Free-Access Videos as a Music Education Research Source: The Case of Kindergarten's Year-End Celebrations

Free and openly accessible videos have as yet not been treated per se as raw data for music-education research purposes. Bearing in mind (1) the potential of audiovisual records for the study of musical school culture in all its aspects, (2) the advantages of sharing that type of audiovisual data between researchers and from a variety of disciplines, and (3) the wealth of data available in open-space video websites such as Youtube.com that includes, inter alia, music classes in formal and informal settings, promotional clips for music-education initiatives or marketing music classes, and schools' celebrations – we embarked on this pilot study aiming to examine the value of online user-generated videos as raw data for music education research, specifically early childhood musical behaviours and instructional models in music teaching. The data was gathered from YouTube videos found under the terms "kindergarten year-end celebration," probably uploaded by the kindergarten pupils’ parents or teachers. For this pilot study a relatively small number of videos (sixteen), among many dozens found, were selected for (1) richness of content; (2) representing a variety of Spanish-speaking countries: Spain, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela; (3) year of uploading: 2006 through 2010; and (4) event setting: outdoors vs. indoors. Findings show that (a) the most frequent instructional models are practical, academic and communicative traditional (Jorquera Jaramillo, 2010); (b) adult interests and types of musical behaviours lie at the core of all performances; (c) children play gender-marked adult roles not corresponding to their age; and (d) shows’ traits can be defined as glocal.