Contextual Violin Pedagogy for Young Children

Background

Elliott (1995) describes the original meaning of context as “to interweave, join, or weave together,” interpreting it as “the total of ideas, associations, and circumstance that surround, shape and frame, and influence something and our understanding of that something.” Although the violin class was considered a group violin class, the young children were engaged in various musical activities much broader than just learning to play the violin. For example, the children’s musical experiences included exploration of various musical instruments, listening and imaginative drawing, singing with gesture, and moving to music in addition to violin playing. All these activities were young children’s favorite things to do in their daily lives.

In a traditional sense, young children’s violin playing is a critical and important research topic of our time. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) once described children’s violin learning and said that many caregivers of young children focus exclusively on achievement of violin performance and mastering technical aspects of violin playing; however, there is no room for children to enjoy their learning creatively. Suzuki (1983) also criticized that many parents put too much emphasis on the progress of their children and overlook the social aspect of music learning, including group classes and a playful stance toward learning.

Recent investigations have focused on children’s violin playing in relation to their musical play in a family and social context. Akutsu (2016, 2018) observed young children’s violin playing in their family/social context and concluded that the violin playing of the child overlapped and socially supported similar spontaneous musical play. Drawn from the study, the violin itself contains a wide range of challenges, variety, and possibilities in sound-making—thus, it facilitates young children’s music learning (Akutsu 2018).

Such a view is echoed by Marsh and Young (2006), who illustrated the complexity and sophistication of children’s musical play in their interaction with other children, and said their play “goes well beyond many adult preconceptions” (p. 289). Lamb (2010) considers music as a social phenomenon and describes it as follows:

This emphasis on interaction differs from the emphasis on music education as either skills or talents. By emphasizing the interaction and the meaning of these interactions to the individuals, groups, social structures, and institutions, we gain much richer and deeper knowledge that subsequently demonstrate music as a meaningful and relevant educational endeavor. (p. 25)

In short, the contextual influences were strongly emphasized in the violin group class. The class provided a rich musical environment, and the children shared in musical experience and exploration with others. The class design had a clear connection to musical context of young children. As Vygotsky stresses the importance of children’s social interaction and socio-cultural context for human development, modern cognitive perspectives suggest that children learn cultural beliefs, values, and problem-solving strategies in the context of collaborative dialogues (Shaffer 2005).

Method

This case report describes the author-designed practice of violin group instruction for Pre-K children. Although the study depicted a practice of one-time group violin instruction at a public elementary school in Brooklyn, New York, the author repeated the same model of practice over ten years in kindergartens and/or nursery schools both in the United States and Japan more than 120 times.

This study—by applying Rother’s (2010) PDCA (plan-do-check-act), the interactive four-step management method used in business for the control and continual improvement of processes and products—described the whole picture of the practice followed by reflection of the practice. According to Herr and Anderson (2005), one of the aims to pursue action research is to improvise practice and to develop individuals; thus, it requires a reflective stance toward practice and considers uncertainty of the practice as a source of professional development (Schön 1983). As a result, action research often considers the researcher as an insider and practitioner who continuously plans, acts, and reflects on her or his practice to improve it (Prince 2009).

In this case study, a researcher of music education and violin teacher with more than fifteen years of experience in the field developed the practice in an ongoing manner. Field notes were the main source of this investigation, along with video excerpts and other teachers’ voices collected on voice recorder. Instead of analyzing the data about the practice, the study directly depicted and illustrated the practice with reflection. We selected the practice for illustration because there was the best support from classroom teachers, caregivers, and the principal of the school in preparation and after the session for reflection.

Case Description

Consider the case of the violin class for Pre-K students. Twelve young children ages either three or four were freely exploring the shapes and sound of toy instruments such as maracas, shaker, triangle, and a few unknown world percussion instruments. Since there were more than twenty instruments for twelve children, students were able to compare sounds of a few different instruments. Children occasionally scrambled for the single triangle, and they argued, but soon, they found their own ways to solve the problem.

About five minutes later, the theme song from the “Dora the Explorer” animated television series came from the iPod speaker, and the children spontaneously started jumping and dancing to the music. Many students danced and played instruments at the same time, so they created quite unique and complex body movements along with the musical sound. The children’s movement stopped when the music ended, so many asked me to play the same tune again. This repeated three times. At the last round, I walked around the room with a large bag to let the children return the instruments.

