The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Council for Exceptional Children, and Division of the Visual and Performing Arts published the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Arts and Special Education (JASE).  JASE is the first scholarly journal to focus on the intersection of the arts and special education. 

Historically there have been very few research studies that focused on both arts education and special education that met high-quality research standards.  The Research and Evaluation Department at the Kennedy Center, as well as leaders from across the field, have been pushing to change that.  This change will make more, and better, information available that educators can utilize to inform their evidence-based practices.  

“For program reporting purposes people tend to rely on anecdotes and they tend to be positive ones…but are they happening for all the kids?” asks Don Glass, Ph.D., Research Manager at the Kennedy Center. “That is always my initial question…can you talk about the rest of the kids in the class? Is this methodology or modes of teaching reaching them as well?”

The only way to know that you are reaching all the learners in a class is to systematically assess that learning.  And, according to Glass, the Kennedy Center is working to raise the bar on the quality of those studies.  It is vital that researchers in the field of arts and special education assess using rigorous standards of evaluation in order to serve the larger field.

It is also vital to collect data in a way that can be separated.  “You can not say anything about a student population if you do not know who they are,” says Glass.  He suggests embedding that planning into your research design.

The Kennedy Center convened thought leaders from the field of arts education and special education in 2012 to create recommendations to guide the emerging arts and special education field.  The Arts and Special Education: A Map for Research designated three priority areas for the field moving forward.  The first, Access and Equity, gives focus to equitable access to meaningful participation in the arts in educational settings, which requires intentional inclusion of students with disabilities.  The second priority area, Instructional Design and Innovation, invites analysis of what instructional arts or arts integration strategies promote successful outcomes for students with disabilities.  The third priority area, Effectiveness, Efficacy and Scale-Up, invites researchers to design large scale studies that can inform evidence-based practice across multiple sites and contexts.

The Arts and Special Education Map for Research identified the establishment of a peer-reviewed journal on the topic of arts and special education as an important milestone for the field.  JASE, the first journal on this topic, includes four types of articles that span art forms (visual art, performing arts, music, and media), a resource review, research and practitioner papers, a policy history paper, and an editorial introduction. The premier issue contains a paper detailing the history of actions and advocacy that led to the creation of the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division of Visual and Performing Arts Education (DARTS), an evaluation of a community program offering a multi-genre arts program for middle-school students with autism, a review of resources for teacher development in music education for students with disabilities, and a description of three research-based programs to teach drama that focus on students’ social-emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and linguistic outcomes.

Research informs practice.  It’s vital to the field that high-quality, rigorous studies can be conducted and disseminated through avenues such as JASE to enable teachers, teaching artists and other practitioners to design evidence-based instructional strategies and curricula.

Part of quality design, whether designing a lesson plan or a research study, is considering accessibility for diverse learners.  Glass and the Kennedy Center team conducted a study on student engagement in Kennedy Center performances.  Glass built accommodations into the study by offering multiple modalities for engaging with the survey, including iPads, voice to text, and proctoring, to ensure everyone’s voice was included.

Glass also ensured that, within the data, they could identify results specific to members of priority populations, such as students with disabilities, English language learners, and students living in poverty. 

Engagement is an important measurement.  “[It] is the affective gateway into paying attention and memory access and learning,” says Glass.  Because the study was designed to be accessible to diverse learners and because the data could be categorized into different population groups they were able to discover that preparing students with disabilities for the performance, using performance guides or other resources, significantly boosted their engagement.

Glass encourages practitioners to make research a more explicit part of their routine in order to be more rigorous and holistic in serving all students.  For Glass, kids are “the expert users of your curriculum.”  He encourages teachers to engage in disciplined inquiry and information collection through assessment, interviews and observation. 

“You can collect data, thoughtfully take a look at it, ask questions about it and learn with your students based on your observational and assessment data,” says Glass. “That is on the ground, really practical, really useful research…Your students can teach you a lot about how they are trying to learn.”