Broadly speaking, socio-cultural theory informs a great deal of our understanding of teaching and learning in music. To grasp this understanding and unpack the layers of experiences requires countless hours of observing, listening, questioning, analysing, interviewing, notating, consulting, verifying and at times, becoming as one with the research participants in order to capture their experiences at first hand. In so doing, we generate research that builds knowledge, deepens understanding and extends theory. Invariably, it is a slow process.

Singing is an important part of teaching for early childhood teachers. However, some teachers find this difficult and may even identify themselves as ‘tone-deaf’. We invited a group of early childhood teachers who self-identified as ‘tone-deaf’ to participate in a study to investigate their beliefs and behaviours about singing and musicality. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 40 participants via a questionnaire. Results indicate that these teachers considered themselves to be unmusical and revealed negative feelings towards singing. They showed a general self-consciousness about their singing. These beliefs had been formed through various interactions with friends, family and in schools. While the teachers still participated in singing activities in the centres in which they worked, their participation was marred by feeling self-conscious when singing and they often altered their singing behaviour.

Global colonialism and continuing post-colonial influences caused widespread cultural change at the interface of different cultures. Musical acculturation can be observed in most colonised countries. Some pro-colonialists apologetically allege that through colonisation the colonised territories would receive developmental aid and economical benefits. If this was the case, did Korean music education also benefit from Japanese colonisation as is commonly claimed? And also, was Korean school music acculturated by the Japanese curriculum? To answer these questions, I scrutinised the intentions of colonial Korean music education through interviewing 42 witnesses who attended primary schools of the time, simultaneously analysing school activities such as morning assembly and the military draft, both of which show musical content. The interviews focused in particular on the day-to-day life at school, pedagogic content and impacts of colonial education on pupils’ later life and cultural identity.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how amateur choral singers experience collective group support as a method of learning ‘art music’ choral work. Findings are derived from a grounded-theory based, socio-musical case study of an amateur ‘art music’ Bach Choir, in the process of rehearsing and performing the Mass in B Minor by J.S. Bach. Data collection consisted of participant observation, qualitative interviews and a paper-based survey. Findings indicate that in the process of learning a challenging choral work, participants use peer-learning as support and form supportive groups within each voice part, with ‘informal leaders’ supporting others (‘followers’) who are performing the work for the first time. On the other hand, performing a challenging work can also seem ‘intimidating’ for those less experienced singers. Findings also indicate that whereas followers (and the conductor) benefit from this group support, ‘leaders’ may experience a certain lack of musical challenge.

This study is the result of a two-year experimental collaboration with children from my piano class. Together, the children and I designed a method that uses visual expression as a starting point for composing and visualising music-theoretical concepts. In this method various dimensions of musicality such as listening, creating, noting down and performing are interrelated. The article goes on to compare this method with other piano methods in which visual expression is part of the learning process. The findings indicate that, by using their visual capacity, children can acquire a deeper insight of what music means as structured material and a better understanding of the music terminology.

Current research in music education tends to put the emphasis on learning processes outside formal academic contexts, both to rethink and to renew academic educational formats. Our aim is to observe and describe three music learning cultures simultaneously, including formal, non-formal and informal settings: Classical, Jazz and Flamenco, respectively. We observed the conceptions of learning, teaching and evaluation within the framework of implicit theories. We used multiple-choice questionnaires to infer the profiles of these conceptions in 30 guitarists who are starting out on their professional careers in the three cultures and analysed whether there are related profiles. The results show that: (a) the Flamenco culture differs significantly from the others in the conception of teaching; (b) the three cultures are most alike in the conception of evaluation, for which conceptions are more sophisticated; (c) the classical culture is closer to constructive conceptions and farther from direct positions, while the opposite is true of Flamenco.

The guitar has a high value in cultural capital and we are immersed in a culture in which the guitar is the predominant vehicle of music-making. Given the guitar's mass popularity, it follows that the guitar-learning community is vast and diverse. Subscribing to the social model of disability, I problematise the guitar as being disabled and conducted an instrumental case study using the ethnographic tools of video-based observation, field notes and a semi-structured interview to chronicle the experience of teaching an adolescent with Down syndrome how to play the guitar. Different approaches to enabling the guitar are examined including open-tuning, standard tuning and a modified two-string guitar. Findings discuss the importance of the guitar to the participant as a percussive and rhythmic instrument and additionally as support for singing in the context of jamming.