Publications

When Questions are our Best Answers: Responding to the Impact of COVID-19 on Community-based Arts Education Organizations

Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, Jeff M. Poulin

February 2, 2021

Arts Education Policy Review

A special issue of Arts Education Policy Review

The details of the global COVID-19 pandemic centered on lockdowns, face masks, and video conferences. The larger impacts of the pandemic included facing the profound inequities in civic, health, education, and other policies that multiplied the effects of the disease. Between March and September 2020, the world of community-based arts organizations was hit broadside, stifling the creative activity of young people across the world. Even as youth-centered arts organizations sought to sustain programs of creative skill-building, inquiry, and expression with positive youth development principles, they became by necessity food pantries, hot spots, and curbside sources of legal advice and financial aid for struggling families. In making that transition, old habits and assumptions have given way to fundamental questions about the definitions of art, arts education, community, leadership, funding, and policy.

This introduction summarizes articles that redefine policy as spanning from individual teaching artist practice to municipal and national procedures. Together, they raise basic questions about the new kinds of organizations and practices that could emerge from the crises of early 2020, given the will to seize the insights of the pandemic.

Access this publication.

SHARE

Recent Publications

Making Music, Promoting Development: The Power of Practice

Routledge

A chapter by Dennie Palmer Wolf, Steven Holochwost, and Judith Hill Bose in the new volume, Music Learning As Youth Development. Music Learning as Youth Development explores how music education programs >>

Why Making Music Matters

Carnegie Hall

In 2016, Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, working with musicians and staff at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, published a booklet for families, “Why Making Music Matters.” The publication outlines >>

Book: The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights

Routledge

The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights is a collection of case studies spanning a wide range of concerns about music and human rights in response to intensifying >>