Music is a powerful resource for human relating and the expression of meaning. From birth, infants are sensitive to music, explore vocal sounds in musical ways and have the ability to process music. Studies examining interactions between infants and their adult caregivers have discovered the fundamental musicality of these interactions, and the more musical these interactions, the more meaningful they tend to be. However, the potential of music functioning as a conduit for meaning expression, particularly in application to the education and care of young children, has largely been overlooked.

The portrayal of infants and young children’s music-making tends to cast their music participation as a process of becoming, potentialities and efforts towards an adult ‘expert’ state of being musical. Such views can lead to a view of young children as deficient musicians, their music-making as inadequate, and a dismissal of the ways in which they use music in their world-making. Further, through a singular focus on the adult ‘expert’ musician, music education tends to be shaped to achieve that outcome instead of a perspective of music education as preparation for lifewide and lifelong engagement. The adult ‘expert’ view of music participation in adulthood is restricted to a particular form of participation that can disenfranchise and silence many adults’ active music. This chapter will explore what happens when we shift our focus from a perspective of young children’s music-making as becoming from ‘emulation of expert adult activity’ to a manifestation of their being, of their agency, identity work and world-making through embodied music and song-making.

In this chapter, we focus on the implementation of the planning cycle in infant and toddler settings and how it might be co-constructed, documented and shared with key stakeholders. Throughout this book, we have examined how the first three years constitute a foundational period with particular competencies, vulnerabilities and opportunities for growth and learning. Infants and toddlers deserve, and indeed have a right to experience, curriculum that is specifically designed to nurture their unique ways of being, belonging and becoming. At the same time, very young children are not a homogenous group but individuals with their own interests, dispositions, strengths and challenges. Quality curriculum is planned to be responsive to these individual differences. Planning curriculum is an important professional practice requiring educators to act with what the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) calls intentionality, meaning their curriculum and practice is deliberate, thoughtful and purposeful.

Infants and toddlers are immersed in the social culture of their family, community and society from before they are born. Every family has distinct social practices and ways of interacting which shape very young children’s holistic physiological, cognitive and emotional learning, development and wellbeing. These practices reflect the values, beliefs, norms and expectations of their community and culture. Over time, through repeated social encounters and experiences, the social culture of their family and community is passed on as infants and toddlers become socialised into these specific ways of engaging with others. Social practices and interactions thus form the basis of the relationships that infants and toddlers form with significant others. As a result, the social opportunities that very young children experience and participate in during their everyday existence have far-reaching consequences for their sense of identify and belonging.

Most simply, the words ‘pedagogy and care’ capture and describe the core work that is done in the earliest years of education with very young children. Early childhood education (ECE) shares the same general aims as primary, secondary and tertiary education, with an overarching focus on learning and development. Educators working with infants and toddlers practice in a space where pedagogy and care are inextricably linked. It could thus be argued that ideas about pedagogy in relation to infants and toddlers are hardest to reconcile. This challenge may be due to the particular history of infants and toddlers as the youngest children in society, driven by discourses of maternalism and inherently tied to an image of their place in the home, where they were for many centuries. However, infants and toddlers are attending ECE settings in ever-increasing numbers and upholding their right to quality pedagogy is a professional responsibility of all ECE services, leaders and educators.

From the moment they are born, infants are active and competent learners. Before birth, they perceive and respond to stimuli from the outside world and the people in it. Newborns recognise and respond socially to other people and pay attention to interesting objects and events. Infants are born ‘ready to learn, and during their first three years, they learn, develop and grow at a faster rate than at any other time in their lives. Rapid physical development enables mobility, exploration and physical manipulation; emerging social and emotional skills foster relationships, wellbeing, and belonging; increasing communication and language competence support social interactions, literacy development and learning; and cognitive advancements cultivate critical ways of thinking and understanding. The skills and understandings that infants and toddlers achieve during their first three years form the cornerstone from which all future learning, development and wellbeing is built.

From the moment of birth, infants are immersed in a world of communication. Attentive adults look into their eyes, smile and coo at them, and use touch, eye contact and simple sentences to connect. In return, newborns respond to the human voices that they have been hearing in utero by looking towards the adult’s face and moving their bodies and faces. They also respond neurologically, with parts of their brains associated with auditory language processing activated by human speech more so than by other human sounds such as humming or non-distinct speech. Within the first six months, they not only use cries, coos and facial expressions to communicate feelings and needs, but also engage in rudimental back and forth exchanges with attending caregivers. The desire to connect with others through language and communication is indeed a very strong and uniquely human trait.

