The purpose of this study was to uncover the approach that a professor in Lithuania utilized in successfully teaching undergraduate music education majors how to improvise during a one-semester course. The research questions focused on the participant's philosophy of teaching and learning, his methods for motivating students, the learning…

Whereas most articles in this special issue demonstrate careful and close-up views of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in a performing arts or humanities discipline, my approach is opposite; I look in on music teaching and learning to interrogate current conceptions of SoTL. I begin with Sloboda's cognitive explanation of music…

Embodied mind theories underline the role of the body in the act of knowing. According to the enactive approach, we learn to perceive and to know through our bodily interactions with the world (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). However, such an approach remains incomplete as long as sociality is not taken into account (Froese & Di Paolo,…

This qualitative, multiple case study examined teachers' perceptions and strategies used to elicit emotional expression in students' piano playing. Since much of the existing literature depicts the relationship between emotion and music (Juslin, 1997; Perrson, 1993; Tait, 1992), yet little exists which explores conceptualizations of emotion…

This case study compares the teaching strategies employed by a novice and an expert instructor of two beginning children's group-piano classes. In the United States, there is a century-long tradition of teaching piano to children in groups, and group teaching is championed in pedagogy texts and at professional educator conferences throughout…

This article focuses on the influence of parental support and interactions on the young musicians' learning processes. In an attempt to corroborate the findings of the wider research, a case-study has been carried out comprising observations of 34 parents and 34 piano students taught by the author in three different locations (private studio,…