Youth Engagement – Chapter 2: Youth Experience (Part 1)

In this section:

• Fostering Inclusion
• Student-Centered Teaching
• Teaching Artists

YOSA (Youth Orchestras of San Antonio)’s Sara Vicinaiz was once titled Operations Director; she is now Director of Student Experience. As she explains, the job is about much more than chairs and stands. “We do everything we can to make sure our students have a great experience, feel safe, and know they belong.” Similar positions are being defined at many youth orchestras. Amy Chung, Executive Director of Houston Youth Symphony, notes that among her many constituents, parents can become an overly dominant voice. So HYS recently put student voices into its strategic plan, “so students can be heard, and not just on stage.”

Fostering Inclusion

Rebecca Calos, Executive Director of the Empire State Youth Orchestra in Albany, NY, says that “there’s been a radical change over the last decade in order to address inclusivity.” A teen’s experience of feeling included can have as much to do with cliques as with race or gender. “We start each season with an inclusive experience, not something like talking about summer travels, but something involving humor and collaborative work, that sets the tone for rehearsals.” For instance, she describes sending students throughout the building hunting for fragments of a score that they then work together to reconstruct.

Houston Youth Symphony, like many youth orchestras today, now sports gender-neutral concert dress and includes pronouns on name tags.

Read about inclusivity at the Chicago City Youth Orchestras in Catalyst Snapshots: EDI Case Studies from American Orchestras.

Alison Levinson directs arts-X-press, a summer multi-arts program at the Pacific Symphony. She notes that true inclusivity requires broad participation, bringing together children of families of all income levels. “It’s about everyone being exposed to an inclusive community. You are who are, you’re not solely a representative of your community.” She also says it’s important to model inclusivity at the staff level, with staff members of many different backgrounds sharing in leadership.

Student-Centered Teaching

A student-centered educator’s goal is to give students the tools to be successful in finding their own voices. Teaching that builds out from students’ own interests, experiences, and identities in this way puts down deeper roots, engenders more enthusiasm, and builds more confidence than the conventional “empty vessel” approach that situates the learner solely as a recipient of knowledge.

As described by Eric Booth, student-centered teaching means “attending to the learner’s organic impulses, what intrinsically motivates a learner, attending to what they have going in their self-directed learning lives; leaving room for young people to find their own meaning in music.” Approaching it with inclusivity top of mind means respecting and responding to each student’s individual background and identity. Music educator and philosopher David J. Elliot notes that student-centered learning is inherently multicultural and therefore we must create learning environments that reflect that.

“The traditional model is that kids are recipients of information the conductor imparts,” says Rebecca Calos at Empire State Youth Orchestra. But the traditional model is open to change. Calos describes how Music Director Etienne Abelin challenges the stereotype of the maestro as unquestioned leader by inviting the young musicians to make repertoire suggestions and have conversations about his choices, treating them as collaborators. “Improvisation, conductorless pieces, enabling them to communicate among themselves—it changes how students come into rehearsal,” she says. Such leadership reflects a broader evolution in musical training to replace the power dynamics that can breed abusive behavior by leaders and instructors with a safer, collectively owned space for artistic expression and learning.

Read about the progress that youth orchestras are making towards repertoire diversification in the Orchestra Repertoire Report from the Institute for Composer Diversity, produced in partnership with the League of American Orchestras.

Teaching Artists

As practicing, professional artists who have dual careers as educators, often in classroom settings, teaching artists are recognized for developing student-centered teaching to a high degree in youth, professional, and community orchestras. (See the 2023 Symphony feature on teaching artistry.) Stemming from the work of philosophers John Dewey and Maxine Greene, teaching artistry involves specific training distinct from the studio pedagogy known by most orchestral musicians. Some orchestras, mostly in large urban areas with freelance musicians, have had dedicated faculties of teaching artists for many years. Other orchestras deploy their own musicians for in-school work, with or without extra training.

“An unfortunately small percentage of orchestra musicians are actually curious about the work we do as teaching artists,” admits Eric Booth. “There’s little to encourage their curiosity and interest. The challenge is adapting what you know toward a new purpose—and that’s required to succeed with young people.” But with training and honest feedback, the payoff can be tremendous. “If you put the musicians in situations where they can succeed,” says Booth, “it has a ripple effect on the whole orchestra.”

Suzanne Perrino at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra engages teaching artists only for specific projects, but she can tell the difference. “A teaching artist changes the culture of the organization,” she says, as musicians become aware of their expanded skill set.

Perrino describes the impact of focused professional development not just for musicians, but also for staff and volunteers, in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s Sensory-Friendly Concerts. “Those concerts have [also] really changed the culture of the organization,” she says, citing the myriad ways the orchestra and the hall have become more accessible to all kinds of neurodiversity. She works with Roger Ideishi of George Washington University to deliver trainings and has taken these trainings to other orchestras as well. (See the 2020 League Conference session on sensory-friendly concerts featuring Dr. Ideishi.)

“We are most successful when we learn and grow alongside our students. Listening and responsiveness guide us in the pursuit of student well-being, superseding assumptions around age, race, gender identity, socioeconomic status, or place of residence. Our work at the DSO centers people as the experts in their own experience.”

Karisa Antonio, Senior Director of Social Innovation and Learning, Detroit Symphony Orchestra

---

---

Photo: Students rehearsing with South Dakota Symphony Orchestra musicians on new compositions written as part of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s Music Composition Academy program. Credit: Connor Gibbs