How can arts educators ensure that all of their students – no matter how they learn best – can engage, participate and learn meaningfully? It requires engaging an interdisciplinary approach that breaks down the silos between arts education, arts therapy, general education and special education. By leveraging evidence-based practices from all of these areas and diving deeper into areas of connection among them, we can develop and utilize strategies and approaches that make arts education truly accessible for all.

For over twenty years, I have worked tirelessly to provide access to the arts and arts education for people with disabilities. My organization, the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education  provides arts education programs for people with disabilities of all ages in music, dance and theater; graduate programs in accessible music education; and a wide range of professional development programs and resources for the field.

What is Accessible Arts Education?

My new book, Accessible Arts Education: Principles, Habits, and Strategies to Unleash Every Student’s Creativity and Learning articulates the field of accessible arts education and provides a framework for all educators to increase the accessibility of their teaching. It shares numerous teaching strategies to reach and teach every student, no matter how they learn best, no matter what strengths and interests they bring to the classroom and no matter what assistance and supports they may require.

The framework of Accessible Arts Education centers around several key principles:

• Necessary for some and helpful for all: Accessible Arts Education helps every student learn better, regardless of whether they require these strategies.
• Start with accessibility: Accessibility is more effective when it is infused in your planning from the beginning, rather than an afterthought tacked on later in the process.
• Clear goals with flexible means: Having very clear learning objectives for your students makes it possible for teachers to design a wide range of ways to meet that goal.
• Anticipate, reduce and strive to remove barriers: At its core, Accessible Arts Education is about breaking down barriers to student engagement, participation and learning. This happens through anticipating barriers during the planning process, reducing them through various strategies and striving to remove them altogether whenever possible.

Who can use Accessible Arts Education?

All educators can use Accessible Arts Education in their teaching practice. Arts education administrators and leaders can use Accessible Arts Education to create and plan programs and to support teachers.

• Arts educators
• Educators who teach non-arts subjects
• Classroom teachers
• Teaching artists
• Studio teachers
• Ensemble directors
• Theater directors
• Choreographers and dance directors
• Community arts organizations
• Community education organizations
• Arts education leaders

How Do You Use Accessible Arts Education?

After laying out the Accessible Arts Education framework, the book provides teaching strategies related to several key topics:

• How to encourage student control and agency
• How to alleviate student anxiety
• How to engage multiple modalities and pedagogical approaches
• How to support learning with visual tools
• How to anticipate and alleviate sensory issues
• Vignettes of teaching and learning challenges

The book also provides graphic organizers to customize the strategies to your own teaching situation, subject area and student population. Accessible Arts Education is intended to be a generative framework that everyone can use in their own way to increase the accessibility of their own teaching for their students. Throughout the book, readers are encouraged to create their own strategies and try their own ideas.

Intended Impact

We want ALL students to engage, participate and learn meaningfully in the arts and arts education. The goal of writing Accessible Arts Education was to provide educators with resources to reach and teach every student, thus addressing barriers that might obstruct student learning. I hope that when teachers use the framework and strategies of Accessible Arts Education, they will ignite the learning of all of their students and make it possible for every student to have powerful arts education experiences. At the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education, we have coined the phrase, “Arts Better the Lives of Everyone.” I am sure that all of you agree that the arts are a fundamental, critical part of being human. Through Accessible Arts Education educators can ensure that all students can have access to learning, creating and engaging with the arts.