Over the past three decades, piano learning has witnessed an upsurge in popularity in China. To examine why, between 2016 and 2018 ethnographic fieldwork was conducted among piano teachers, students, and parents of students. Employing the concept of piano pathway, this article tracks the relationship between piano learning and formal schooling and…

In this article, students build a prototype guitar. One way to get students to take creative risks is to allow playful approaches to their designs--let them come up with wild or silly ideas. By starting from such a wide-open place, many students will change their definitions and assumptions of what a guitar has to be. The result will be a wider…

Informal learning practices, based on Lucy Green's research into how popular musicians learn, offer students in the music classroom the opportunity to explore collaborative, aural-based learning that is guided, rather than directed, by the teacher. Over a period of five years, informal learning projects were included in the music curricula of two…