CAE-VSA arts INCLUSIVE ARTS SUMMIT
On Tuesday, October 17, 2006, 9:00am – 5:00pm, The Center for Arts Education, in partnership with VSA arts, hosted a one-day summit on arts education and disability at the United Federation of Teachers building in New York, NY.
The goal of the meeting was to explore how arts organizations, artists, and school administrators are serving students with disabilities.
Summit participants discussed the successes and the challenges of serving students with disabilities, as well as the kinds of support arts organizations and artists need in order to better serve this community.
Specific topics that were covered include:
- What do we know about present efforts of New York City-based arts in education service providers in serving this constituency?
- Are there consistent learning outcomes for students with disabilities and special needs that could be tracked across service providers?
- What is the role of the New York City Department of Education’s Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts?
- Grades K-12 in the learning of students with disabilities, in particular, and students with special needs in general?
Click here to view the press release.
CAE-VSA arts Inclusive Arts Summit
Brief Summary
On Tuesday, October 17, 2006, at the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) building at 52 Broadway in New York, NY, The Center for Arts Education and VSA arts, in partnership, convened a one-day, 9am – 5pm, summit on arts education and disability.
The attendees were enthusiastic, vocal, dedicated, and passionate. Representing the full spectrum of stakeholders in the disability arts community, they included classroom teachers, arts specialists, teaching artists, cultural organization representatives, school administrators, UFT and Department of Education representatives, and parents.
The goals of the meeting were to explore how cultural organizations, artists, and school administrators are serving students with disabilities, the successes and challenges of serving students with disabilities, and the kinds of support cultural organizations and artists need to better serve this community and these students.
Three major themes emerged:
- Need for more information, including best practices and programs, as well as identifying and defining quality in arts learning;
- Need for more professional development for inclusive training (for teachers in classrooms with both general and special education students) and differentiated training (individualized instruction directed to the needs of the particular student);
- Need for dissemination of the work to help practitioners improve their effectiveness and to raise public awareness of the results.
One particular frustration was the recognition that useful, practical knowledge — in the form of professional development, best practices and programs, resources — exists in the world but is unavailable because no central clearinghouse collects and disseminates this information for practitioners. And practitioners are not the only ones who are in need of this information. Teachers, teaching artists, paraprofessionals, school administrators and parents should be included in the process of educating students with disabilities. Furthermore, education conferences usually have, at most, one session devoted to students with disabilities. It would be useful for conferences to include more sessions on special needs, or for the disability community to sponsor its own conferences on education.
The lack of awareness among general education teachers and administrators leads to inadequate funding/resources and obstacles in implementation, such as scheduling difficulties, pullouts, lack of continuity, and logistical problems such as inaccessible classrooms.
The participants pointed out that special needs education has much to offer general education. Today, where pressurized testing leads to standardization of teaching, special needs education is individualized and creative – an approach that benefits all students.
At the end of a day of brainstorming, the participants developed a long wish list of items to be supported by CAE and VSA, headed by the desire for:
- More seminars to facilitate the sharing of information;
- More professional development;
- Compilation of best practices and programs, i.e. resource guides and websites;
- Great public awareness of the outcomes of special needs arts education.
At the close of the summit, attendees expressed feelings of gratitude and exhilaration at being able to share their views with such a broad range of others committed to the practice of special needs arts education.
More complete documentation of this summit will be available on this page soon.
