Singing well-becoming: Student musical therapy case studies

Much research supports the everyday therapeutic and deeper socialneurophysiological influence of singing songs alone and in groups (Austin, 2008; Cozolino, 2013; Sacks, 2007). This study looks at what happens when Japanese students teach short English affirmation songlet-routines to others out of the classroom (clandestine folk music therapy). I investigate 155 student-conducted musical case studies from 7 semester-long classes (18 to 29 students per class) over a 4-year period. The assignments, their in-class training, and their results are introduced, with examples directly from their case studies. Each class published their own booklet of case studies (a class publication, available to readers online for research replication and modeling). Results show that most primary participants enjoyed spreading these positive songlets as they became “well-becoming agents of change” in their own social networks. “Well-becoming” emphasizes an agentive action or activity that creates better well-being in others, an action such as the sharing or teaching of a songlet. The qualitative data reveals a number of types of well-becoming such as social and familial bonding, meaning-making, teaching-rushes, and experiencing embodied cognition. The project also stimulated wider network dissemination of these well-becoming possibilities and pedagogical insights.


Introduction: Connecting project work, positive psychology, and neuroscience
Leo van Lier wrote in the foreword to the book Project-Based Second and Foreign Language Education (van Lier, 2006, p. xi) how most Americans cite John Dewey's "advocacy of experiential and action based learning" when in fact there are actually a great number of admired European educators who advocated such experiential learning years before (Comenius, 17th century Prague; Pestalozzi, 19th century Switzerland; the Italian Montessori, early 20th century; and of course the giant of educational theory Piaget a bit after Dewey). Van Lier also says that we must add the special case of L. S. Vygotsky, whose influence was huge in the early Soviet revolution, and then was forced underground under Leninist and Stalinist repression, only to surge to "world-wide prominence in the last third of the 20th century" (van Lier, 2006, p. xi). Van Lier goes on to stress that we need to appreciate the "deeper foundations of educational thought (whether it be enlightenment, democracy, or fulfillment) that underlie this approach to education" (p. xii). Even the famous hypnotherapist Milton Erickson regarded well-designed tasks for patients in the real world, outside of therapy, as usually more productive of change and learning than actual therapy (Rosen, 1991). Students are normally already heavily invested in certain important relationships out of class that can be rich contexts for exploratory learning tasks. Gregersen and MacIntyre (2014) state that the social conceptualization of investment emphasizes that a learner's complex identity changes across time and space and is reproduced in social interaction (Dörnyei, 2001), dynamically re-adjusting as the learner struggles to adapt and change (Norton, 2010). As language learners interact in their TLs, they are engaged in ongoing identity construction. (p. 111) Most out of class contexts are under-accessed as potential fields for invested changes in identity, agency, and language acquisition. My hypothesis is that students can "well-become" through teaching others, and that others will "well-become" with them, that is, the well becoming through teaching (WBTT) hypothesis. This action research/project work that I am specifically interested in is the sharing of positive learning from my classes with people in the students' networks out of class. What I have seen over the years is that this sharing/teaching not only validates the material we use, but it also augments it with a reality factor that provides an experience of agency and altruism within one's everyday life, and even some Love 2.0, that is, positivity resonance among family and friends and strangers as they sing together. Barbara Fredrickson (2013) describes Love 2.0 as positively connecting with others, which can happen in a micro-second. These micro-seconds of connection and positivity resonance have been shown to actually change our health at the cellular level in her laboratory: When I compare love to oxygen and food, I'm not just taking poetic license. I'm drawing on science: new science that illuminates for the time how love, and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is steeped. They, in turn, can alter the very ways your DNA gets expressed within your cells. (Fredrickson, 2013, p. 4) In 1978, my Master's thesis was on situationally-motivated teacher produced texts, advocating that the teachers should produce texts that were based on the situations in which their students actually lived and learned (Murphey, 1985). Since then I have shifted to situationally-motivated student produced texts (Chou, Lau, Yang, & Murphey, 2007;Murphey, 1993a), realizing that through students' activities away from the classroom in their own social networks valuable learning can also be accessed. Project work and task-based learning often describe only classroom-based learning. I contend that out of class teaching tasks that students do themselves are inherently more motivational and much more exciting as they push the social envelop, getting all parties to dynamically re-adjust competencies and identities (Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2014). In the typical flipped classroom, teachers get students to watch their lectures outside of class and then come prepared to discuss and do activities with the material in class with their classmates (Jackson, 2013). If we think that our students learn greatly through task-based learning in our classes, why not flip it and encourage them to do it out of class and then come to class to share their experiences through case studies? This is what I have been doing with my students over the last four years. It is through teaching people in their real lives, and bringing those experiences to class for discussion and CS writing that students learn most.
The social neuroscientist Cozolino writes (2013): Learning is enhanced through music training. Listening to music evokes memory recall and visual imagery, and stimulates a wide range of emotions. It also results in increased complexity in the organization of white matter as well as a significant increase in regional cerebral blood flow over the posterior two-thirds of the scalp (Nakamura, Sadato, Oohashi, Nishina, Fuwamoto, & Yonekura, 1999). These activations reflect the deep evolutionary history of music in the forming of social groups and the expansion of cognitive processes. The possibility that music stimulates neuroplasticity is supported by the fact that children with music training demonstrate better verbal memory than their nonmusical counterparts (Ho, Cheung, & Chan, 2003). Music training is also associated with math proficiency because it increases language skills, working memory, and the ability to represent abstract numerical qualities (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998;Schmithorst & Holland, 2004). (pp. 233-234) Thus, I have been sending students out to teach the world for about a decade and doing class publications of the students' own work, giving them personal copies to take away, and making enough for the next group to read as near peer role models (Murphey & Arao, 2001;Singh, 2010). The idea that first person experience is most essential is shown in the student quote below: Before I did this Case Study, I read a booklet of case studies from a previous class. Many students wrote: "After I taught songs to friends or family, they really looked happy, and I also became happy." Somehow, I did not believe their words. I changed my mind after my experience. It is true. I can't explain exactly why, but my sister and I laughed a lot and felt happy during the activity. Though I hesitated to do this and thought that we might quarrel doing this, I could enjoy teaching and my sister enjoyed it . . . It has been a few days since I taught her, but I still hear her singing "Do it again" in the house. (Ito, 2013, p. 13; see the information on student citations in Section 2.2)

