Breaking Barriers
Discover how the GIVE (Growing Inclusivity for Vibrant Engagement) initiative is transforming classrooms and arts education by promoting inclusivity for neurodiverse learners. Through its innovative resources, GIVE equips teaching artists and educators with tools to foster equitable, creative environments where all students can thrive. In this post, Dennie Palmer Wolf shares how this powerful collaboration is reshaping how we teach, making a lasting impact on classrooms and cultural organizations alike.
By Dennie Palmer Wolf, in conversation with Courtney Boddie, Alexa Fairchild, Amanda Sellers, and Katherine Stock
We have grown discouraged with the internet—for many of us, it is not the generous, hopeful commons we hoped it might be.
Except when it is. For example, consider the Teach with GIVE (Growing Inclusivity for Vibrant Engagement) website built by teaching artists, for teaching artists, along with all the other educators who support creative work reaching all students in inclusive classrooms.
The larger context: ICT classrooms in New York City
New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) offer families a unique approach for neurodiverse learners through an Integrated Co-Teaching (ICT) model that includes students with IEPs (Individual Education Plans to address additional learning needs) along with general education students. No more than 40 percent of the students in the class have IEPs. There are two teachers—a general education teacher and a special education teacher who work together to adapt materials and modify instruction to make sure the entire class can participate and develop as learners. Students in ICT classes are intentionally grouped together based on similar needs that can be met with specially designed instruction. In this way, ICT classrooms provide students with disabilities with the least restrictive environments in which to learn alongside their peers in a general education setting. The students are provided support to be successful in achieving their learning goals.
The support structures, tools, and learning goals specific to each student with a disability are outlined in their Individualized Education Programs, or IEP’s, which can be realized in this co-teaching model.
Many families (both caregivers of children with IEPs and general education students) value this approach:
- The co-teaching model, which often also includes paraprofessionals, ensures there are multiple voices and approaches to delivering differentiated education
- The integrated approach means that children rarely know who does and doesn’t have disabilities.
- Children with additional learning needs have general education peers to model their interactions on.
- All children learn that there are many approaches to learning, all of which contribute to an enriched classroom.
GIVE’s Evolution
Beginning in 2019, through the generous funding of The New York Community Trust, a collaborative of arts education organizations (Arts Connection, Community-Word Project, and the New Victory Theater) began building on the inclusive promise of ICT classrooms. They convened general and special education teachers, teaching artists, and their own staff to contribute strategies from their collected years of experience, building a compendium of resources to support teaching artists in planning, implementing, and reflecting on what it takes to teach all learners in the fullest, more welcoming way. The result was a web-based library of tools, including discussions of classroom management, a guide to inclusive language, and a rich collection of lesson planning materials that spans initial learning about a classroom to closing celebrations.
GIVE’s resources provide any teacher working in ICT classrooms, and beyond, with inclusive strategies designed to:
- Consider how every student can be engaged and demonstrate their learning;
- Ensure classrooms are safe and supportive environments for all;
- Effectively plan across students’ social-emotional, cognitive, physical, and behavioral capacities;
- Differentiate arts instruction in lesson design, facilitation, and implementation;
- Incorporate formative assessments that support student engagement and informed lesson design and goal setting for students;
- Build relationships with other classroom professionals to co-develop programmatic goals, establish co-teaching partnerships, and reflection structures.
GIVE’s Impact
As Alexa Fairchild, Manager of Arts for Diverse Learners at the NYCPS Arts Office, explains:
“Students with disabilities face two significant obstacles towards receiving a high-quality arts education: Lack of equitable access (arts instruction is often missed because of pull-out programs and delivery of other intervention services) and lack of inclusive teaching practices (many arts teachers do not have sufficient training to meet the needs of students with disabilities).
