The muse within Book

Jon-Roar Bjorkvold is recognized around the world for his pioneering research on the spontaneous singing and play of children. Through his studies of child culture in Norway, the United States, and Russia, he determined that singing and playing exhibit remarkable similarities across wide national and cultural differences. These similarities led him to postulate a "Muse Within" - that is, the basic human capacity for creativity within all of us. Bjorkvold's particular focus is on the holistic learning process that comes naturally to children. Even before birth, in the womb, the unborn child "listens" to its mother's voice and experiences the rhythm of her movements. Later, these same "muse-ical" qualities - sound, rhythm, and movement - are expressed in play and spontaneous singing, activities that may appear random and chaotic to adult eyes but are in fact intricately patterned, and at the same time allow for daring leaps into the unknown. Bjorkvold's fascinating analysis of child culture as a model for human creativity through all the stages of life is liberally strewn with no-nonsense advice to parents and educators about how to nurture the Muse Within. Using his child-centered, ecological theory of learning and teaching, Bjorkvold offers an impassioned critique of contemporary educational methods, with special emphasis on music education. His findings are very much in line with those of Howard Gardner and others at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, but his approach is utterly unique, drawing on a wealth of revealing anecdotes, personal stories, and examples from literature - what Bjorkvold calls "story passages" that serve as "eye, heart, and brain openers" leading the reader into his provocative discussions of learning theory and research. Bjorkvold boldly mixes genres, his method of presentation mirroring the very qualities of playfulness and imagination he seeks to tap. Integrating a diverse range of personal and cultural experience, learning theo