Participants
All principal participants (155) were third and fourth year Japanese university students of an English department at a small private liberal arts university near Tokyo, with a few cases of mixed ethnicity, roughly 10%, in classes of 18 to 30 students. One hundred and fifty one were taking an elective, content-based instruction (CBI; also known as content and language integrated learning (CLIL)) course titled, The Importance of Music and Song (TIOMAS), whose goal was to improve students' knowledge and use of English through interesting content teaching. Four were actually in another CBI course (Volume 7 in Table 1 below) and chose a song teaching option that they were given. The great majority were female students (84%) and all courses were electives that students chose to take after reading the description online. Secondary participants were those invited to take part by the CS authors, half of which were near peer role models, with the other half varying from different family members to part-time coworkers, from 12 year-olds to the elderly, and even a few native speakers. While 221 secondary participants were exposed to songs directly from my students, we will see in the qualitative data that the network contagion often spread much wider.
Each of the booklets in Table 1 is a collection of one class' case studies, plus a short introduction by me, often with appendices with song lyrics and suggestions for teachers who may wish to use some of the songs in their classes (a number of my students are studying to be English teachers and I use the booklets for workshops with elementary, junior high school, high school, and cram school teachers). The booklets also acted as a souvenir of the class, with the class picture often on the front or back cover. The booklets are available at https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home

Methodolgy (in class training)
Except for the first class, students were loaned copies of a previous class booklet as a model near mid-term and in one of the last few classes they each received a copy of their own class booklet. Among many other smaller assignments, the case studies (CSs) assignments were usually given in the later half of the semester courses, with a minimum of 400 words required. These courses all met twice a week for 90 min and students were periodically requested to update a partner on their out of class teaching in preparation for submitting their paper. Closer to the end of the semester they were asked to bring in a rough draft to obtain feedback from other students. Finally, a few weeks before the end of the semester, they were to send their finished CS electronically to their teacher. The CSs were then assembled into a file, following a quick spelling and grammar check, and a class publication was created. Usually, we had time to print them out and proof read one last time in class before giving them to our campus printing specialists to make the final copies.

Specifically teaching affirmation songs: Well-becoming and English learning
In Appendix A there are the initial 2010 guidelines sheet for teaching an affirmation song and writing it up, which is also printed in Volumes 1 to 3 (all volumes also have pedagogical tips for teachers, lists of song lyrics, and some have web links https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home). Students were asked to teach one or two of many short affirmation songs that we had been learning in class to someone in their social network. They had a choice from about 20 songlets, most only one line to a stanza, a few a bit longer. They had also practiced these 20 songlets as learners and were able to experience a wide range of teaching and learning protocols throughout this process. The 17 songs that are included in these CSs can be found in Table 2, along with their conversational prompts: Students were taught in class that anytime they were asked one of these questions, they were to answer with the song, in and out of class. Most used this strategy in their CSs as well.
A few advanced students actually used English to teach the songlets to peers also studying English. However, for most, especially when teaching family members, just learning to sing the lyrics in English was the goal and the teaching was mostly in Japanese. In these cases, they translated the lyrics and explained learning strategies (using body language, repeating, blended language, etc.) mostly in Japanese, which facilitated the learning of the English song. I see this use of the L1 as contributing to an ultimately better appraisal of the L2 overall (Turnbull & Dailey-O'Cain, 2009).
It was clear from the start the students believed the songlet learning was a healthy experience, and that teaching them to friends and family was seen as sharing something useful to help them live better. Some language was learned, as the songs were in English, but more important was the possibility of improving the lives of participants in a way that increased their perception of the value of the English language (Murphey, 2013a) by focusing on songs with positive outcomes. Sharing and teaching songs that resonated with them often boosted the students' confidence and showed them the usefulness of not only English, but of learning, teaching, sharing, and interacting with friends, family, and colleagues. The wellbecoming was achieved through teaching and learning English songs and should be recognized as the major outcome of the project.
Through teaching the songs, students' understood themselves better and became more confident in their abilities. Linguistically speaking, they learned about rhyming, blending, vowel changes, as well as assonance, alliteration, and rhythm. From the discourse of media arts, they learned that songs were like "ghost discourse" (Murphey, 1992) in that the language in songs usually had no precise referents (I, you, it), place, or time, permitting the listener to meld the song into their own lives and form their own meanings. At another fractal level, the use of these English songs by Japanese participants was fuel for their and their learners' emergent well-becoming. This was truly a case of the expansive learning (Sannino & Ellis, 2014) that we expect to happen when we switch roles and become teachers of something that we have not yet mastered ourselves.

