Emma Wynne-Jones
After training as a musician classically, Emma explored the creative and cognitive processes intrinsic to music teaching and learning. Emma’s teaching artistry has developed through nineteen years of research and reflective practice in music – movement pedagogy and social artistry, taking her all over the globe. Her teaching background includes training at the Orff Institute in Salzburg, the Kodaly Academy in Hungary, and the Gordon Institute of Music Learning in the USA. Her teaching is deeply influenced by a decade of studying the Alexander Technique alongside her studies at the Royal College of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. She has completed a Mastership Certification in Early Childhood Music and has twelve years experience of teaching and directing music in schools, after-school music programs, early years music programs, as a clinician, and in her own private music studio in the Cotswolds.
Emma is a qualified elementary teacher and has led a team of music teachers as Artistic Director of an El Sistema-inspired youth music program in Northern California, and as Director of Music at Tockington Manor School, United Kingdom. During her tenure at the latter, the TMS Choir became an award-winning choir. Emma’s teaching approach has audiation at its foundation. Audiation is to music as thinking is to language. Her teaching approach mirrors the way in which children learn their mother tongue. Emma draws on her training in dance and physical theatre to enrich her music teaching practice.
In her efforts to reach young troubled minds Emma engaged in a Masters training in child and adolescent psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, London. As a qualified creative arts/play therapist she has accumulated a wealth of experience in working with diverse children and families. Her psycho-pedagogical orientation is informed by her therapeutic training and practice. Her experience of running therapeutic and transformational groups using the creative arts, along with a wealth of experience working and living on holistic land-based enterprises, poises her to facilitate and lead generative tribal/team-building retreats and camps.
Emma’s yearning for musical and relational excellence is core to her praxis. She believes Music is a gift entrusted and bestowed to our species, with extraordinary capacities to educate, liberate, transform and redeem. Music doesn’t happen in a vacuum but emerges from a unique and intimate relationship between teacher and student(s). Emma has dedicated herself to the artistry of teaching, conducting and coaching.
Emma believes music, used creatively, can shape the entire personality of the child. Led creatively a musical ensemble can shape an entire community! Mediocrity will not generate and unleash this inherent transformative power – thus Emma is mindful of the quality of music and education provided to her students, not just the knowledge and skill base of the teacher, but equally if not more importantly, how she and her team conduct themselves with students, parents, colleagues and the larger community.
Emma brings her disciplined cognitive agility, relational attunement, artistic and pedagogic expertise and creative juices to whatever project she applies herself to.
As well as conducting choirs, teaching music, and working in a therapeutic and coaching capacity, Emma loves dancing, braiding, storytelling, travel, horsemanship and low-stress stockmanship – being a human agent in the synergetic dance that is the art and science of regenerative land-animal-people stewardship.