GIVE deeply believes that students with disabilities can be engaged and demonstrate their learning in the arts with inclusive teaching practices. (Remember: GIVE stands for Growing Inclusivity in Vibrant Engagement). While still in its development phase, the GIVE team experienced the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a growing recognition of the importance of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. This incredible team of educators sought to meet these timely challenges and GIVE doubled down on its approach to help teachers create liberated learning environments. GIVE is now an indispensable framework for providing professional learning for teaching artists and certified school-based arts teachers.”
Building on this, Courtney J. Boddie, Vice President, Education & School Engagement at the New Victory Theater adds:
“GIVE moves away from a clinical or medical model rooted in diagnosis and identifying a person’s disabilities as something to be fixed, to the social model of disability and an interpersonal framing which asks, ‘What can we change to give young people the access they need in order to share their unique abilities?’ GIVE offers these students the chance to be seen, to walk away from the dark history of exclusion. It allows all of us—teachers, artists, and organizations—using its framework ways to say, ‘We see you, you are beautiful, now let’s begin our work together.'”
This remarkable collaborative work has yielded not only a free, online library of resources, it is enriching classrooms and shaping the fundamental practices of cultural organizations. Read on to understand how GIVE’s work is rippling outwards.
2. Teaching Artists Enriching Inclusive Classrooms
Katherine Stock, teaches modern band and core music in a high school in District 75, the network of NYCPS specifically dedicated to teaching students with significant challenges. She speaks to her experience as a teacher and a co-trainer, introducing her NYCPS colleagues to GIVE’s resources and values:
“I love working in District 75. Since the beginning of my career it has been difficult to find professional development opportunities that specifically meet the needs of District 75 arts teachers. Previously, most professional development was focused on either arts or students with disabilities, and there was not much on working in the combined setting.
Working on the GIVE team felt like a community for me as a special education music teacher. It has been an amazing experience for me as a lifelong learner. The biggest impact for me was personal. I learned more about inclusive language, accessibility, and how to pay attention to things I wasn’t necessarily thinking about before. I have since shared the GIVE resources within my school and in the music education community. The GIVE resources provide concrete ideas, concepts, vocabulary and physical resources that truly address our specific class settings.
The professional development sessions that we presented with GIVE are facilitated in ways that acknowledge all of who we are as human beings. Just as you want in arts classrooms. There is an openness, more wait time, more patience, more inclusivity and celebration, which results in a more well-rounded, educated teacher or teaching artist.
The result of the GIVE resources and community is that I am able to use a tangible, web- based resource to communicate with other arts and special education professionals and that I understand all people and their needs more fully.”
This inclusive approach, embodied by classroom teachers and teaching artists can enrich classrooms. In a sixth grade ICT classroom, two co-teachers (T1 and T2), along with a teaching artist (TA), work on a combined social studies and poetry unit designed to build students’ willingness to exercise their imaginations. The following excerpt portrays how they work together to combine geography and poetic thinking, each contributing from their own memories. They work to engage all students, using their own experiences to spark stories and mysteries from everyday life.1
TA – (Connects to the current social studies unit on geography, talking about how landmarks help people make sense of a place, to find their way, and mark events). He explains: Now think of the “home-marks” in your house and the story behind each one of them, how they mark your history.
T2 – Once when I was little, we drew on the wall behind the couch, my cousin and I laughed each time someone sat there because no one knew but us that the marks were there.
T1 – I carved my initials into my desk at home.
TA – Could be marks from your pet, mysterious marks you have no idea where they came from, but they were just always there.
T1 and T2, along with TA walk around, asking questions of individual students, working to get possibilities out.
TA – Here are some more examples: When I was growing up, there was a sign in my house: No speaking Spanish. It was from a time when my mother was trying to learn English and how we teased and loved her for that.
Students begin writing.
TA (as he circulates): Your story could be happy, sad, weird like when my mother banged on my brother’s door and didn’t mean to punch a hole in it. Your home-mark could be a sticker, a mark, a crack.
1 The example is a classroom observation, lightly edited for the purpose of clarity and brevity. It is taken from the “Homer to Hip Hop” program developed by City Lore and its teaching artists, funded through a grant from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.