Quantitative results
In the 155 CSs, a total of 17 different songs were taught ( Table 2). All lyrics are either in Appendix B or a link is given there for easy capture along with some notes about the song. 3 "Diversity Song" How do you eat well? 15 15 3 "I Love Us Playing" What do you love? 16 16 1 "Turtle Song" What is more beautiful than a bird in a tree? 17 17 1 "Bear Song" What's the bear song?

Song choice
Surprisingly, three of the longest songs were in the top four: "5 Ways to Happiness," "Young Strong & Beautiful," and "Today." Song #2, "Superhappy," was the first affirmation song learned in classes and usually the one they were most comfortable with due to the borrowed-tune of "Supercalifragilistic" and five strategies that they had learned for mastering a long line (chucking, back formation, rhythm, singing, and attaching a question prompt for it's retrival). The purpose of these positive affirmation songlets were to help people focus on ways to become happy, to enjoy themselves, to accept their mistakes, and to "do it again!". A few were focused on specific tasks such as writing (e.g., "Write Write Write It Down"), and others more generally on love and playfulness. Their common ingredient was that they were fun to sing, fairly easy to remember, and made you think more positively (readers can access several recordings at http://mits.podomatic.com and articles about some of the songs at http://kandaeli.academia.edu/TimMurphey).

Song teaching successes
Only one person could be said to have been unsuccessful in teaching, but because he was in the first class, his example became excellent educational material for subsequent classes. He admirably dared to teach his 12-year-old sister four songs in a short time frame. When he became impatient, the activity felt forced and was no longer pleasant. It was at this point that the younger sibling gave up. From this experience, it was learned that being too ambitious and trying to do too much is not a good idea. Now the students' learn the KISS (keep it short and simple) principle, but are still encouraged to challenge themselves appropriately.

Qualitative emergent themes
I analyzed the 155 CSs using grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and through repeated readings over the years allowed myself to have conversations with the data and let the themes emerge. This section contains quotes drawn from the actual CSs that support several crucial ideas, several of which, I must admit, I may not have valued enough on my first few readings and which seemed to have taken on more importance as I was re-reading the CSs in preparation for this article. I call these types of well becoming, and while the list is not complete and is indeed overlapping, these are the ones that emerged in the data: (a) high affect well becoming, (b) we-learning, (c) social and familial bonding, (d) meaning-making, (e) teachingrushes, (f) embodied cognition, and (g) love 2.0 & power posing well becoming. In addition to the types of well-becoming, I highlight at the end (h) pedagogical learning, and more specifically (i) learner centeredness, both of which relate to the teaching goal that many of my students have. Finally, I give examples of (j) the network contagious spread of songlets in fractal pedagogy, which highlights how many of the learners ended up teaching and sharing with many others. Please note in the quotes below I have bolded parts for emphasis and the un-bolded is intended to give them more of a context in which to grasp them. The number (e.g., #1) at the beginning of each quote refers to Table 2 to let readers know about which song the student is writing. I introduce each section briefly before providing the quotes as examples. An important note is that these CSs have all been published as class publications and are online for those who wish to consult the data. In the sections below, I cite 50 out of the 155 students (citing two students twice). The citations are a fair dispersal of all seven volumes which can be seen in the last column of Table 1 above. Note that at the end of every student quote, APA guidelines are followed with the author's last name, year, and the page number. I have set up a special reference list for these published CSs following the general article reference list. Also, all quotes from the CSs are in italics to facilitate the reading process and distinguish them from other quotes.

