6 Value of remote teaching/learning for extra-ordinaryyouths
Remote teaching was seen by student facilitators as an interesting
alternative to in-person teaching for extra-ordinary youths, with
both advantages and disadvantages. Individual sessions allowed leaders
to adapt to participants’ needs, interests, and level, and to
personalize the sessions as much in the activity plan as in
interventions. Individual teaching also permitted flexibility in
sessions and prevented comparison between youths, in accordance with the
principles of an inclusive education adapted to extra-ordinarylearners (Côté et al., 2016; Duchesne, 2002; Jourdan-Ionescu &
Julien-Gauthier, 2011). When the participant’s familial situation
allowed it, some participants included a friend in their session, which
was shown to be very stimulating both for the youths and for the session
leaders. As one facilitator noted, this contributed to theextra-ordinary youth’s social participation by favouring
interactions, social bonds, and a sense of belonging: “I have two
participants who take their lessons together and it’s a whole different
dynamic. Having 2 kids together, you can do collaborative or competitive
things and they go for it”; “Sometimes they’ll clap their hands
together, I find that nice, it’s a beautiful chemistry.”
Finally, session leaders have reported several positive results of the
remote music camp: the youths enjoyed doing the activities and made
progress in musical capacity, but also in autonomy, capacity of
expression, openness to proposed activities and technological literacy.
These developments contributed significantly to stimulating motivation
both in the student facilitators and the extra-ordinary youths;
the former because they could note their positive impact on
participants’ lives, and the latter because they could tangibly witness
their own development, both musical and extra-musical. Indeed, the
technological aspects of participants’ learning over the course of the
project will be able to be reinvested in other learning contexts and
into “real life”—since technological literacy has become more
important during the current pandemic.