Designing Activities for Teaching Music Improvisation in Preschools – Evaluating Outcomes and Tools

This chapter gives an in-depth analysis, through Activity Theory, of two key music improvisation activities developed by the author. These two activities were part of a series of music improvisation workshops delivered by the author to a group of six preschool children in Scotland. The workshops were designed around two novel constructs back-engineered from the researcher’s professional experience as an improvising musician, Creative Musical Agency and Socio-Musical Aptitude. Creative Musical Agency (CMA) is: The child creates novel musical material independently and executes this in the group improvisation. Socio-Musical Aptitude (S-MA) is: The child creates a musical response with reference to another child’s musical idea in the group improvisation.

Through examining video analysis of the workshops, teacher interviews, children’s talk data and the author’s own reflexive data, a rich picture of the workshop activities is gained. The theoretical lens of Activity Theory revealed the creative musical decisions the children made and the ways in which these were mediated through physical and symbolic tools. Interesting possibilities and challenges in the activities were explored, and, therefore utilising Activity Theory has great potential for other researchers to examine complex creative pedagogical contexts.