Sustainability in music education can be approached as topical knowledge and as an integrated way of working with democratic values and societal challenges. Sustainability as a question of equity and justice based in systems thinking highlights the relations between music education practices and socio-ecological issues, enabling the music classroom to become a space where ethical and political questions can be explored. This paper presents two case studies of music teachers who worked with sustainability in their practice as part of a broader research project investigating the nexus between formal music education and sustainability.

The participating teachers work in international primary and secondary schools, respectively. Both independently chose to develop soundscape composition projects, one with six-year-olds and the other with twelve-year-olds. Data was generated through interviews, classroom observations, and materials produced by the teachers and their pupils. Grounded in practice theory (Schatzki, 1996, 2001), the study investigates how music teachers engage with sustainability in their pedagogical practice.

Preliminary outcomes of the ongoing analysis suggest that working with soundscapes provided an accessible connection between the learners, music, and their immediate environment as a form sustainability awareness. The outcomes also raised the question of whether the ‘sustainability label’ is necessary, as it might introduce conceptual complexity that hinders rather than facilitates engagement. Although the music learning outcomes were clear from the outset, the significance of sustainability remained ambiguous. The projects were inspired by sustainability, yet this framing was not revisited with the pupils at the end. While the work allowed pupils to express imagination and ideas musically, it also challenged the teachers’ belief that music lessons should primarily focus on the mastery of musical skills through performance-based practices.

By focusing on teachers’ experiences, the paper illustrates how they construct meaning around sustainability and negotiate tensions between aesthetic and political purposes of music education.

This paper presents the final results of the Musical Narratives project, which explored how primary school students (ages 7–10) invent musical narratives—symbolic sound structures analogous to storytelling (Barrett, 2003; Stadler Elmer, 2015). Building on a participatory action-research framework (Ferrance, 2000; Kindon et al., 2007; Stöckler, 2023), the study examined how students collectively developed, modified, or discarded musical ideas during a ten-week invention process. Three classes participated in the project. Data include audio-video recordings of group work, supported by clip-on microphones capturing peer dialogue, teacher reflections, and transcriptions of the musical narratives. Video-based content analysis (Mayring, 2019; Huber, 2020) focused on moments of negotiation—when students justified why a musical idea should be changed, maintained, or excluded.

Findings reveal a progressive transformation from individually generated ideas toward shared, co-constructed sound structures. Early sessions show exploration, with students collecting personal sound samples inspired by objects; later sessions involve increasing negotiation, coordination, and synthesis of ideas into group narratives. As organisational complexity grew, leadership roles often emerged spontaneously. Negotiation alternated between verbal explanations—such as explicit reasoning for musical decisions—and non-verbal cues, including gestures, movements, imitation, or musical responses within the group. Differences across age groups suggest developmental variations in how students externalise reasoning and manage disagreement. Beyond age, additional factors—such as group composition, prior collaboration, and task framing—appeared to shape how students spoke about, or refrained from speaking about, their creative musical ideas.

These analyses raise a broader question for discussion: What influences the ways students verbalise, negotiate, and transform their musical ideas when co-creating sound structures together? Addressing this question offers insights into how participatory music learning environments can cultivate both agency and relational understanding through shared invention.

Teaching music to children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is an under-researched (Ockelford & Markou, 2012) but complex area of professional practice. Teachers require a combination of music subject knowledge and specialist SEND pedagogy to meet the coexisting nature (Ockelford, 2008) and increasing complexity (Salt, 2010; Carpenter, 2007; Pinney, 2017) of learners’ needs. Despite this, there is a lack of mutual understanding of the training teachers require to teach SEND music effectively, with little attention paid to this within the professional and academic literature.

As a means of addressing this, a recent doctoral study examined the efficacy of a skills-based teacher training and mentoring model in SEND music (Johnston, 2023). The research involved four generalist (non-music specialist) in-service teacher participants from a primary special needs school (GTSS) in the UK. The longitudinal case study utilised various data collection tools including interviews, focus group discussions and classroom observations. Learner-centred theory framed decisions regarding the pragmatic nature of training and mentoring, as well as the analysis and reporting of data. Findings highlighted the importance of GTSS receiving domain specific, situated training and mentoring (Catalano, 2015; Lave & Wenger, 1991) from a SEND music specialist.

This spoken paper reveals what this training and mentoring looked like, exploring somewhat predictable connections with the music training of generalist teachers in mainstream schools, but crucially, identifying new links with early years music pedagogy (Bremmer, 2021) and with music training for early years teachers (Bainger, 2010; Barrett, Zhukov & Welch, 2019). The idea that music specialist teachers and early years music teachers could therefore play an equally important role in the music training and mentoring of GTSS is proposed, inviting further exploration of the potential interdisciplinary nature of the SEND and early years music education fields in terms of pedagogy, practice and professional development.