Abstract:

The purpose of this case study is to understand pre-service teachers’ perception of using songs and music with American Sign Language (ASL) and/or musical instrument(s) as the intervention during their required semester of field experience in Early Childhood Education classroom settings for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, or kindergartners. The participants were 50 college students who took two junior-level and one-senior level Early Childhood Education courses in a college in the Midwest, USA. For the data collection and analysis, diverse data were collected and analyzed such as pre- and post-surveys (administered online via Qualtrics), students’ reflection papers, and the author’s field supervision and observations.

There were five major findings:
(1) most pre-service teachers agreed that music is important for young children and music can be an effective tool to interact/communicate with young children during the required field experiences.
(2) many pre-service teachers thought that music has an unconscious and potential effect on children’s intelligence, morals, and aesthetics,
(3) most pre-service teachers believe that songs and music with ASL and/or musical instrument is a valuable and effective tool to interact/communicate with young children during the required course-based field experiences,
(4) many pre-service teachers want to learn more about musical instruments such as classical guitars and keyboards and apply this knowledge to their future instruction,
(5) music and songs with ASL and musical instruments were strongly related to children’s or students’ social/emotional development.

The findings of this study imply that using not only classical guitars or electronic drums, but also diverse musical instruments would be valuable and studying the effects of music with ASL and/or musical instruments for young children by age would be beneficial for pre-service teachers in the field of Early Childhood Education. ​

Keywords:

Early Childhood Teacher Education, American Sign Language, musical instrument, classical guitar​.