The board members of the Eu MERYC
Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir, Chair, Iceland
Contact: helgarut@hi.is
Helga Rut Gudmundsdottir is a Professor of Music Education at the University of Iceland, School of Education. She teaches courses in early childhood music methods as well as music pedagogy for elementary and middle school. Helga conducts research in young children’s musical perception and development. Helga collaborated in the international research project AIRS (Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing).
Helga has developed her own practice (Tonagull) in early childhood music in her home country Iceland. Tonagull is a research-based practice that gives courses, trains teachers and develops material for teaching music in early childhood. Helga has published her scholary work in several international music education journals, Studentlitteratur, Routledge and Oxford University Press.
Rūta Girdzijauskienė, Lithuania
Rūta Girdzijauskienė is Professor of Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and president of the Lithuanian Music Teachers' Association. She is a board member of the European Association for Music in Schools (EAS), European Network for Music Educators and Researchers of Young Children (EuNET MERYC). For many years she was a secondary school music teacher and leader of a children’s choir. The list of her publications include 2 monographs, 10 teacher handbooks, more than 80 research studies and practice based articles. She is co-author of Lithuanian music education programmes and music textbooks. Her research interests lie in the fields of early childhood music education, musical creativity, vocal pedagogy and teacher education.
Jessica Pérez-Moreno, Spain
Dr. Jessica Pérez-Moreno is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Music Education at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) where she currently coordinates the degree of Early Childhood Studies. She received her PhD in Music Didactics from UAB in 2011 studying how music takes place in the daily lives of thirteen two-year-olds in school setting. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Exeter, Institute of Education of the University College London and The Ohio State University. Pérez-Moreno is a Comissioner of the Early Childhood Music Education Seminar from the International Society of Music Education for the period 2016-2022. She is also a member of the editorial review board for several academic journals.
Maria Papazachariou-Christoforou, Cyprus
Dr. Maria Papazachariou-Christoforou holds the position of Assistant Professor in Music Education and Pedagogy at the Department of Education Sciences, at European University Cyprus. She directs the LifeLong Music Engagement Research Unit, SosciEAtH, and serves on the board of EuNetMERYC. Her primary research interests encompass the sociological dimensions of music pedagogy and musical identities, early childhood music educartion, musical parenting, and informal music learning practises. She specializes in Edwin Gordon's Music Learning Theory and is an active member of GIML. With 25 years of experience as a music educator in Public Education in Cyprus, she has also served as a Music Education Officer at the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute and as a Music Director in Primary Education. Her research activities include collaborations with academics from Greece and abroad through Erasmus+ programmes and other initiatives. She coordinates the research project "Music During Pregnancy and Infancy". She has presented research papers at many international conferences and published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
Hans Van Regenmortel, Belgium
Hans Van Regenmortel is an artistic coordinator at Musica, Impulse Centre for Music in Belgium. For more than 25 years he has been a teacher of the violin and creative music making. He has been involved in diverse artistic projects in non-formal contexts as well as schools and teacher education. He regularly contributes to publications concerning music and art education.
As a teacher and performer he soon became aware of the inconsistencies in mainstream music education, which often result in confusing ideas about learning, notation, memory, artistry and talent. His main research focus is on the relevance of musicality as a phenomenon to development and education in general.
He is an advocate for using (collaborative) creativity as a core tool for developing integrated musical skills.