. Children varied in terms of how eager they were to share their cultural differences and home cultures through singing and music education in their school. Furthermore, the findings show that young children seek for opportunities to produce in-between spaces of singing in school, for example in the school yard or even in secret in the classroom. The dissertation contributes to a more complex, spatial, and relational ecological understanding of children's singing in school, as narrated by the children themselves. It challenges learning-centred teaching practices in music education in schools, teacher education, in-service teacher training, and research suggesting a new awareness of children's singing ecologies in educational institutions. It advocates for an awareness of the existential qualities of singing, which cannot be reduced to learning the use of the singing voice. It concludes that more attention should be given to singing as a powerful activity and affordance that can bridge home and school experiences, and to the school's ability to function as a bridging organization through a curriculum of caring that can help young children navigate their singing ecologies and lives in a meaningful way.

Scientia, 2021

The Phenomenon of Singing, 2014

This paper describes an initial exploration of the informal singing culture in one school/ community site in a small Caribbean nation, St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). The first author's collaborative work with teachers in SVG on literacy pedagogy provided the opportunity to explore the oral culture practices in which SVG children engage, and to think about the potential these informal practices might hold for children's literacy development. Current research into connections between children's musicking and their literacy readiness and literacy development supports our understanding that embodied experiences with rhythm, metre, phrase, rhyme, language play and sound play are of vital importance to both musical and literacy development. We describe several examples of SVG oral culture singing, graciously shared by various culture bearers. We posit that a respectful awareness of the significance of oral traditions and of children's oral culture practices is essential for literacy educators.

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2006

In this article the author suggests that the persistence of a ‘performance model’ of early childhood music education has detracted attention from children's spontaneous musical activity. The article focuses on one dimension of children's spontaneous musicality: improvised singing. Descriptions of short episodes taken from two periods of observation, the first in a day-care setting among two- and three-year-olds and the second in a nursery among three-year-olds, provide examples of different kinds of improvised singing and how they are integrated into physical movement, and play with objects and malleable substances such as sand and water. The descriptions move into detailed discussion which draws attention to the way in which, as they play, the children's singing represents one mode blended among many and gives insight into time-based processes. The author goes on to suggest that these time-based processes support ways of engaging, either with material things or in inter...

This paper discusses the interaction of vocal music skill development with phonemic awareness (the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of language) and fluency training in kindergarten and grade one language arts instruction. The phonemic awareness and fluency activities provided in language arts curricula are often music related: songs, chants and rhymes. Research is discussed regarding auditory processing related to vocal production; developmentally appropriate singing, prosody (the intentional grouping of words into phrases), and music perception as it relates to reading achievement. The pedagogical strategies necessary for developmentally appropriate modeling in both music and language arts instruction are discussed.

2007

 Song singing means organising simultaneously linguistic and musical elements into a coherent unit by reproduction (imitation) or (spontaneous or requested) invention. Children developing in a bi-cultural context familiarise with a larger variety of cultural conventions than mono-cultural children. For the latter, microgenetic analyses of strategies in making new songs at different developmental stages have been described, but none for bi-cultural children. Our case-study concerns a six-yearsold boy with a Turkish family background, attending a German kindergarten. The song he learnt was also used in studies with mono-cultural children. Compared to them, the bi-cultural boy had considerable difficulties acquiring the lyrics and melody. He adopted the beginning of the melody (primacy-effect) and the end of the lyrics (recency-effect), whilst ignoring the middle part. He then tried to fill it in melodic and linguistic elements. He continued with a regular meter despite of producing inappropriate accents in the wording. Albeit the discrepancies between the song model perceived and the ones produced, he was highly motivated and not yet hampered or discouraged by internalised conventions. This case study illustrates a strategy at the preconventional stage, and contributes to the variability of the phenomena during a crucial time for developing a (bi-) cultural identity.