High affect well-becoming
The following student citations show extreme levels of positive affect and allow us to see that the activity of songlet learning had exciting and positive results with many involved:  (Tokuyama, 2012, pp. 29-31) Perhaps the greatest testament for the usefulness of the set of songlets we learned each semester and were teaching is the comment below from Eriko who suggests to future students "to choose a person who is depressed" because then they will see how they really work: (#1) She seemed to improve with each call and she seemed to really enjoy singing. This experience was good for me, because my friend was full of energy from this homework . . .her condition changed right before my eyes. My advice to others who wish to teach affirmation songs is to choose a person who is depressed. There are many songs to cheer someone up, and each person has their own needs. Choose songs wisely for the person you are working with, think of how they fit each other. (Abe, 2010, p. 24)

We-learning
The word together jumped off the page in many of the CSs, pointing to the importance of cohesiveness. While it can be helpful in many ways to sing alone, it is much more enjoyable and impressive when we sing with others. The students explain: (#1) [My mother said] to sing with you is better than to sing alone. I am happy when I sing songs with someone." We always sing the songs in the class with our partners. Therefore this activity should be held in the group if it is possible. (Shirai, 2011, p. 11) This is great advice for future students doing this project, or perhaps anybody teaching anything! Learning as a tribe (Cozolino, 2013) is vastly more interesting and enjoyable. Schools bring us together as groups but then often insist on individual assignments and assessment and we lose out on bonding and learning with others. Singing together bonds us together. Dr. Diane Austin (2008)

Social and familial bonding
Many students mentioned how the activity allowed them to take on new roles and to bond in different ways with their family members and friends: (#5) "It was a rare opportunity that she [mother] learned something from me, so she looked very happy when I taught her the song. I was also happy. (Miyamoto, 2011, p. 6) (#7) . . . she (mother) was happy because she could talk to me for a long time. Recently I have not called. It was a good communication for us . . . (Sugahara, 2011, p. 7) (#1) She said that she could relax by breathing deeply before the exam, she could be positive by looking up at the sky and she could smile a lot . . . Especially, I thought that the bond between Saya and I became much stronger than before by singing together. (Numayama, 2013, p. 15) (#2) [He said] when he felt fatigue at his work place, he closed his eyes thinking many things. Then he remembered our talking and tried to sing in his head . . . When he sang in his head "I want to cry to the world I want to fly all around" (that is his favorite part), he smiled in his office and co-workers were wondering... Of course he didn't sing "I'm in love" in a loud voice. (That is my next goal, to get him to cry to the world, "I'm in love!" haha!)... I actually realized that music has limitless power for fun....the song gave us a precious time when my father and I could laugh together. I think the real power of music comes when we share. The time when we share something is important and also happiness. It is not too much to say that singing together makes living together a wonderfully joyful time! (Hori, 2014, p. 5)

Meaning making (ghost discourse)
One piece of content of the TIOMAS course is the idea of ghost discourse (Murphey, 1992): That songs are like language coming from ghosts that we cannot see and it is up to us to give them meaning. The language from most songs does not designate precise places, times, people, and the like; thus we are free to invent our own stories and meanings, usually imagining people we know, and the song gets time and place dated with the time and place, the where and when we listen to it most often. A few students noted this in their CSs. Interestingly, the first below commented on the need to acknowledge sadness. This is reminiscent of Fredrickson's (2013, p. 153) three positives to every negative ratio for a healthy life: (#4) We were eating cakes in her house and talking about the last part of the lyric "I'll (Nishina, 2013, p. 11) (#2 & #6) . . . it was interesting to see the differences among people in many ways of interpreting the songs. This reminds me that I create my own meaning to songs but my friends hear different ways so truly the words do not have meanings but each person gives them meanings. (Goto, 2013, p. 10)

Teaching rushes
At the beginning of this article, I cited Manami Ito, a student who said she had read previous CSs but had not really believed them. Later, when she completed the activity herself, she recognized that it was indeed a fun and rewarding experience. Though it is advantageous to learn from the accounts of others, firsthand experience can have a much deeper impact. This is what I call a teaching rush! For instance, at the level of your reading this article, you may indeed learn a lot and get motivated to do similar projects, but it will be vastly more convincing when you actually do them and see for yourself that these concepts may help people to learn more effectively.
Here are a few more examples of teaching rushes and advice for better teaching: (Sekine, 2014, p. 17) (#2) . . . watching someone's skill improve was very exciting. (Yonaha, 2014, p. 8) (#4) I learnt that you do not have to sit in front of the desk to learn something new. (Amemiya, 2013, p. 27) (#5) It is an effective way to teach that mixes study with happy things. (Sato, 2013, p. 27) (#1) We laughed many times. We almost forgot that this was studying. (Omagari, 2013, p. 28)

