Ages and stages: is that the same child I taught last year? The elementary-aged student - Pedagogy Saturday VI

American Music Teacher, Oct-Nov, 2002

Donna Brink Fox, speaker

Early childhood is my current area of specialization as a music teacher, and it is often said that the early childhood years are the "getting ready" phase of development and learning. If that's the case, then the middle childhood time, ages 7 through 12, is fertile ground for continuing musical development. Learning how to tend this fertile ground involves understanding the landscape and its possibilities.

What's Your Zone?

I begin by asking you to consider, "What's your zone?" In gardening, the topic of "zone" is a serious issue that asks you to determine what is the temperature, what are the environmental conditions in your growing area? Zones are numbered (New York State is mostly zone 5.), and plantings are often labeled by appropriate zone.

For each child we teach, there are "zones" that affect what that child can do at various times in development. If we consider a beginner to be in "zone 1," how many zones would you find in your teaching studio? The important thing to remember is that each of these climate zones has beautiful flowering plants and fabulous greenery. In the same ways, each of the stages your learners will go through, each zone of musical development, can have legitimate, valuable buds and blossoms appropriate to the zone.

Principles of Development

Understanding the concept of "zone" requires that we examine some basic theories of development. A recent book published by the National Research Council, in cooperation with the Institute for Medicine, presents a number of core principles of development that are important; I chose these three to highlight today:

1. Human development is shaped by a dynamic and continuous interaction between biology and experience.

2. Children are active participants in their own development, reflecting the intrinsic human drive to explore and master one's environment.

3. The development of children unfolds along individual pathways whose trajectories are characterized by continuities and discontinuities, as well as by a series of significant transitions.

(Shonkoff and Phillips 2000)

One of these significant transitions for children occurs when they enter "school culture" in first grade. They begin to access new musical cultures that are part of this middle childhood stage of development.

School Music Culture

Patricia Shehan Campbell, professor of music at the University of Washington, has written about these age-based musical cultures in her book Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children's Lives. Dr. Campbell has extensive training as an ethnomusicologist, as well as a music educator, and she spent time observing children in their "natural" musical environments. For preschoolers, this was the playground at their school. For school-age learners, she spent time riding the school bus and documenting the musical material used there. She also observed in the school cafeteria, as upper-grade students assigned to help "clean up" the lunch room formed their own rhythmic ensemble ... a la Stomp.

Her observations and interviews include time spent in children's musical cultures, in children's "own back yards," as it were. Her vivid detail, including notation for invented patterns and spontaneous ideas, offers us a glimpse into this school-age musical learner--what interests them, what influences their thinking about music, what challenges them.

Three important ideas she identifies are:

1. Music is an important form of interaction with other children.

2. The mediated mass music forms the living musical culture for children today. 3. The school music culture often provides common repertoire for children to use in their music making efforts.

(Campbell 1998)

We have, then, these principles of development and these ideas about school-age musical culture. Together, they help us to understand our zone, our climate for musical learning. Let's go on to the next step of our musical landscaping project: testing the soil.

Testing the Sod

Some years ago, I took a landscaping course at the local community college. Before the first class meeting, I received a phone call telling me there was a homework assignment: "Go out to your yard, dig up a bag of dirt and bring it to class." The objective here was to find out, for each class member, what were the characteristics of the soil in our own yard. Because the soil makes all the difference.

What's the musical parallel of this dirt analysis? I would say it is assessing the musical development, the musical characteristics, that each child presents to you at their lessons. What can we expect to find in the soil of musical behavior? Singing, movement, listening, reading, playing an instrument, improvising and composing. All of these components make up the musical soil of young children's development. (For a recent research summary of these musical behaviors, see Lehrer 2002.)

Plan the Landscape Layout: Physical Features

When you design a landscape, the physical components are an essential first step. I compare bricks, stones and grass to the physical skills, the physical development needed by young musicians, including coordination, self-regulation and executive skills.