The Role of Arts and Music in Early Childhood Education

Introduction

Given the importance of early childhood brain and sociological development (Duckworth et al., 2007; Cunha et al., 2010), the activities that children engage in (or do not) greatly influence their long-run outcomes, ranging from careers (Keane and Wolpin, 1997; Cunha et al., 2010) to health (Campbell et al., 2014) to sociological development (Luo et al., 2018). In this chapter, we explain why music education, and arts education more broadly, is an especially crucial investment in early childhood: it not only stimulates cognitive activity (Bilhartz et al., 1999; Costa-Giomi, 1999), but also socialization (Humpal, 1990) and good habit formation (Rickard et al., 2013). These early years are a particularly important time to develop a taste and competence for art and music through intentional practice because of how the brain develops (Kraus et al., 2014); simply listening to music is not enough to incur the benefits (Abbott, 2007).

Pedagogues have long viewed music as an integral component of childhood education; see, for example, Comenius (1592 – 1670), Pestalozzi (1746-1827), and Froebel (1782-1852) (Mark, 2008). During the early and mid-twentieth century, successful pedagogical approaches for childhood music instruction were developed by Dalcroze (1865-1950), Kodály (1882-1967), Orff (1895-1982), Suzuki (1898-1998), and Gordon (1927-2015). Contemporary approaches to early childhood music education are carried out by many organizations, including: the Feierabend Association for Music Education, Kindermusik, Music Together, and university-based community music schools, like the Eastman Community Music School. The pedagogical support is bolstered by substantial parental support for music education too (NAMM, 2003).

Motivated by all these foundational contributions, most contemporary approaches to early childhood music education offer some combination of chanting, singing, movement, and dance, listening, playing instruments, improvising, creating, reading and writing. They often blend the approaches initially pioneered by Dalcroze, Kodály, Orff, Gordon, Suzuki and their collaborators (Feierabend, 1989). Flohr (2004) describes 16 different methods for teaching music in early childhood and beyond. The specific music instructional approaches are best to tailor based on age so that they appropriately address children’s physical, cognitive, and social-emotional domains of development (Reynolds & Valerio, 2015).

Very early musical development is frequently paralleled with language acquisition (Burton, 2019; Suzuki, 1982). Before birth, the fetus perceives sounds from the environment and moves in response to musical stimuli. From birth to 18 months, infants and toddlers show increasing sensitivity to pitch, contour, and rhythm as they vocalize and babble. They freely move in response to musical stimuli as their gross motor movements develop. From 18 months to three years, as toddlers gain greater control over their vocalizations and motor movements, they enjoy imitation, repetition, and exploration of melodic and rhythmic patterns, and spontaneously improvise musical ideas (Burton, 2019; Flohr, 2004; Gordon, 2012). Music programs for infants and toddlers often focus on guided listening, movement to music, and guided music-making, and provide positive experiences for parents by giving them opportunities to be involved with musical mentoring of their children (Trehub & Degé, 2015). The first 18 months among primary caregivers are a critical period for musical development; the period from 18 months to three years is a sensitive period of musical development (Gordon, 2012).