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This collective case study aimed to explore the various expected roles for parents of preschool children in group music lessons in the Klang Valley of West Malaysia, the area located around Kuala Lumpur. We collected data by conducting two semi-structured interviews with 10 parents and three teachers of three preschool group music classes. Four broad themes emerged. Participants viewed parents as playing the roles of supporters, practice supervisors, role models, and consumers. We propose that a flexible understanding of role is essential in crafting meaningful relationships between parents and teachers and suggest the approaches that might assist future music educators to develop such a perception.

In this article, we discuss Christoper Small's concept of musicking in order to explicate his understanding of music as a practice and the implications of such an understanding for today's general music education. Our main argument is that, armed with Small's concept of musicking, we can deal with music in its full social-cultural significance. From this standpoint, music is not only just a collection of specifically musical practices but also a community of practice that affirms our existing social habits and helps us to transcend these habits through exploring and celebrating new relationships. Rather than taking music merely as something that people do, Small suggests that it is one of the most important ways of living as a human being, comparable to verbal communication. We also argue that based on this view, music should be seen as a central part of general education, not to be compromised by taking it out of school.

This theoretical inquiry approaches the challenge of reflexivity in the music education profession from the perspective of a collective and social understanding of memory. While memory is typically understood as being an individualistic, psychological, and cognitive phenomenon, in this paper we argue that the perspectives of collective and social memory may be of critical assistance to music teachers and music teacher educators who are facing the problem of increasing diversity. Teachers experience mounting pressure to include a wider selection of available material from the diverse musics of the world in their curriculum. We suggest that understanding the politics of memory–how memory shapes the future and reveals our reflexive capacity in terms of our bonds to, or freedom from, the past–provides new tools and perspectives for considering diversity. Furthermore, we propose that in order to make a difference, the politics of memory require an agonistic engagement in pluralistic societies, with multiple, even conflicting, relationships to memory and time, place, and space. The article argues that a critical politics of memory is not just about combining the past and present, but about re-imagining, re-negotiating, re-working, and re-generating the collective futures of the school, its educational context, and broader society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing effective parent–teacher relationships in music lessons is important for the well-being and learning outcomes of the learners. The aim of this collective case study was to explore the relationship between teachers and parents of pre-school children in group music lessons in the Klang Valley, which is an area in West Malaysia centred on Kuala Lumpur. It includes the neighbouring cities and towns in the state of Selangor. Interviews were conducted with nine parents and three teachers of three group music classes for pre-school children. The results point to the values and attitudes that parents and teachers hold and the interactions between them that both encouraged and discouraged parent–teacher partnerships, which are relationships where trust, reciprocity, mutuality, shared goals and decision making are essential characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades there has been a proliferation of neuromyths based on oversimplifications and over-generalisations of research findings. As part of a larger project that examines the societal impacts of the arts and arts education practices, this interdisciplinary collaborative study examines the translation of recent neuromusical research into the public domain, one of the main generators of neuromyths. We review the claimed benefits of musical engagement to other domains, and the ways that researchers discuss these claims. To accomplish this, we first provide a thematic analysis of the kinds of claims that are made in research texts. We analysed 76 review articles published between 2006 and 2016 that both concern brain imaging studies in humans and involve music. The analysis highlights the ways that researchers qualify the potential benefits of music. Second, we explore the ways that neuroscientists report their results to the public and the ways that these results are taken into public discourse. In order to do this we analysed the homepages of the researchers who published at least 2 review articles in our dataset, focussing on the media linked to their homepages. We also explored over 100 websites that mention the benefits of music and also refer to brain imaging research. These overviews allow us to show that the same criteria commonly applied in research are almost never applied in public discourse. We conclude that there is an ethical imperative for researchers to take care in presenting the research results of brain imaging studies to the larger public, and furthermore argue that there is an ethical obligation for researchers to speak out against misuse of research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]