For many adults, the idea that infants and toddlers are ‘knowers, thinkers and theorisers’ is a strange one. Such concepts are often associated with older children whose abilities to build and express understandings are more evident and align more readily with traditional ideas about learning and teaching. Furthermore, cognitive states and processes such as ‘knowing’, ‘thinking’ and ‘understanding’ are not visible in the same way that physical, social and emotional behaviours. This means that they have to be inferred and interpreted, especially when pre-verbal infants and toddlers cannot tell you what is going on in their heads. Together these challenges may result in a deficit view that, instead of seeing infants and toddlers as active and capable learners, positions very young as waiting to learn. Also, an emphasis on meeting physical and emotional needs may come at the cost of overlooking infants and toddlers cognitive capabilities and potentials.

Human emotional responses are a complex mixture of physiological, cognitive, social and communicative activity. Emotional activity occurs in response to inner and outer worlds and is deeply shaped by the social and cultural environments in which it is embedded. Very young children experience (and learn about) emotions by feeling, understanding and showing them. These sophisticated emotional capabilities lay the groundwork for co-creating social affective relationships with important people in their lives. As the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) states, when educators tune into and try to understand children’s emotions and feelings within respectful and reciprocal relationships, they support their learning, development and wellbeing. Emotional wellbeing can be seen as the glue that holds children’s learning and development together. Similarly, an educator’s emotional wellbeing can bind their professional learning, development and satisfaction together. Without emotional wellbeing, learning and development for both children and educators can be negatively impacted.

The environments we create for the infants and toddlers in early childhood education (ECE) settings are critically important because they shape the daily lived experience of children and educators, and create the conditions for children’s interactions, wellbeing, engagement, learning and development. ECE environments are not neutral, nor are they natural. They are constructed in specific ways for specific purposes and are a representation of our philosophy that ‘speaks’ to children, educators and families about our image of the child, about the value we place on family, culture and community, and about our beliefs regarding teaching and learning. ECE environments are political because they influence the possibilities for interactions, relationships, empowerment and agency.

This chapter explores the value of the arts in the lives of very young children in early childhood education settings. It is hard to imagine a more joyful or rich opportunity for connection, expression and learning in early childhood than the arts. Humanity has always created art in a range of forms for a range of purposes and the youngest children are innately attracted to engage in music, dance, drama, and visual arts experiences.

In contemporary Australian society, the word ‘quality’ is ever-present in professional and political discussions about early childhood education. Educators and families are told that ‘quality is important’; curriculum documents, such as Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), aim to enhance quality; services are rated for the quality of education and care that they deliver; and governments regulate service conditions and provisions in order to facilitate the provision of high quality practice. Together, these social, professional and political structures communicate a strong message that quality matters for young children’s learning and wellbeing.

This chapter takes a different approach to common ECE perspectives on physical development that, for example, focus on the stages of achievement of fine and gross motor developmental milestones. Instead, we focus on the bodily functions, movement and deep physical learning that are central to infant–toddler pedagogy. This is because embodied health and wellbeing in the first three years of life are the foundations for ongoing holistic learning and lifelong outcomes. The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) acknowledges this through its recognition that cognitive, linguistic, physical, social, emotional, personal, spiritual and creative aspects of learning are all intricately interwoven and interrelated. Promoting physical health for holistic wellbeing reflects this view by acknowledging the whole body as the physical home of all these parts. The brain is the ‘control centre’ for many of the complex integrated systems within the body, including the nervous and sensory systems, that establish and guide development.

Across Australia and beyond, early childhood education (ECE) services play a significant role in the everyday lives of infants, toddlers and their families. For some decades, the enrolment of infants and toddlers has increased to the extent that, in today’s Australian society, around 40% of birth to 24-month-olds and nearly 60% of two-year-olds spend at least part of their week in an early childhood service. More still balance ECE service attendance with informal care arrangements with family members and friends. With these figures echoed across many countries worldwide, the widespread uptake of infant and toddler early childhood programs has meant that this generation of infants and toddlers and their families are experiencing a markedly different start to life than previous generations. It is now the norm for infant–toddler care to be spread across multiple contexts both within and outside of the walls of the family home, and for the responsibility for early learning to be shared between family and non-familial adults.