Music and Me focuses on inspirational women working in music. The importance of strong female role models (especially non-stereotypical role models i.e. not only women singers, but women drummers and producers) within music for girls and young women is enormous: to improve confidence and self-efficacy by showing them that women can and do thrive in all areas of the music industry. 

This unit is about exploring our identity. Our identity is all the different things that make us who we are. Each one of us is completely unique with our own experiences, feelings, family background and dreams. Music is a brilliant way of exploring and expressing our identity. It gives us confidence, power and purpose.

How can we embed and normalise the important and inspirational role women in the music industry have in children's learning?

Recurring themes that pupils have studied throughout our KS2 music curriculum:

● Be true to yourself ● Confidence ● Self-belief ● Mentoring ● Gender imbalance ● Honesty ● Curiosity ● Identity and gender identity ● Your voice is as important as theirs ● Imposter syndrome ● Role models ● Safe spaces ● Awareness 

So, music can help us to discover and create our own identity as we are growing up. Music can:

● Help us to discover things within ourselves

● Help us form a vision of who we are as children/young people and who we will become in the world

Through music we can develop our:

● Positive self-identity

● Confidence

● Motivation

● A sense of belonging

● Creative skills

● Social and emotional skills

● Well-being

The four female artists that were interviewed for this unit of work are listed below. Each artist expresses themselves through music and each artist has a different cultural background but lives in the UK.

● Shiva Feshareki - A turntablist who works with orchestras; she DJs and she is British of Iranian descent.

● Eska - Eska Mtungwazi, known professionally as Eska, is a London-born British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

● Afrodeutsche - A British-born Ghanaian/Russian/German composer, producer and DJ based in Manchester.

● Anna Meredith - A British composer and performer of electronic and acoustic music.

This is a six-week unit of work created to embed and normalise the important and inspirational role women have in the music industry. Pupils will learn about and understand some of the ways that inspirational women in the music industry express their own identity in the music they create and perform. Children will then create their own music, inspired by their own identity and the four featured artists.