Young children learn through play.This has long been acknowledged in the writings of educational theorists dating back as far as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel and is strongly supported by current early childhood research. Play is at the heart of contemporary early childhood pedagogy, and this has led to a strong belief in the importance of an emergent, child-centered approach to curriculum. Although music educators commonly recognize the importance of making music enjoyable, music education pedagogy for young children is often teacher led and structured toward specific behavioral outcomes. Research has shown, however, that child-centered musical play can be a powerful medium for young children’s exploration of many musical elements and concepts.

While the importance of inclusive approaches to research has been identified, much childhood research is still done ‘to’ not ‘with’ young children, with research focusing on the experiences of children who experience disability commonly involving data from parents/families/practitioners, rather than from children themselves. In this article, we explore the development of an arts-based research project involving young children who experience disability as active participants in an exploration of their perspectives on inclusive education. Accordingly, we ruminate on questions about how we can genuinely ‘listen’ to children who experience disability in an aesthetic and ethical manner, and how we can use artistic ways of knowing to engage in meaning-making with children. Using arts-based research as an aesthetic framework alongside insights from critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework, we explore ‘aesthetic’ approaches to being, teaching, researching and knowing. As a team of researchers who do and do not experience disability, we share reflections on arts-based methodologies informed by critical approaches to conceptualising disability and research. As artistic modes of expression are central to young children’s everyday lives and play and can create enjoyable and safe communicative spaces, we share dialogues, artwork and methodological reflections on opportunities for children to choose ways of interacting and communicating, allowing possibilities for agency, expression and creativity. Specifically, we conceptualise and concentrate on possibilities for using arts to foster ‘listening’, meaning-making and generative or transformative praxis, in order to explore how arts-based research can be a powerful, authentic, ethical and meaningful provocateur for listening ‘generatively’ to young children who experience disability in research.

This article outlines an action research/practitioner inquiry approach used in an ongoing professional development project involving educators in two early childhood (EC) education and care settings in Australia. The aim of this professional development project is to provide quality musical experiences for children as part of the overall curriculum, while at the same time building the musical knowledge, skills and confidence of the educators at the settings. The aim of the research is for the specialist music educator researchers to work collaboratively with the EC educators to develop an approach that will achieve the professional development aims. This article outlines the practitioner inquiry methodology used, and presents data and reflections on the most recent phases of the project, during which a focus on developing the musical attunement of educators to the children’s musicality and musical identities led to them sharing their own musical cultural identities with the children. Reflections from these phases of the project provide evidence of the positive impact of this approach on the musical self-efficacy of some educators, and the rich musical cultural sharing that has taken place.

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The concept of belonging is widely recognised as a fundamental part of human development and a key element of early childhood curricula. The research presented here explores the role of singing in the development of children's sense of belonging in a day nursery for children aged from six months to two years. The research design incorporated ethnography and portraiture, an approach to narrative inquiry. Data were collected over seven months, with the researcher adopting a participant observer role during regular visits to the nursery. Observation and interpretation of singing focused on relationships between children and adults and between peers. Themes of identity, togetherness, intersubjectivity and communicative musicality were identified in the analysis of data. The portrait shows the intrinsically interactive nature of singing, providing rich evidence of ways in which singing both supports and reflects the children's relationships and hence their sense of identity and belonging. This research contributes to literature on the musical lives of infants and toddlers that supports the value of music, especially singing, in early childhood.