More than words

The power of communication

This series draws on peer-reviewed research in music psychology and music education. References and further reading are listed at the foot of each post. Where findings from my own doctoral research are shared, this will be clearly indicated.

There is a particular kind of research conversation that only becomes possible when you stop trying to have it in words.

Children carry complex interior worlds that verbal language doesn’t always reach. Ask a nine-year-old to describe how she feels when she walks onto a stage, and she may look at you with perfect sincerity and say: nervous, I guess. Ask her to draw it, and she may show you a small figure, dwarfed by a vast dark space, with lines radiating from her chest like something trying to get out. She may draw the audience as a row of enormous eyes. She may draw herself with no mouth at all.

The drawing says what the words couldn’t.

This is the core insight behind the research methodology at the heart of this doctoral study — and it is the reason that eight young singers were handed pencils and paper at three carefully chosen moments over eight weeks and asked to show me what their world looked and felt like.

The researcher in the room

Before delving into the methodology, it’s worth being transparent about the position from which it was conducted — because in practitioner-based research, the researcher is never a neutral observer standing outside the phenomenon being studied. They are inside it.

This research was conducted within my own voice studio, with students I had recruited, some of whom I had taught, and with whom I had built relationships over eight weeks of group lessons. I was simultaneously the teacher creating the community and the researcher studying how it formed. This dual role carries both significant advantages and significant responsibilities. The educational researchers Viviane Robinson and Mei Lai have written carefully about the complexities of practitioner research, and their guidance has shaped how this study managed the inherent tensions of the dual role.

The advantage is access to the authentic, unguarded moments of a group of young singers as they navigate something genuinely difficult together. A researcher who is also a trusted teacher, present in every lesson, earns a kind of trust that an outside observer cannot. The responsibility is rigour — ensuring that closeness to the participants doesn’t compromise the integrity of the analysis, and that what I saw is examined honestly rather than interpreted to confirm what I hope to find.

Throughout the study, I maintained detailed analytic memos, sought member checking with participants, and employed triangulation across multiple data sources to ensure that the findings reflected the students’ actual experiences rather than my own. The research was conducted with full ethical approval from Griffith University and with particular care for the well-being of all participants.

Why draw and tell

The methodological centrepiece of this research was the draw-and-tell interview — a participatory, child-centred approach to research that invites young people to express their experiences through drawing before discussing what they’ve created. The methodology has been developed and refined by the American nursing researcher Martha Driessnack, whose work with children navigating difficult emotional experiences — fear, illness, family upheaval — established draw-and-tell as a genuinely powerful tool for accessing dimensions of children’s experience that verbal interviews alone consistently miss.

The rationale is both developmental and ethical. Young children and pre-adolescents navigating complex emotional terrain do not always have ready verbal access to their interior experiences — particularly when those experiences involve shame, fear, or feelings they have never been invited to name before. Traditional interview methods, which place the researcher in a position of authority and the child in a position of verbal performance, can inadvertently replicate the very dynamics that make performance anxiety difficult to discuss in the first place.

Drawing changes the power dynamic in subtle but meaningful ways. The child becomes the expert — the only person in the room who fully understands what the drawing means. The researcher becomes genuinely curious, genuinely dependent on the child’s explanation. The drawing creates a shared object of attention that sits between researcher and participant, reducing the directness of the relational gaze. The Danish researchers Else Søndergaard and Susanne Reventlow describe how drawing-based methods create a particular sense of community between child and researcher — a collaborative rather than extractive encounter, in which the child is positioned as the one with the knowledge.

In music education research specifically, drawings have proven extraordinarily generative. The Australian researcher Jason Goopy’s recent work has shown how drawing-based methodologies can capture the nuanced ways adolescents navigate tensions between their musical identities and external expectations. Dawn Bennett has used drawing elicitation to explore identity formation among music students, revealing how visual methods can access dimensions of experience that verbal interviews alone cannot capture. Children express the feelings they cannot speak. They draw the social dynamics they have never consciously articulated. They draw the gap between what performing looks like from the outside and what it feels like from within — and in that gap, often, is exactly where the most important understanding lives.

The three moments

Each of the eight participants — Casey, Riley, Morgan, Quinn, Avery, Taylor, Jordan and Alex — engaged in three draw-and-tell interviews across the eight-week programme. Each interview lasted between 45 and 60 minutes, conducted individually in the music studio at carefully chosen points in the research process.

The first interview took place before the group lessons began — a baseline conversation designed to understand each student’s existing relationship with performance anxiety, with singing in front of others, with the prospect of joining a group of peers they didn’t yet know. The drawing prompt was deliberately open and personal: draw a picture of yourself singing in front of family and friends. What emerged from these initial drawings — the images children chose to represent their relationship with performance at its most familiar and intimate — established a vivid starting point for everything that followed.

The second interview took place at the midpoint of the programme, when relationships within the group were forming, and the culture of the community was beginning to take shape. The prompt shifted the frame: draw a picture of yourself in our voice class. This change of scene — from the generic performance context of the first prompt to the specific, shared space of the group — was intentional. It invited students to reflect not just on their individual experience of performing but on their experience of belonging to something together.

