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

Abstract

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.