BackgroundThough little-known outside Australia, violinist Lyndall Hendrickson (1917-2017) was a teacher of highly skilled violinists whose methods were forward-looking and preceded later neuroscience research on motor learning. Remarkably, after suffering paralysis as an adult from polio she recovered use of her fine muscles to perform on the violin again by employing retraining principles from her husband’s rehabilitation program into violin finger exercises. In 1977, after the end of the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, she was the first woman and Westerner to share her multi-sensory violin teaching techniques for children at the Central Conservatory of Music. Her violin teaching drew from a diverse range of then-contemporary scientific and educational research to tailor exercises to her students’ musical, physical and sensory learning needs.AimsThis presentation will outline Hendrickson’s approach to learning violin techniques by demonstrating samples from a case study drawn from Hendrickson’s teaching portfolios. It provides a perspective on Hendrickson’s processes in the context of research in music pedagogy, educational psychology, motor learning and neuroscience. This presentation also provides a historical picture that connects Hendrickson’s background to her research and the foundations of her pedagogical philosophy and methods.MethodA thematic approach as outlined by Braun and Clarke was used to code and establish themes for this research (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Themes were formed from coding Hendrickson’s lectures, individual student exercise profiles, 3000 cassettes, published papers and research notes.FindingsHendrickson transferred advanced elements and motions of techniques within her elementary violin programs. She used her training in Dalcroze Eurythmics to link rhythmic movements and gestures to sounds, as well as combinations of multi-sensory visual and tactile elements in materials that engaged her students’ working memory, as well as their long-term memory, in the learning of patterns and skills. This session describes Hendrickson’s exercises and applications of multi-sensory materials individualized for a five to eight-year-old student. It focuses on the processing of identical elements and somatosensory learning. She focused on the elements and relevance of motions involved with the fingers and hands, and presented these in an individualized learner centred multi-sensory style for her students.ConclusionHendrickson’s exercises and organisation of materials shows a deliberate intention to economise the cognitive load for her young students. She focused on the elements and relevance of motions involved with the fingers and hands, and presented these in an individualized learner centred multi-sensory style for each of her students. These drills do not always resemble the repertoire passages they were for, and are unlike any other known published violin instruction manuals such as Essential Elements for Strings (Allen et al., 2002) or the Suzuki Violin School (Suzuki, 2007). Hendrickson introduced procedures that were radical in violin teaching in the 1970s. Her historical significance is demonstrated through her teaching files, and through her documented teaching exchanges given in the People’s Republic of China (Hendrickson, 1978). Hendrickson’s approaches demonstrate that she was at the forefront of teaching violin skills by tailoring her students individual processing needs. Despite being an historical figure in violin pedagogy, Hendrickson’s work still has much to offer violin teachers today, especially concerning her multi-sensory, individualised approach in teaching young violin students.