Embodied cognition
Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks says (2007), listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well: 'We listen to music with our muscles,' as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the "narrative" of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it provokes." (p. xi) In other words, we have physiological reactions to music (body language) and we have muscle and neurological network memory. More recently, this has been termed embodied cognition (Atkinson, 2011). In every day language, it could be as simple as the tapping of your foot. This also corresponds with the common experience of having a song stuck in your head (Murphey, 1990), even one we may not like. (Fujisawa, 2012, p. 10) (#1) We sang the song together with big gestures like when we were little kids . . . She really seemed happy while she sang the song . . . This case study brought us an opportunity to sing and laugh together. (Akimoto, 2013, p. 15) (#1) He told me that he tried to act like the lyrics while he was singing the song . . . it made him relax and comfortable. I was really surprised. (Sudo, 2010, p. 20) (#1) . . . she sang it happily. She said, "This song keeps running in my brain!" . . . My advice to others who wish to teach "5 ways" is to use body language. It is easier to remember the song with body language than just singing. (Kato, 2010, p. 10) (#2) I was surprised to see that he was using some gestures with the rhythm in order to remember some words, although I did not tell him to use them. I guess people will naturally use gestures to remember . . . Teaching him made me happy. (Murakami, 2013, p. 20) (#14) To my surprise, she soon started to imitate me before I finished teaching . . .

She said "It is just fun! I can't stop enjoying myself!!" after finishing memorizing it .
. . I noticed teaching songs makes me happy, so I want to teach more songs from this class. (Suzuki, 2014, p. 18) (#8 & #12) The final day, I was very surprised because she asked me the questions before I asked her! [the power of routine embodied questions, TM] She seemed to like the songs very much, and wanted to tell the song to her friends. (Namba, 2014, p. 16) (#1) . . . she hated studying English. However, I sang the song with the gestures her reaction changed and she was interested . . . she said, "At first I did not want to learn the song however it was interesting for me because the gestures were easy to remember." (Matsui, 2010, pp. 28-29)

Love 2.0 & power posing well becoming
In 2013, I started teaching students about micro-moments of love and positivity resonance from Fredrickson's book LOVE 2.0 (2013, p. 153) and combining it with Amy Cuddy's power posing (2012). They both quickly got attached to the song "Young and Strong and Beautiful" (YSB). After singing the song, we would all do a power pose in class raising our arms high and crying to the world, "I'm in love!" Needless to say, we had many micro-moments of connection and laughter resonating throughout the group. I also presented the challenge of doing a power pose in public and crying, "I'm in love!" Some reported doing it in their action logs, but I was really impressed when I was bicycling by the soccer field one day and two students (a woman and a man) called my name in the middle of the soccer game and did a power pose while shouting the phrase. The power pose is body cognition tied to YSB and LOVE 2.0 for my students. The comments below use a bit of this language: (#2) She told me that "Thank you for choosing me as the learner. I'm happy I could learn this song from you. (Matsunaga, 2013, p " Surprisingly, she could answer completely and asked me "Are you young?" I gave advice to her to do power pose before the test. I think these two songs helped her English learning. (Kahsiwagura, 2014, p. 26) (#6) [Visiting at a nursery school in Australia] I became aware that a little girl tried to pile up some blocks as high as possible. When the blocks had stacked up as tall as her, the blocks tower had collapsed suddenly. She was surprised and became fretful after that. Then I walked up to her and sang, "Do it again!" to her. She gave me a strange face at first, but she got more and more smiley and she did it again and again singing, "Do it again!" many times with me. It was a micro-moment of love for me! (Odaka, 2014, p. 27) (#1) Since she did these five ways to happiness, she looked happier than before. I'm really happy to see that, too. At that time, I felt like "Even if I just changed one person, the world is better than before!" I felt the importance of, "When you change yourself, you change the world". Even when one person has more power, it will be better than before, and can change the world! (Shoji, 2013, p. 27)

Pedagogical recommendations
It was not specified as a requirement for their paper, but many students gave advice on teaching the affirmation songlets, some of which was very helpful.
(#11) My advice . . . is to think about the student's feelings and change the way of teaching flexibly when they seemed to have troubles. (Akiyama, 2010, p. 19 (Sugawara, 2014, p. 4) (#5) I love the songs we sing in class and have wanted to share them with someone . . . My advice to others who wish to teach affirmation songs is to choose short songs or make long songs into shorter ones. (Tsuchiya, 2010, p. 11)

Learner centeredness
The passages below show how students naturally adjust to their learners in a way to help them learn better.
(#3) [I sang a song and] she gave a wry smile and said, "I would like to remember another song." I gave up to teach this song unwillingly, and then I passed my notebook to her to choose a song. After she read some lyrics and asked tunes, she chose the song: Are you young? My original plan was completely destroyed . . . (Ogasawara, 2011, p. 5) (#7) Next day, I changed my teaching way. The new one was singing beside her although she didn't listen to my song. I kept singing the song again and again when she took a rest in the living room. Then, she became increasingly curious about the song so sang following me . . . After singing slowly three or four times together, I taught her the meanings . . . She completely sang it by herself even though I didn't teach for a long time. (Sasamori, 2013, p. 18) [non-teaching teaching, TM] (#5) [Purposeful choice of song, TM] The reason why I chose this song was she was writing [her] graduation thesis and she was worried about how to do it. (Kanai, 2011, p. 12) (#7) Then she [mother] recorded her singing on her cell phone . . . After the lesson, she sang the song smoothly when I asked "Do you love me?" I think my music therapy project was a great success. Finally, I learned that having fun is very important for teaching and learning . . . I am glad for having this kind of opportunity. (Tomitsuka, 2011, p. 14) (#6 & #7) Teaching is always challenging, but the most important thing is thinking what are the best ways and materials for the students. (Chiba, 2014, p. 10) (#6) To tell the truth, some elderly people forget the people who they met each day. In other words, every day is the first time I met them. However, miraculously, they could remember the melody of "Do It Again". (Hashimoto, 2014, p. 22)

