7.5 Adaptation, resilience, and innovation
The current article concerns modifications brought to an inclusive day
camp project comprising an informal musical creation experience forextra-ordinary youths. Our experiment shows that remote informal
music learning activities are an avenue that should be further explored
to offer extra-ordinary youths access to participatory and
informal musical creation activities. The COVID adaptations to our
project necessitated adjustments to our research plan, the organization
of the research team’s work, and our pedagogical plan. The shift from
adding an inclusive and adapted musical program to an existing day camp
to developing and implementing an inclusive, adapted music program
offered remotely required numerous adjustments, brought about several
adverse situations, and gave rise to an unusual kind of teamwork. By the
end of the study, even though we had not yet analyzed the totality of
research data, we could infer the resilience of the different actors
(the extra-ordinary youths and their entourage, student
facilitators, and members of the research team). This resilience relied
at first on the principal researcher and team’s complete confidence in
the extra-ordinary youths’ learning potential and capacity to
adapt positively to a remote music-learning program. Implementing the
inclusive music program reinforced the young participants’ natural
resilience, in overcoming an adverse situation and approaching learning
with positivity and confidence. The student facilitators, veritable
tutors of resilience, guided the participants in the construction of new
knowledge and in developing their music-making abilities, by valuing
their unique potential. Overcoming the adversity we faced brought about
an innovative program of informal remote music learning inextra-ordinary youths. The inclusive music camp, unique to our
knowledge, was shown to drive innovation, prioritizing the youths’ own
potential, and exploring original and novel ways to favour their
development, musical education, and social participation.
Table 1