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.