Voice, Choice, Access
Understanding the Outcomes of Inclusive Arts Education
Note: This article originally appeared in the Creative Spirit, a newsletter published by VSA arts.
Central to VSA arts’ mission is understanding the impact of quality, inclusive, arts-based instruction for students with disabili- ties. Through extensive interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations involving teachers, teaching artists, and others from education and the arts, we are documenting the benefits of involvement with the arts for students with disabilities. Several key themes are emerging around voice, choice, and access. Essential knowledge and skills associated with social, artistic, and academic growth are woven into these key themes. These themes also provide a comprehensive way to understand student achievement across ages, abilities, and subjects.
Voice
The arts provide the opportunity for students with disabilities to find and explore their voice. Voice refers to the unique and individual way students with disabilities utilize an art form, and the process of creating art, to communicate about themselves and their understanding of the world. The teachers, who participate in VSA arts’ work, talk about the opportunity that engaging in art-making provides for them to learn about their students in ways that would not have otherwise been possible.
Voice also closely ties to notion of self-esteem. Time and again, teachers see that the arts are a way for their students, who often fall outside of standard notions of success, to contribute. The arts become a conduit for positive attention, and create confidence. The crucial act of finding your voice, your way to communicate with the world, is central to participating in society.
Choice
Like voice, choice is also central to the art-making experience. An artist chooses both medium and message. The artistic process allows for the artist to dictate the twists, turns, and ultimate destination. This is particularly important for students with disabilities for whom so much of life is scripted. When well-crafted, the educational experience of making art puts the script in the hands of the individual. Through the arts, all students are given the opportunity to explore and share their thoughts.
Choice cultivates autonomy. The arts engage students with disabilities in the acts of observation, rehearsing, weighing, judging, all of which are essential tools for learning in general. As they decide how paint goes on canvas, what to say on stage, or how to format a poem, they are honing the highly critical capacity of decision-making that will enable them to be active and independent members of society. Teachers repeatedly mention that offering students choice and opportunity, within creating art, prepares students to make better choices in the future.
Access
Access provides a bridge that connects the ideas of voice and choice to education. Access refers to the opportunity to fully engage in the curriculum, participate in the school and community, and contribute in ways that allow all students to reach their full potential. Student, school, and community are strengthened when true access is achieved.
Teachers talk about the inherent ability of the arts to “level the playing field” and “meet students where they are.” “Leveling” and “meeting” are the essence of access. As students experience poetry, they individually and artistically enter the language arts curriculum. Students who learn mime skills create and physically explore characters and stories in ways not defined by language or physical ability. In truly inclusive educational settings, access pertains to multiple points of entry into lessons, opportunities for all students to engage in learning equally, and definitions of success that address the ways all students can achieve.
We are not integrating art into education, we’re educating through art. That is the mode through which the children are learning. — Focus Group Participant
Moving forward, the way in which we articulate the benefits of inclusive arts education must embrace the idea that the arts can fundamentally create educational environments built on principals of both artistry and inclusion.