Next, two children were asked to provide blank paper to every child, and I provided boxes filled with mixed colored crayons. Again, there were more than enough colors of crayons for each student, so the children were able to choose colors freely as they wished. Right away, the iPod started playing “What a Wonderful World,” and I told the children, “Listen to the music and draw any images that come to your mind.” As they drew the images, I walked around the room and talked to everyone by saying “wow” or “very good” to encourage their imagination. During the session, some children were saying, “This is a ‘morody’ song.” “Yeah, ‘morody’ song.” Another child said, “I used to sing that!” Indeed, they hadn’t learned the word “melody” correctly yet, but they all enjoyed listening to the melody of “What a Wonderful World.” After the piece was over, the children quickly finished up their drawings and came to me to show their work by saying, “Look at mine!” We helped each other post all the students’ work to the wall at their eye-level.

Then, I picked up my violin from my violin case and played the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” followed by the same song recorded by a children’s chorus played on the iPod. Along with “Twinkle,” I made stars and diamonds by using my hands to choreograph the song. Some children imitated my gestures, others spontaneously sang, and some even started dancing to the music in a small group. “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” made everyone happy.

Finally, the iPod played the “Twinkle Variation” recorded with violin and piano accompaniment, published by the Suzuki Method. I held my violin at the height of my knees while sitting on a chair, without placing the violin on my shoulder. I called one student at a time and each child stood up intentionally and placed the bow on the strings. Although I did not teach them how to hold the bow, the children enjoyed working the bow back and forth across the strings and enjoyed the luxury of making sounds. After a boy finished playing open strings excitedly with the background music of the first variation of “Twinkle,” he said, “I was almost like that!” and pointed out my iPod speaker. Another boy answered, “Yeah, me too.” A few other children played the violin along with spontaneous singing of “Twinkle.” All the children kept asking me to play the tune again and again, so the violin playing continued for a while.

Reflection

In this scenario, although this class was considered a group violin class, young children were engaged in various musical activities much broader than just learning to play the violin. For example, the young children’s musical experiences included exploration of various musical instruments, listening and imaginative drawing, singing with gesture, and moving to music, in addition to the violin playing. All activities were young children’s favorite things to do in their daily lives. Thus, the class design had a clear connection to musical context of young children.

“Although this class was considered a group violin class, young children were engaged in various musical activities much broader than just learning to play the violin.”

In the described Pre-K violin class, the children’s experience was always the central part of the class activities. This process of experience-based learning was also applied to the young children’s violin learning specifically. According to Holt (1983–1995), when young children encounter the violin and have access to the instrument, almost all the children enjoy the luxury of making sounds by placing the bow on the strings and working the bow vigorously back and forth across the strings.

In the class, I prepared the violin on my knees while I was sitting on a chair and let the children hold the bow to experience sound-making. There was no instruction on how to hold the bow or where to place the bow. In general, many violin teachers set detailed rules on where to place the bow on the strings; for example, not to place the bow too close to the bridge or fingerboard, or to place the bow at a right angle to make a nice sound. Nevertheless, young children are usually able to control and self-correct bow usage to find a good sound. Indeed, young children do not need any official instructions on how to produce a nice violin sound—their intuitive experience guides the best learning to master sound-making on the violin.

Exploration takes another essential part of young children’s daily lives; thus, it also becomes an important factor to promote young children’s music learning. In general, when young children encounter unknown musical instruments, they first ask, “What do these instruments do?” and then “What can I do with these instruments?” All these inquiries are answered through young children’s exploration, discovery, imaginary play, and critical thinking (Custodero 2010a). In addition, extensive research indicates that once young children are intrinsically motivated to engage with musical materials, they find musical exploration as a compelling and rewarding activity, and thus pursue further challenge (Custodero 2005). In fact, creativity research in the realm of social psychology interprets intrinsic motivation to explore alternative cognitive pathways in problem-solving as one of the main factors to determine creativity in the daily lives of children and adults (Amabile 1996).

During my violin class, as I mentioned earlier, young children had opportunity to explore various sounds, colors, musical instruments, and movement. For example, to start the class, young children freely but intentionally explored various musical instruments for a few minutes. Gardner (2010) described young children’s playfulness, passion, and commitment to solve a problem, and sharing findings by saying “Look!” as a few factors that characterize creativity; in my class, young children explored, spent time on problem-solving, shared findings with others, and participated in enjoyable musical activities by using the learned skill. Although both teachers and parents tend to control young children’s behavior too strictly by saying “don’t make any noises” or “listen to the teacher’s instruction,” recent research emphasizes the importance of letting students explore objects, shapes, and sounds, and encouraging young children’s artistic autonomy.

Conclusion

“Affective experience may be why we do what we do” (Custodero 2010). Young children enjoy being in a rich musical environment, so they experience and explore musical sounds, objects, shapes, movement, and many more things intentionally with others. As a result, young children learn much beyond just how to play the violin. The consequences of CVP will be examined by a continuous research effort to correct longitudinal data and to assess this pedagogy objectively in the future.