The third interview took place in the final week, after the group performance that brought the programme to a close. The prompt placed students at the culmination of their shared journey: draw a picture of yourself performing at our concert. Comparing these final drawings with the first — the same child, the same basic scenario of performing in front of others, but now carried through eight weeks of collective experience — produced some of the most revealing and moving data in the entire study.

The eight weeks

The research unfolded across three sequential phases, each designed to capture a different dimension of how social relationships influence the experience of performance anxiety.

The first phase — Weeks 1 through 5 — was the learning phase. Each weekly session combined structured musical activities with intentional community-building: connection activities, collaborative games, opportunities for students to make choices about their learning environment, and carefully designed moments of both individual and collective practice. Field notes were kept throughout every session, documenting social interactions, the development of peer dynamics, individual responses to performance moments, and the gradual emergence of group culture.

The second phase — Weeks 6 and 7 — was the rehearsal phase. With the group performance approaching, the focus shifted toward preparing together — not just musically, but relationally. How did students navigate the heightened stakes of an approaching public performance within their community? What support systems emerged, and who initiated them? How did the group hold its more anxious members as the performance drew closer?

The third phase — Week 8 — was the performance phase. The culminating group concert brought everything the community had built into the real conditions of performance: an audience, a stage, the full weight of being heard. Field notes documented not just what happened musically but how students responded to the performance environment together — the pre-performance moments in the wings, the ways students positioned themselves around one another, the gestures and glances and quiet acts of support that passed between young singers who had, eight weeks earlier, been strangers.

For research into performance anxiety, a real performance in front of a real audience is irreplaceable as a site of understanding. Controlled simulations and mock performances have value, but they cannot fully replicate the particular quality of aliveness — and vulnerability — that a genuine performance event carries. What happens to a young singer’s anxiety in that moment, and what role the community around them plays in that moment, is precisely what this research needed to witness.

What this methodology makes possible

Taken together — the draw and tell interviews at three observation points, the weekly field notes across eight weeks, the group performance, and the practitioner-researcher’s sustained presence throughout — this methodology created conditions for a kind of understanding that no single method alone could produce.

The methodologist Johnny Saldaña, whose multi-cycle coding framework structured the analysis of all this data, describes the work of qualitative analysis as the building of intimate familiarity with what participants have shared — reading and re-reading until patterns begin to surface, then testing those patterns against the data again and again until what emerges can genuinely be said to be in the data rather than imposed upon it. That is the work this study undertook with the drawings, transcripts, field notes, and the reflective activities the children completed throughout the programme. The themes that emerged — and that the next phase of this series will share — are the result of that careful, recursive listening.

The methodology honoured the voices of young musicians not as data sources to be processed efficiently but as the primary bearers of knowledge about their own experiences. It situated that knowledge within the real, living context of a musical community rather than extracting it into an artificial research setting. And it tracked change over time — the evolution of individual students and the group as a whole — in a way that a single snapshot could never capture.

Research with children, at its best, should feel to those children like something done in genuine partnership with them — something that takes their inner world seriously, that is curious rather than extractive, that leaves them feeling more seen rather than less. Whether this research achieved that is, ultimately, for the participants to judge.

What I can say is that it tried. With every pencil handed across a table, with every drawing carefully considered, with every conversation that began not with tell me what you think but with show me what you see — it tried.

And what they showed me is what the next phase of this series will begin, carefully, to share.

The title of this post comes from the song More Than Words by Extreme.

Part of the Little Voices, Big Feelings series — an evidence-informed exploration of music performance anxiety in child singers, written for parents, teachers, and music educators. Published weekly.

References

Angell, C., Alexander, J., & Hunt, J. A. (2015). “Draw, write and tell”: A literature review and methodological development on the “draw and write” research method. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 13(1), 17–28.

Barrett, M. S. (2009). Sounding lives in and through music: A narrative inquiry of the everyday musical engagement of a young child. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 7(2), 115–134.

Barfield, S. C., & Driessnack, M. (2018). Drawing as a method to elicit children’s understandings of complex experiences. Nurse Researcher, 25(6), 38–43.

Bennett, D. (2013). The use of learner-generated drawings in the development of music students’ teacher identities. International Journal of Music Education, 31(1), 53–67.

Driessnack, M. (2005). Children’s drawings as facilitators of communication: A meta-analysis. Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 20(6), 415–423.

Driessnack, M. (2006). Draw-and-tell conversations with children about fear. Qualitative Health Research, 16(10), 1414–1435.

Einarsdóttir, J. (2007). Research with children: Methodological and ethical challenges. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 15(2), 197–211.

Goopy, J. (2023). Intersections and conflicts between adolescent boys’ musical possible selves, university study, and parent values. Psychology of Music, 51(2), 624–639.

Robinson, V. M. J., & Lai, M. K. (2006). Practitioner research for educators. Corwin Press.

Saldaña, J. (2021). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Søndergaard, E., & Reventlow, S. (2019). Drawing as a facilitating approach when conducting research among children. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1–10.

Further Reading

Christensen, P., & James, A. (Eds.). (2008). Research with children: Perspectives and practices (2nd ed.). Routledge.

National Health and Medical Research Council. (2018). National statement on ethical conduct in human research. Australian Government.