This collection of reflections is the first time that a group of Australian music educators has reflected on their doctoral journey describing and commenting on relevant academic, personal and other aspects relating to this intellectual rite of passage.

This co-edited book provides doctoral candidates with a practical, cross-discipline handbook for successfully navigating the doctoral process – from initial program selection to the final dissertation defense and preparing for the faculty interview. Invited chapters from established higher education experts cover topics ranging from university and program selection, preparing for comprehensive exams and dissertation research, self-care and self-management strategies, and recommendations for maintaining personal and professional support systems. Each chapter includes strategies for success and practical tips, including how to create a study guide for the comprehensive examination, how to create a professional support group, how to talk to your family about the doctoral process, how to select and work with a chair and committee, how to identify an appropriate research design, how to navigate the IRB process, and how to master the research and writing process.

Based on topics that frame the debate about the future of professional music education, this book explores the issues that music teachers must confront in a rapidly shifting educational landscape. The book aims to challenge thought and change minds. It presents a star cast of internationally prominent thinkers in and beyond music education. These thinkers deliberately challenge many time-worn traditions in music education with regard to musicianship, culture and society, leadership, institutions, interdisciplinarity, research and theory, and curriculum. This is the first book to confront these issues in this way. This unique book has emerged from fifteen years of international dialog by The MayDay Group, an organization of more than 250 music educators from over 20 countries who meet yearly to confront issues in music teaching and learning.

This volume is an innovative collection that transcends national boundaries and provides new knowledge about approaches to research and research education in music. The collection brings together leading thinkers and practitioners in music research from Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. The book is designed to serve as a resource for university music departments and conservatoires, and offers insights into the development of research programs in this context.

This is the first book to critically address the issue of how we can enhance and develop creativities in higher music education. It features new international, richly diverse perspectives on the nature and practice of creativities in different cultural and institutional contexts, in varying roles and in response to diverse professional pressures and expectations of artistic and educational achievement. This compelling and provocative book combines powerful social and educational commentaries and examples drawn from international sources based on original practices and experience of a diversity of creativities. The authors provide an important contribution by drawing attention to what is at the heart of all music and how we can understand and foster these multiple creativities at an individual and institutional level. It features new analyses of the question of creativities in higher music education, and offers illustrative and innovative examples of adaptive learning environments for teaching and learning creatively, considering the broader issue of the role of creativities in relation to educational policy in the context of increasingly interventionist governments and rapidly paced educational change. Topics covered include: -the conceptual tools for people to think about and debate multiple creativities -the role of creativities in higher music education -how musicians can develop multiple creativities in new ways -new approaches to teaching and learning for multiple creativities -what constitute leadership creativities in conservatoires and music departments -creativities at the interface of institutional learning cultures -assessing the multiple creativities of music. Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education offers a multi-disciplinary research and practice focus, which will be essential reading for anyone involved in higher education and industry sectors. The book will appeal to academics and practitioners in music, researchers, instrumental and vocal teachers, curriculum and policy developers and institutional managers who want to enrich the higher education experiences of their students and enable them to develop more of their creative potential. It is also ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of music education who are looking for an authoritative selection of writings that define the fields of musical creativities in one comprehensive volume.

Children are inherently musical. They respond to music and learn through music. Music expresses children's identity and heritage, teaches them to belong to a culture, and develops their cognitive well-being and inner self worth. As professional instructors, childcare workers, or students looking forward to a career working with children, we should continuously search for ways to tap into children's natural reservoir of enthusiasm for singing, moving and experimenting with instruments. But how, you might ask? What music is appropriate for the children I'm working with? How can music help inspire a well-rounded child? How do I reach and teach children musically? Most importantly perhaps, how can I incorporate music into a curriculum that marginalizes the arts?This book explores a holistic, artistic, and integrated approach to understanding the developmental connections between music and children. This book guides professionals to work through music, harnessing the processes that underlie music learning, and outlining developmentally appropriate methods to understand the role of music in children's lives through play, games, creativity, and movement. Additionally, the book explores ways of applying music-making to benefit the whole child, i.e., socially, emotionally, physically, cognitively, and linguistically.