The network contagious spread of songlets in fractal pedagogy
In the first quote below, the student asks her mother to teach a song to her father in order to learn. There is evidence that this happened more than once, as family members taught work colleagues and teachers taught their students. Emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994) describes how our emotions can be contagious in our environments, stimulated by those around us and other contextual elements. In terms of dynamic systems theory, a song being sung by a person close to us can be an "attractive attractor" (see Gregersen & MacIntyre, in press). While this study is mostly about the primary participants (student teachers) teaching songs to secondary participants (the immediate receivers), quite often the songs and teachings spread more widely in families, friend groups, and other social networks. For example, in the second citation below, a student talks about teaching the songs to a cram school co-worker and shows how they spread in that environment, and how they brought people closer together in friendships.

(#4) I knew she (mom) would forget the song easily so I told her to be a teacher of my father.
She was proud that she could sing an English song, so she was being a teacher next day . . . Next day, my mother and my father were singing "Today" completely. (Hoshino, 2011, p (Suzuki, 2013, p. 14) (#1) My sister taught our younger sister and [we] sang together. (Demise, 2010, p. 12) (#1) . . . she told me she taught the 5 ways of happiness at the nursery school. Children had fun and enjoyed it. (Ito, 2012, p. 32) (#1) In addition, she taught it to my father, and he is also smiling . . . The affirmation songs are so effective to be happy and learn English. Therefor I want to tell my students about affirmation songs in the future, too. (Kamoda, 2012, p. 37) (Kumano, 2012, p. 18) (#1) He often hummed the song at home. He said, "I want to tell the song to my subordinates. They would have a liking for the song." My mother also seemed to be happy when she saw my father's smile. I was also happy because I could have a chance to talk and interact with my father. Thus, the song had a good effect for not only him, but also for my family. (Wakaume, 2010, p. 16) (#2) . . . when I was helping her with cooking, she hummed the rhythm and started singing. We sang the line together and it was very fun. My sister came and asked us what we were doing and we said "How are you?" to her. Of course she did not know what we were talking about but we all laughed together . . . She said it made her feel well and increased her energy . . . She also said that she asked her colleagues the question and taught the answer too. When she was talking about this story her face was shining and it also made me feel happy too . . . (Yokohara, 2012, p. 18)

