Mignon van Vreden

Dr Mignon van Vreden is senior lecturer in music education and an Open Educational Resources (OER) fellow at the North-West University’s School of Music. She completed her BMus, BMus Hons and MMus degrees at Stellenbosch University and received her PhD from the NWU in 2014, exploring a conceptual framework for integrating music in grade R. Her main instrument is piano and research interests include music education in childhood, undergraduate music teacher education, and project-based service learning in higher music education. As part of her OER fellowship, she created an online platform, singingfeelings.com. The project “Singing Feelings” is an initiative to collect, create and facilitate open access musical resources that undergraduate music education students as well as the general public could use to support children’s social-emotional development, by assisting them to express themselves through original songs and musical activities. By making musical resources that relate music education to the socio-emotional development of the child freely available, music education students are finding creative ways to accommodate diversity and multilingualism in their own teaching. She is co-author of “Creative CAPS/Kreatiewe KABV”, a series of teaching manuals for Grade R; contributed to “Teaching Life Skills in the Foundation Phase” (2014), and “Teaching Life Skills in the Foundation Phase 2” (2020) published by Van Schaik; and wrote a chapter for “Music in the lives of young children” (2021), published by Routledge. In 2018 she received a Y2 Rating from the National Research Foundation and was awarded an NWU Emerging Teaching Excellence Award.