The present study clarified that childcare workers' narratives of music outreach had never been properly examined in previous studies and carried out interviews and analyses using the Modified Grounded Theory Approach to investigate how childcare workers who experience music outreach explain their practices. The results showed that the central topic of their narratives was not what skills or knowledge children is acquiring, what children can do in practice. This shows that kindergarten and nursery school are the places for workers to focus on children's abilities. The results of this study also showed that setting up interviews or meetings causes one to pay attention to the actions of children that one would typically ignore and to view these actions from a new viewpoint. From these results, it can be concluded that interviews or meetings can be opportunities to promote horizontal learning or to verbalize and visualize horizontal learning.

  This study aims to characterize the Suzuki method from an insider viewpoint of Suzuki teachers, by focusing on the teachers' narratives. By studying teachers who have worked close to the founder and his philosophy, both in Japan and the United States, I focused on “ethos in the Suzuki teachers' community,” drawing on narrative inquiry, showing the ways Suzuki teachers embrace Suzuki Shinich's philosophy in a living form. For this purpose, I chose specific summer schools whose teachers aspire to remain faithful to the original Suzuki method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with individual teachers and groups of teachers at both sites to extract common topics representing the teachers' values and beliefs. It became clear that the Suzuki method is oriented toward “music education as human education”. The significance of playing in unison, in particular, was demonstrated through teachers' narratives to embody the ethos of collaboration, co-learning, and co-development - openly rejecting the competitiveness so common in traditional music education. The potentiality of music for human society and education was confirmed by reciprocal teaching and learning in the Suzuki teachers' community, and by the growth of parents and teachers as well as that of children.

  Many studies approach the phenomenon of artistic singing from scientific viewpoints such as acoustics. However, from the practical view point of voice teachers and students, the pivotal problem is how to define the concepts of singing ability and beautiful voice. The purpose of this paper is to consider the concepts of singing ability and what constitutes a beautiful voice. In order to achieve this, this paper analyzes the thoughts of Frederick Husler. Most studies have either been interested in the influence of his teaching techniques during the vocal training, or scientific aspects of his teaching techniques. On the contrary, this paper is interested in his thoughts on “ability” to sing and “beauty” of the singer's voice. Husler argues that everyone has “ability” to sing, since everyone has vocal organs, therefore anyone can sing artistically if they use the vocal organs properly. He explains that “beauty” of singing voice reflects the proper use of the vocal organs. Husler's argument shows us the necessity of reconsidering the concepts of singing ability and beautiful voice. It will be shown that through his thoughts on vocal pedagogy, Husler reminds us of the importance of being interested in the thoughts of singers and singing teachers.