Discussion
These CSs inspired me greatly not only with the possibilities for seeding more education beyond our classroom doors and turning more students into teachers, a form of flipped education, but also with the possibility for seeding positive psychology in our everyday conversational and singing lives. This exercise showed it is possible to turn people's thoughts and behaviors toward the positive, and that introducing new activities like singing in a foreign language are a powerful tool to do so.
This activity allowed students to learn the class material better, but there is much more to it than that. Teaching these songlets to others creates far greater affordances than simply learning the material better. It accomplishes something that does not seem probable within classrooms alone. This task engages expansive learning: At the beginning of a process of expansive learning the object is only abstractly mastered as a partial entity, separated from the functionally interconnected system of the collective activity. By ascending to the concrete, an abstract object is progressively cultivated into concrete systemic manifestations and transformed into a material object that resonates with the needs of other human beings as well. These phases often require the subject to struggle and break out of previously acquired conceptions in conflict with new emerging ones. (Sannino & Ellis, 2014, p. 8) Students struggled with being teachers and often broke out of previous conceptions of themselves as they described the emergence of new identities, new skills, new and improved relationships and feelings of agency and well-becoming, among other things! I was happy that some of the content was useful, but it was how they used it that was the most important. The songlets and the teaching procedures were used as ways to create and deepen relationships, to spread joy and understanding in social networks, and to have fun and improve bonds with friends, family, and co-workers. And maybe learn a little English and see more value in the language. As Davis and Sumara (2006) also write of expansion: Education-and by implication, educational research-conceived in terms of expanding the space of the possible rather than perpetuating entrenched habits of interpretation, then, must be principally concerned with ensuring the conditions for the emergence of the as-yet unimagined. (p. 135) The qualitative data shows that the out of class tasks of teaching songlets to others was "expanding the space of the possible" and allowed for the emergence of affordances facilitating the well-becoming of the participants that beforehand had not been imagined. Diane Austin (2008) asks, "why is singing such a powerful therapeutic experience?" (p. 20). And she answers: When we sing our voices and our bodies are the instruments. We are intimately connected to the source of the sound and the vibrations. We make the music, we are immersed in the music and we are the music. We breathe deeply to sustain the tones we create and our heart rate slows down our nervous system is calmed. Our voices resonate inward to help us connect to our bodies and express our emotions and they resonate outward to help us connect to others. (p. 20) While I hope this article communicates a lot of the positive resonating advantages of getting students to teach others out of class, simply reading it will not infuse you nor your students with the same enthusiasm and understanding as the actual experiences of engaging with others, struggling to help them learn, and the joy of all the small successes along the way. The wellbecoming through teaching (WBTT) hypothesis is confirmed by the qualitative data. However, to really know and understand this at the personal level, teachers need to do it with their students.
In Before Happiness Shawn Anchor (2013) describes five "actionable strategies to achieve success and happiness," two of which sound close to what my students have been doing with these songs. His third strategy is to zoom in on the target and magnify its size. In the context of the songlets, when students want to zoom in on feeling good about writing, for example, and make the target bigger, they can sing "How Do You Write?", which offers advice on how to write and gets them to focus on their goals in a powerful way.
Anchor calls his fifth recommended strategy "positive inception," in which he advises us to learn how to transfer the positivity to others, to "franchise success by creating simple easy-to-replicate positive patterns and habits and then helping them spread" (Anchor, 2013, p. 18).
I call these songlets speed dictations at first in the classroom and try to do one each class. Linked with their question, they become a routine that students recycle 10 or 12 times in the first 90-min class and later as review. The home fun (not homework) is always to call that day's partner and ask all the speed dictation questions and have a short chat. Asking them to further teach a songlet routine to someone not in the class is literally franchising the positive potential embedded in the songlet routine. However, it would be a mistake to assume I knew exactly what was going to happen when they taught outside of classes (thus, all the different and emergent ways of well-becoming). Complexity thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2006) attempts to dissuade us from linear thinking and posits that we accept that putting minds together to achieve a task outside of class (away from the teacher/researcher) is too complex an activity to anticipate simple linear results.
In 1984, Dick Allwright wrote an article titled, "Why don't learners learn what teachers teach?" He asked students at the end of a class what they learned, and as it turns out, they all told him different things and some things that the teacher had not even talked about. I later wrote an article to respond to his question entitled, "Why don't teachers learn what learners learn? Taking the guesswork out with action logging" (Murphey, 1993b). His article had prompted me to start asking students in every class what they learned and to write about it in an action log. To help them, I list activities on the board for students to evaluate and ask them to comment on them as well. Of course this does not assure that they are learning what I am teaching, but it does give me a lot of feedback about what is going on in their minds that I can adjust to in the next class. Their CSs require a lot of mind-reading by the student, both of the person they are teaching and the readership of their study (the teacher and other students, cf. theory of mind, Bruner, 1981;Iacoboni, Molnar-Szakacs, Gallese, Buccino, & Maziotta, 2005). Thus, once again, I feel prompted to say that this type of project creates environments of emergent and expansive learning (Sannino and Ellis, 2014); while allowing little control over the final product, it creates great un-imagined affordances.

Limitations
The conclusions I come to are based upon descriptive CSs by students away from the classroom, which were written and rewritten several times, and readers may justifiably doubt the total veracity of these accounts. I can imagine that there may indeed be a few that were more imagined than actual, but I still have faith and trust in 98% of what they describe. The quantitative data is merely descriptive rather than evaluative and in the future I would like to make an instrument that helps in evaluating the different aspects of the task. The qualitative data was very useful in teasing out the types of well-becoming and other phenomena that deserve more attention (pedagogical initiatives and network contagion); however, some overlap with others a good deal, which my complexity thinking allows, but my older-earlier brain wishes to tease apart more. Here I find Walt Whitman's phrase reportedly shouted from the rooftops to be of help, "Do I contradict myself? Well then I contradict myself. I contain multitudes." What I regret not doing more (and will do more in the future) is asking my students to teach diverse others: 50% taught near peer role models and I think they would learn more from diversity. For potential replication and dissemination readers can find the CSs at https://sites.google.com/site/folkmusictherapy/home.

Implications
If we think that what we are teaching is valuable to our students, there is a good chance that it will also be valuable to their friends and families. Putting these ideas into songlets allows for bite-size processing that can facilitate acquisition and enjoyable repetition. I think teachers are capable of creating their own valuable songlets about their particular interests and for their students particular needs. (If teachers need more help, Google "NFLRC-UH" and put my name into their search engine and you can freely download several presentations on the topic that could be of use to you.) Needless to say, I am hooked on getting my students to share their learning beyond the classroom. While bite-size songs are attractive, I believe this could be done with stories, puzzles, manga, movies, and other means. Getting students to write up CSs gets them to give back to the school and contribute to the learning of others. When students read these CSs they believe that they too can do these things because of the near peer role model effect (Murphey & Arao, 2001;Singh 2010).

