Instructional processes comprise three basic components: planning, delivery of instruction, and assessment. Educators frequently reflect on the relationships among those components to choose the most effective approaches to increase student learning. Teachers’ continual assessment of student knowledge and understanding through reliable, valid measures critically propels teachers’ effective instruction forward. Constraints on funding for public education have resulted in larger class sizes and smaller budgets for the arts, as well as a heightened focus on standardized testing, less instructional time, and fewer resources (Slaton, 2012). How, then, are music teachers effectively assessing student achievement while grappling with those challenges? To fill a gap in the research literature, the purpose of this research was to explore singing voice development assessment practices that public-school elementary-general-music teachers use with their students. The following overall question guided this research: What can we learn from three kindergarten through fifth grade general music teachers about their approaches to singing with their students? I sought to document three teachers’ singing voice development processes and assessment techniques. Recognizing that this study took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, I also sought to document participants’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of the techniques they shared, especially as they grappled with teaching singing in new learning models that were emerging; and adaptations they were using to safely and effectively guide students’ singing voice development—whether they were teaching their students virtually and/or in person. For this study, I chose symbolic interactionism as a theoretical lens and an interview-only design. Upon approval from Temple University Institutional Review Board, I invited the three participants who consented to engage in three semi-structured individual interview conversations to explore singing voice development assessment techniques, and benefits, challenges, and adaptations of those techniques, especially as they grappled with teaching singing in new instructional models that emerged as a result of COVID-19. After participants completed member checking of each of their transcripts, I used a content analysis approach to the data to identify emerging codes. Four themes summarized participants’ approaches to singing voice development assessment: teachers rely on their (a) personal philosophy formed from influences and values, (b) planning processes and objectives, (c) interactions with their students through selected techniques and tools, and (d) having time to make necessary adaptations in their singing voice development assessments. The key idea emerging from the study: the three teachers prioritized providing worthwhile musical experiences for their students. They situated singing voice development and assessment as one piece of their broader general music curriculum. A symbolic interactionist lens informed my themes and key idea by placing the context of teachers’ interactions in the forefront, and my understanding of how their experiences have shaped their views. While findings from this study are not generalizable, readers may find them transferable. Potential applications for other music teachers’ assessment practices include the following six examples: using a variety of tools to model appropriate use of singing voice, implementing pattern instruction to develop and assess singing voice, incorporating opportunities for individual singing, providing students with performance experiences, maintaining consistency in changing instructional models, and focusing on informal assessment through observation and questioning techniques. Future researchers can continue to shed light on how teachers approach singing with their elementary general music students by learning about factors outside of teachers’ instructional processes that impact singing voice development assessment, and how music teachers adapt their processes for singing voice development assessment in emerging instructional models. / Music Education

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The purpose of this study was to explore the emergence of subject-ness among children in the context of a world-centered elementary general music class. I addressed this purpose through the creation and implementation of a curriculum project in which young children engaged in lullaby songwriting. In so doing, I sought to explore curricular and pedagogical alternatives: namely, curricular purposes beyond functional literacy and pedagogical approaches with relational potential. This curriculum project was enacted alongside children (ages 5–6) participating in three classes of kindergarten general music in the elementary school at which I taught at the time. I framed this study using Biesta’s (2021b) domains of educational purpose and, in particular, the notion that teaching has the potential to encourage children to be(come) subjects in their own lives, rather than objects in the lives of others. Furthermore, I relied upon world-centered education (Biesta, 2021b) in this study as a means of addressing a “grown-up” (p. 51) orientation to subject-ness in which the subject is “in the world and with the world, and not just with themselves” (Biesta, 2020b, p. 37, emphasis in original). To realize this framework, I invoked three supporting concepts: project-based teaching (Dillon, 2023a), dialogic pedagogy (White, 2016a, 2021), and compassionate care (Hendricks, 2023). For this study, I assembled a critical educational action research design drawing upon Somekh’s (2006) principles of action research. The progressively iterative nature of this three-phase project was initially influenced by the self-reflective action research spiral (Kemmis et al., 2014), which I later adapted into the action research trellis—a visual framing in which inquiry is illustrated as potentially growing in divergent and unpredictable ways. Data collected as part of this action research study included video observations of our enactment of the curriculum project, focus group interviews with children, an individual interview with a kindergarten teacher, my research journal entries, and various artifacts, such as lesson plans. I conducted a thematic analysis of the data (Glesne, 2016) which yielded three overarching themes: snapshots of emergent subject-ness in childhood focused on care, resistance, and dissent; pointing as an invitation to explore subject-ness, including the myriad ways in which this pointing manifested and facets of the curriculum project which contributed to this pointing; and the reflexive gifts of teaching, including “philosophical play” and teacher-student “connections” (Research Journal Entries). I situated the implications of these findings in terms of both curricular and pedagogical reimaginings.

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