ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine conceptual tools and workshop roles that preschool children used to mediate their understanding of musical improvisation activities. This project was part of the author’s Action Research PhD, which had two cycles of a six-week improvisation workshop programme. Although musical improvisation pedagogy is a rapidly growing field, with increasing critique on teacher’s approaches and methods, the participant’s perspective of creative tasks is under reported. To address this problem, all of the children’s talk throughout the workshop programme was gathered and analysed with Thematic Analysis in an Activity Theory framework. This innovative approach allowed for exploration of the ways in which preschool children understood improvising. Two overarching themes were identified; conceptual tools where children gained plural ways of conceptualising the music they created. The second theme, workshop roles demonstrated the creative agency that children had in the workshops, but also interpersonal tensions. Discussion of these results will highlight the importance of gaining the children’s perspective, to appreciate the ways in which they make sense of open-ended creative tasks over time.
