The role of music in early childhood
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© iStockphoto.com/Alison Hausmann |
Stories and music should play a key role in the education and development of young children according to early childhood educator and Macquarie University PhD student Amanda Niland.
“I think that the arts have a big role in education because we need to have aesthetic and expressive parts of our lives, rather than just scholastic knowledge,” says Niland. “The arts allow children to be open, creative and respond in their own way. There is no right and wrong in the arts which gives children a lot of scope for success.”
There is much research to back up Niland’s views. She has found a number of recent studies where arts and music have been integrated into the school curriculum. There is one program involving Indigenous children in the Northern Territory and another in Canada. “When the researchers looked at the effects of an arts-based curriculum they found that children tend to get more engaged with learning and with school as a whole.”
PhD research
Niland will explore the important role of arts in education in the first creative component PhD to be undertaken in the Australian Centre for Educational Studies. She is looking at children’s responses to stories with a musical component and composing her own original musical stories.
Currently Niland is reviewing current research on the value of arts in the education curriculum. There are some gaps in research looking into children’s aesthetic responses to books in preschools. Niland hopes that this will provide her focus.
“At this stage I’m thinking about children aged two to five and looking at how music integrated with stories will shape their responses.”
Creative component
Young children have provided Niland the inspiration for her songs. She has worked in early childhood settings and taught in the Music for Children Program at Macquarie University for the past 11 years.
Niland is putting together sets of stories that have relationships with one another. Some of her stories have a song that accompanies it, some songs extend the story and some tell part of the story. Stories are designed to be read aloud with music playing or with children participating by playing instruments, moving, chanting or singing.
To date Niland has written three stories designed for two to three year old children. “The stories have a teddy bear as the central character and follow the theme of clothes - one story is about new shoes, another about socks and the last about a lost shirt,” explains Niland. “Each story has a song and there is room for children to create new verses to the song with their thoughts about their new shoes or socks for instance.”
Ultimate goals
“My ultimate aim is to be able to develop materials for children that involve music and stories and possibly the other arts as well – drama, movement, visual arts,” says Niland. “I would like to develop some that can be used by teachers no matter what their level of confidence with music.”