Being There 1 Being there: Creating music-making opportunities in a childcare centre THIS ARTICLE WAS SUBSEQUENTLY PUBLISHED AS FOLLOWS: deVries, P. (2006). ‘Being there: Creating music-making opportunities in a childcare centre.’ International Journal of Music Education, 24(3), 255-270. In this case study of the impact of professional development activities in music on staff at a childcare centre the researcher was also the provider of professional development (PD). The needs of the staff and their preferred mode of professional development delivery was negotiated with the researcher, resulting in a number of sessions where new resources and teaching ideas were modeled in sessions with children, with staff observing and participating in activities. The study reports on staff reaction to the sessions and how they used material from the PD sessions in their own music teaching. This study reports on an eight week case study of the impact of professional development activities in music on staff at a childcare centre in a large urban city in Australia. The aim, as Merriam (1988) says of case studies, was to provide “an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a single entity, phenomenon, or social unit” (p. 16), the social unit in this case being a childcare centre, and the phenomenon being the impact of professional development in music at the centre. The advantages of case studies are that they can provide in-depth knowledge of a setting, which, as Spindler (1982) argues, is preferable to superficial information about multiple settings.