3. Changing How We Operate: How GIVE Affects Organizations
The New Victory Theater brings kids to the arts and the arts to kids in and beyond New York City. Powered by New 42, whose mission is to make extraordinary performing arts a vital part of everyone’s life from the earliest years onwards, New Victory connects its audiences to new cultures, artists, and stories through its international programming online and in its historic Times Square theater.
GIVE’s curriculum aim is to support “liberated learning environments” and increase equitable outcomes. Photo source: GIVE Partnership Team.
A GIVE Universe
Courtney J. Boddie, Vice President, Education & School Engagement, reflects on what the GIVE experience has meant for her organization:
Working on GIVE taught us to center the needs of learners in classrooms. But as we did that work, that point of view became more and more prevalent in our own work. What we once did when a show featured performers with disabilities, we now do for every production. We now have a GIVE universe which more and more people are joining, across the entire New 42 organization we are looking at our work culture, how accessible we are, the language we use and why.
Partly as a result of GIVE trainings for the entire staff, the New Victory was sparked to deepen its thinking about equity and accessibility across the organization. Amanda Sellers, part of the sales and marketing department, became deeply engaged:
When I got Long COVID in 2021, suddenly accessibility really hit home. I had to build fortitude. I needed help. I had to meticulously plan any type of outing. The GIVE trainings made me feel more seen and understood. I did a lot of thinking about how people with extra needs can be a part of the whole. I wanted the theater to think more radically about inclusion—how could we be a model in our community for doing this?
I work in sales and with building audiences. Previously I let information flow to me, I assumed that people would tell me about any accommodations they needed; now I ask them. I see part of my job as helping them to know it’s always ok to ask for what you need. Bringing 49 3rd graders to midtown is daunting- what can I do that will make them feel more comfortable coming here? Now I tell them more: how long it takes to walk to the theater, where are restaurants to meet their dietary needs, what are the pre-show activities and who are they for, etc.?
I did a question tour with reps from across the organization. We gathered an enormous list of questions about accessibility in all the spaces we run, asking who needs this information outside and internally. We looked at questions like: how many steps is it from the subway to our front door; what types of accessibility information do we post on the website, what kind of resources should be available when people call and ask, how do we present our information in different ways (text, photos, video) before, during, and after a show. We are becoming a place that shares answers. When I overhear a rep on the phone answering one of the questions, or being thanked for their help, my heart lightens. You never know when a small detail will change whether a person comes to the theater or not.
In the 1980s a disability rights movement took off, eventually giving us the Americans with Disabilities Act, which forever changed the architecture of accessibility insisting that buildings had to have elevators, and bathrooms that would not only accommodate, but welcome, walkers and wheelchairs.
Building on that foundation, the GIVE initiative insists that the accessible architecture of art- making includes more than wide aisles and wheel-chair-height sinks and supplies. It also embraces inclusive strategies for teaching and learning as carried out by teaching artists, classroom teachers, and students working with one another. To make this a reality, the artists and teachers who developed GIVE hope that everyone in the field – from teaching artists, classroom teachers, paraprofessionals to the staff working deep inside partner organizations – will find their online resources useful—and that the result will be an abundant increase in those who GIVE.
About Our Work and Our Collaborators
About GIVE
The GIVE (Growing Inclusivity for Vibrant Engagement) is an initiative transforming classrooms and arts education by promoting inclusivity for neurodiverse learners. Through its innovative resources, GIVE equips teaching artists and educators with tools to foster equitable, creative environments where all students can thrive.
About the New Victory Theater
New Victory Theater is New York City’s premier performing arts venue for young audiences. Run by New 42, it brings world-class theater, dance, circus, and music to children and families. The New Victory also provides arts education programs, workshops, and performances to schools, enriching the cultural experiences of students throughout New York City.
This post is a part of the Breaking Barriers focus of our Amplifying Creative Opportunities newsletter. To read previous posts from our newsletter, please visit the links below to read Re-tooling the Trade-themed posts.
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