Moving the Field Forward: An Interview with Rhoda Bernard, Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs
Rhoda Bernard, Managing Director of the Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs regularly meets with arts teachers who are hungry to know more about how to help students with disabilities.
“You are not alone,” Bernard says. “There are terrific resources, you can get help and you can connect with other people that care about this work.”
The Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs (BIAESN) is on a mission to provide training to current and future arts educators on cutting-edge, effective inclusive practices for students with special needs. The Institute offers community arts education programming year-round on Saturdays and Monday through Friday for two weeks in the summer. BIAESN also has an extensive teacher professional development program offering workshops, trainings and study groups in the United States and internationally. In addition, the Institute includes the only graduate program in the world to offer a Master’s degree and Graduate Certificate in music education for students with autism.
BIAESN is actively working to bridge the gaps in the field of arts education and special needs. Bernard asserts that the field needs less isolation between art forms and between arts education and special education. Through their international leadership networking initiatives, BIAESN is “breaking down barriers so that best practices can be shared [and] so knowledge can be moved forward,” says Bernard. They advocate for more professional development for educators, administrators, and artists; a better-defined research agenda at the intersection of arts and special education; and well-defined, standardized assessment criteria for arts programming for people with disabilities.
For Bernard, the disconnect between arts education and special education often stems from a lack of coursework in teacher training programs. She describes the teachers she meets as working hard to serve their students with disabilities, often without adequate time, resources or supports. In addition, according to Bernard, many teachers often think they need inaccessible, specialized strategies or tools to serve students with disabilities.
“You already have the tools you need,” says Bernard. “Teaching students with disabilities is good teaching on steroids.” Bernard wants teachers to know that there’s no secret recipe to serving students with disabilities, but, instead, the excellent teaching skills that serve typically developing students will serve students with disabilities as well. For example, good teachers take something complex and break it down into smaller pieces. With students with disabilities the pieces may need to be smaller, the pace slower, but, says Bernard, it’s the same process - slowed down, deepened and personalized.
“[If] you’ve met one person with a disability or diagnosis you’ve met one person with a disability or diagnosis,” says Bernard. “Learner variability is the norm. Everyone is different. Diagnosis or no, everyone learns differently. You have to figure out that mystery, that puzzle, for each and every student.”
Bernard also stresses that cross-disciplinary collaboration is a wonderful tool for addressing learner variability. For example, music educators might learn strategies for reaching kinesthetic learners from dance and movement colleagues or students who process more slowly might benefit from visual strategies from the visual arts.
“Good teaching is awesome teaching no matter where it happens,” says Bernard.
Bernard and BIAESN are also working on bridging the gaps between arts educators and special educators. One course in their graduate program targets established special education practices and applies them directly to arts education. For example, the course teaches arts educators to apply task analysis to arts tasks.
BIAESN is also doing cutting-edge work on using technology in music education for students with special needs. Their Immersive Tools project uses virtual reality and augmented reality to help students with autism prepare for private music lessons and recitals. Their iPad ensembles allow students who may find instrument technique challenging to participate in a creative, nuanced music generating process.
There is still much to be done to advance the field of arts education and special needs, according to Bernard. She suggests that the field needs more robust research on topics such as generating standardized criteria for assessments of student learning in the arts for students with disabilities; studies measuring the effectiveness of both existing and new pedagogical tools and adaptive practices for arts students with disabilities; and agreed-upon measures of quality for arts education programs serving people with disabilities.
BIAESN convenes the Leadership Network in Arts Education and Special Needs to strategically engage gaps and issues in the field of arts and special education and collaboratively move the field forward. The Leadership Network met at the 2019 VSA Intersections conference and will meet again at BIAESN’s ABLE Assembly: Arts Better the Lives of Everyone conference, to be held at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, April 3-5, 2020. Bernard would also like to see more international collaborations in the field of arts and special education.
“This is a new and growing field,” says Bernard. “And there are lots of opportunities for innovation and participation.”