Stephanie Schuurman | Graduate Research Assistant

My relationship to this project grows out of a lifetime spent singing. I grew up in Alberta and British Columbia, immersed in choral music shaped largely by Western European traditions – cathedral repertoire, formal choir structures, and pedagogies that often emphasize precision, blend, and discipline. These musical worlds gave me a deep love of singing and a strong sense of musical community. At the same time, they also shaped my assumptions about what singing “should” sound like and how musical learning is expected to unfold. Coming to this research, I carry both gratitude for those traditions and curiosity about their limitations.

Today I work as a teacher, researcher, and artist whose work moves between classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and experimental sonic spaces.

I teach early childhood music and undergraduate music and education courses, alongside K–6 music in the public school system. My research interests include sound studies, affect theory, queer and feminist thought, critical disability studies, and research-creation. I am particularly interested in the agency and voice of children and in challenging dominant assumptions that frame children as passive recipients of knowledge rather than active contributors to shared worlds of learning and creativity.

These commitments shape how I approach the From the Voices of Children project. As an adult researcher studying children’s experiences of singing, I recognize that I hold institutional and social power within the research process. My role in this work is therefore not to speak for children, but to help create conditions in which their perspectives can be heard and taken seriously. The project invites children to reflect on their own experiences with singing – in school, at home, and in community settings – and positions their insights as meaningful contributions to how we understand music education.

My own positionality also includes identities and experiences that shape how I listen and interpret what I hear. I identify as queer and neuro-atypical, identities that inform my sensitivity to questions of belonging, difference, and the ways institutions sometimes reward conformity over expression. These perspectives make me particularly attentive to the wide range of ways children experience singing – whether with joy, hesitation, curiosity, resistance, or delight.

My engagement in the FVC project is guided by a simple but powerful question: What might change in music education if we took children’s own perspectives about singing seriously? My role in this project is not to arrive with answers, but to listen carefully, remain reflexive about my own assumptions, and make space for children’s voices to shape the conversation.

You are welcome to visit www.stephschuurman.ca to learn more about me and my other work.