Conclusion
These students learned through teaching diverse others what they could not have learned in a classroom. They taught their teacher the power of we! and confirmed to him that songs can change the world and educate us all. This has a host of benefits for diverse stake holders: The students benefitted from reinforced learning, new learning, bonding, stronger social ties, new insights; their chosen participants benefitted through positive singing, reflecting and socializing; and all learned a bit of English and perhaps became healthier and happier. The uninvited in the same contexts and those in the participants' networks learned some of these same things by accident of position. Later student readers who learned from previous CSs got inspired. I learned through multiple readings and possibly you, now, the readers of this article and your students may follow.
The qualitative results of these CSs support the WBTT hypothesis, that when we share important information we all can become more "well," especially when that sharing involves us singing it together. Stimulating such interactions in and out of school should be the goal of all teachers, all educators, to give students something positively generative to make the world a better place with the potential to teach us all about well-becoming. When classes of students can function as socially intelligent dynamic systems (SINDYS, Murphey, 2013c) that actively share information, they are more able to take what they learn in class and share it in their networks out of class, enriching those networks into becoming SINDYS as well. This also gives added value to the learning of a foreign language (Murphey, 2013a) and creates true CBI/CLIL classes that are focused on the content, not the language.
Perhaps the greatest CBI value accruing from these teachings is the underlying altruism expressed through the giving of time and the potential for improving of lives. Teaching someone is not your typical everyday transaction outside of schools. However, when they can become part of our everyday lives, they can greatly enrich our relationships, gratitude, and resources. A class assignment can become a giving and sharing with others that returns unexpected benefits to student teachers and the social networks themselves.
In a previous article (Murphey, 2010), I noted that we often over-rated information, success, and teaching (telling) processes when we should give more value to questions, challenges and experiential learning as they guide us to more expansive learning. Graciously, the universe is appropriately constructed with enough never ending complexity as to forever present us with challenges that serve to help us develop. Facing these challenges together (singing together) make living a much richer experience than we will probably ever have the capacity to fully appreciate. And we will continually attempt the impossible, daring greatly, partially failing, and marvel at the miracles of partial success and understanding, improvising and softly singing our way to serenity. (How are you?) [21CSs] [tune of supercalifragilisticexpiallidocious...] is an easy greeting song that is fun and students usually like playing with it in class. Teachers can use such songlets as a classroom management tool: when they need a few seconds to get the next activity ready they can turn to the class and say, "Please ask the person beside you "How are you?"" And then students can have an energizing mini conversation, say some words that might be self fulfilling prophecies, practice some fun English, and not let their minds become idle. Students can also be asked to make their own greeting to the same tune and fit some words in. My second one for this tune is "truly awesome so tenacious lovingly vivacious." In Japanese, I sing sugoi kampeki subarashi sekyiokuteki genki.

4) Today
[11CSs] is a wonderful classic old Scottish folk song. I teach it one stanza at a time over three classes with each stanza having a different question prompt which is answered naturally in the first line of the stanza (What are you going to do today?/Are you content? /Who are you?) In my teaching, I exchange the old English word "ere" with "before." For lyrics and song go to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBGjZAYcJqc which is a John Denver version.

5) Write Write Write it Down (How do you write?) [11CSs]
Sung to the tune of Row Row Row Your Boat, it expresses the idea of improvisation, i.e. "you make it up as you go along" and you need to "set your feelings free" and just " write!" Students find it useful to teach to classmates who were struggling with writing assignments. Lyrics: Write write write it down/ Set your feelings free/ I make it up as I go along/ My pen is writing me. I ask them what is an "upasi" and they guess awhile and then find out "up as I." 6) Do it again! (How do you succeed?) [11CSs] Sung to the tune of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, it is useful to show them native-like blended pronunciation of "doidagin". The lyrics are Doidagin x 8 + Make many mistakes and Doidagin! In Japanese we sing Yariba dekiru naseba naru x 2 + nana korobiya -oh ki! 7) Love You Forever (LYF) [10 CSs] is borrowed from Robert Munsch's (2001) famous children's book by the same title. which can be read to the students also. As a question prompt I use: "Who do you love?" and then the students sing to each other. While most people are very shy about saying "I love you", singing it is an art form that is OK in most cases. Lyrics "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, My baby you'll be."

8) Smile Song or Warau Uta
Why do you smile? [9 CSs] This song is built on a Japanese proverb and we usually sing the Japanese and the English together. Very short and sweet. "Warau kado niwa fuku kitaru. Smiling brings you happiness, let it show the way." 9) The Weather Song: What's the weather like? [5 CSs] The tune is the refrain of the 1950's hit "The Witchdoctor". Only lyrics: "It's raining cats n' dogs and it's cold outside, my sunshine is deep inside."