The Phenomenon of Singing, 2003

We sing because we must." So said Keri Kaa of the tribe Ngati-Porou and of the clan Ngati-Porou of the eastern district of the north island of New Zealand, and that phrase has resounded in me ever since. Keri Kaa is a Maori musician and teacher, a singer of songs, lullabies, and laments, and a composer of moteatea (traditional song-poems of the Maori on subjects of ancestors, customary practices, and continuing rituals). Keri Kaa's proclamation at a gathering of teachers several years ago, that no Maori gathering, be it a wedding or a welcome ceremony, a festival or a funeral, is complete without singing and dancing, is a thing to marvel in a passive, post-modem world. When professional singers and songteachers gather, it is no wonder that we will sing. But when a whole society values song as vessel of culture and a human need to be fulfilled, that is a thing of great beauty and awe. Child-song and Song-singers Children also sing because they must. They have their rhymes and "rhythmicking" behaviours, their jump-rope chants and communal jams, their hand-clapping routines and singing games. Where adolescents and adults may prefer mediated music while they work (with the music of their favourite CDs and radio stations piped to them through headphones, or from a central sound system), children are still compelled to make their own music to fit their movements and their imaginations. Their verbal lore is frequently embedded in rhythm and pitch, so that they may convert their rhymes to songs and their speech to rhythms and recitative-like melodies. They are inspired (in unequal ways) by the popular music of the media, the seasonal, patriotic, and "school songs," and the music of their home and family surroundings. They use what music they know and make it meaningful and fitting for their own functions. Their "musical utterances," short musical phrases that seem to flow effortlessly from ideas somewhere deep within the mind's ear, are vocalized as they play, and many seem hardly able to function without their musical declamations coming forward (Campbell, 1998). What is the nature of the songs that children sing? A half century ago, Constantin Brailoiu (1954) found quarter-and eighth-note durations in children's songs from Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. John Blacking (1967) observed the children of the South African Yenda as singing songs that were at times rhythmically complex and with pitch content that was far beyond the adult perception of their music as "merely tritonic". He noted that the songs of Yenda children were typically incidental to some social event, including chores in the home or field, or songs associated with games. In opposition to standard pedagogical approaches to the teaching of songs to children, Blacking emphasized that there was no gradual progression by children of song-learning from simple to complex, but that they sang what they deemed interesting or of import to their circumstances; seventone songs might very well precede the performance by Yenda children of four-tone songs. Beyond Blacking's Yendachildren, or Brailoiu' s children of (mostly) eastern Europe, Bruno Nettl examined a wide array of collections of children's songs and published analyses of them. His conclusion was that there might be certain universal properties in children's music-including short forms, restricted scales, and repetitive rhythms (Nettl, 1990). As for the topics of their songs, children include a wide gamut of topics: modes of transportation (bicycles, cars, trains, and planes), pets and other animals, food, games and sports, family members, friends, and "love-interests" (imagined boyfriends and girlfriends, complete with predictions of marriage). There is a recent surge of interest by educators, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists to puzzle out the content and meaning of the songs children sing, and their findings will add to an understanding of the nature of their music.

The Oxford Handbook of Singing, 2018

Human vocalization contains key essences of our musical development and fosters our earliest abilities to communicate musically. Speech melodies are the first linguistic elements experienced and mastered, and are indistinguishable from the melodic precursors of singing as essential elements in intra- and inter-personal musical communication. Singing as communication originates in vocal pitch contours whose musical intervals are exploited by caregivers in infant-directed speech to foster language development. Similar, but more explicit, features are evidenced in caregivers’ infant-directed singing, such as in lullabies and play songs. These basic musical elements of communication can be perceived in utero and underpin the infant’s subsequent vocalizations and musical behaviors. Additionally, the underlying integration of emotion with perception and cognition generates a network of linked vocal and emotional behaviors that are central to human communication. The chapter will examine t...

2016

Children from different cultures have a natural aff inity for rhymes, rhythm and music. Imagine if students were able, from the beginning o f their education and experiences with academic writing and literacy, to access the uncons ci u and original selves from which to create their writing. The study of music can help t o access this aware, inventive side that can enhance anyone’s writing. As early childhood writin g teachers and a composition teacher, we draw on their experiences with young children with words and music. We examine the relationship between music and words in an effort t o bring the primitive drive of music into the emergent writing capabilities of children.

2014

In the standard traditions of both folklore studies and child psychology, descriptive and empirical research has only confirmed that lullabies and play songs are either a part of children's lore or a means of caregiving. In this paper I show how and why a socio-anthropological analysis of infant-directed singing, including ideas and themes represented in sleeping and waking songs, can provide fresh insights to grasp the social and cultural environment for their formal components, their performance features, and their semantic and functional aspects. Methodologically, a new picture of actors' practice must arise if we consider lullabies and play songs within an analytical context where they become an important instance of both music education and the symbolic structuration of cultural socialization.