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