The formative years of life provide the most important elements to equip children with the capacity to learn. Therefore, underpinnings for art pedagogy for Australian First Nations early childhood education should ensure that educators and teachers may contribute environmental foundations for children’s learning while ensuring that children have effective resources to prepare them for an ever-changing world. The challenge is balancing the expectations of the home with the expectations of teaching and learning in early childhood educational settings.

Music is a powerful resource for human relating and the expression of meaning. From birth, infants are sensitive to music, explore vocal sounds in musical ways and have the ability to process music. Studies examining interactions between infants and their adult caregivers have discovered the fundamental musicality of these interactions, and the more musical these interactions, the more meaningful they tend to be. However, the potential of music functioning as a conduit for meaning expression, particularly in application to the education and care of young children, has largely been overlooked.

The portrayal of infants and young children’s music-making tends to cast their music participation as a process of becoming, potentialities and efforts towards an adult ‘expert’ state of being musical. Such views can lead to a view of young children as deficient musicians, their music-making as inadequate, and a dismissal of the ways in which they use music in their world-making. Further, through a singular focus on the adult ‘expert’ musician, music education tends to be shaped to achieve that outcome instead of a perspective of music education as preparation for lifewide and lifelong engagement. The adult ‘expert’ view of music participation in adulthood is restricted to a particular form of participation that can disenfranchise and silence many adults’ active music. This chapter will explore what happens when we shift our focus from a perspective of young children’s music-making as becoming from ‘emulation of expert adult activity’ to a manifestation of their being, of their agency, identity work and world-making through embodied music and song-making.

The objective of this chapter is to define socio-dramatic play from a cultural-historical perspective and to describe how teachers can become co-players with children in their play. To do this we present case studies from research and a pedagogical toolbox to support children’s participation, learning and development. The chapter begins by outlining children’s socio-dramatic play using a cultural-historical perspective to focus on interactions in shared play. In socio-dramatic play, imagination and creativity are central as children create narratives together. Play creates conditions for children to express and construct meaning with others and to become co-players in a shared imagined world. Adults in early childhood settings traditionally support children’s play by planning, resourcing and observing, although their role as co-player is less understood.

This chapter describes how conceptual learning is mediated by interactions, the environment and a range of semiotic modes. Using a case study approach, Illustration of Practice 3.1 presents four-year-old children’s dance-play and drawing-telling as exemplars of powerful forms of meaning-making and communication. The nexus between theory and practice is illustrated through an innovative model that supports children’s creative dance improvisation and experimentation, and links to graphic and narrative modes. Children’s sophisticated levels of thinking, feeling and relating are addressed, and the role of the teacher is foregrounded with regards to supporting transformative learning outcomes for young children.

The overabundance of examples in Schoenberg’s textbooks can often be overwhelming. When one solution might have sufficed to illustrate a particular concept, Schoenberg offered many. It was not uncommon for him to compose multiple alternative endings and ossia measures for a single solution, often devoid of aesthetic evaluation, and sometimes of explanatory text altogether. Readers of his texts are familiar with this quirk, but what was the point of such tireless exploration? Schoenberg believed that, through this systematic exploration of possibility, his students would gain the tools necessary to grapple with the unique problems of their own musical ideas. In turn, this emphasis on self-reliance and possibility fostered precisely the stylistic and creative diversity that we find among Schoenberg’s students, from Anton Webern to John Cage. Schoenberg’s emphasis on possibility encouraged a diverse pedagogical legacy that includes film composers, serialists, music theorists and even a composer who late in life saw no contradiction in adding punk rock performance to her résumé.

Arnold Schönberg’s Mödling residence (1918–25) is often referred to as the ‘birthplace of twelve-tone composition’. This influential method, however, was not an invention of the moment, but emerged in a protracted development process, many of the stages of which can be traced back to this place on the outskirts of Vienna. At Schönberg’s longest continuous residence in Europe, the influential Society for Private Musical Performances was founded, numerous students were taught and renowned composer-colleagues were received. Mödling was Schoenberg’s launching point for travels that accompanied his growing international recognition. He left the small town in 1925, when he was appointed professor of a master class in composition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

This chapter provides educators with a new way of looking at how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been represented within the Australian Curriculum. We commence with an open discussion about the structure and potential shortcomings of the cross-curriculum priorities as evident in content descriptions across the Australian Curriculum. Use of a systematic method will help educators aim to engage learners in moral, historical and epistemic questions of Indigenous connectedness to Country/Place and their custodianship of it and the nature of Indigenous agency, resistance and national reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. We will also look at cross-curriculum content structure; provide a pedagogic model for culturally responsive teaching; advise on establishing authentic school and community engagement; and suggest a framework for the development of rich, contextually situated and holistic programs for teaching the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cross-curriculum content across the primary years of schooling.

Wherever we are in society, we are surrounded by the Arts. This text has been designed by artists, and the words you read are just visual artworks representing the oral storytelling foundation of all societies. Its layout was designed by artists, using multiple media forms. You are reading it in an environment where the soundscape will hopefully allow you to concentrate. Your body is probably positioned to minimise discomfort and maximise efficiency, while communicating your current state of thought to all those around you (whether consciously or not). Surrounding you may be posters, objects, noises, people interacting with facial expressions, probably some communicating via Facebook, Instagram or other social media using increasingly advanced technologies. The Arts power our lives, yet too often we power down children as they enter formal education (preschool and upwards), stifle their natural forms of communication and interaction, and slowly destroy their ability to be creative and to think diversely.

A legacy is something inherited by a successor, and in Boulez’s case what he handed down to posterity (his writings, activities and compositions) evolved in complex ways from his own early mentors and influences, particularly Messiaen, along with what the young Boulez determined to be the essential innovations in works that had the greatest unfulfilled potential in the 1940s and early 1950s. Boulez’s own works were naturally part of his legacy but in his later years changes in musical fashion meant that his accomplishments as conductor, writer, teacher of performers and institutional figurehead provided an even more potent example to potential emulators than his actual compositions. His unambiguously modernist sensibility and concern to place serious music at the heart of the prevailing culture brought a remarkable coherence to bear on the rich diversity of his life and work.

From the moment they are born, infants are active and competent learners. Before birth, they perceive and respond to stimuli from the outside world and the people in it. Newborns recognise and respond socially to other people and pay attention to interesting objects and events. Infants are born ‘ready to learn, and during their first three years, they learn, develop and grow at a faster rate than at any other time in their lives. Rapid physical development enables mobility, exploration and physical manipulation; emerging social and emotional skills foster relationships, wellbeing, and belonging; increasing communication and language competence support social interactions, literacy development and learning; and cognitive advancements cultivate critical ways of thinking and understanding. The skills and understandings that infants and toddlers achieve during their first three years form the cornerstone from which all future learning, development and wellbeing is built.