The 2020-21 “coronavirus school year” will be difficult for all teachers, but for music and art teachers, the challenges will be perhaps the greatest. Theirs are classes with students in the closest proximity and with the most hands-on contact with materials and supplies. Gina Costanza, President-Elect of the Music Educators Association of New York City (MEANYC), says music teachers often held mixers for students that involved partner activities like hand-clapping games. At the end of the 2019-2020 school year, music teachers ended these activities because of the concern about surfaces and contact being the main cause of spreading the virus.
Resorting to remote learning is just as difficult for music and art teachers, if not more. Mario Asaro, Chair of the New York City Art Teachers Association (NYCATA), who spent thirty years teaching using what he called a workshop model, making art then learning the method and practice, and suggested that art may lose priority during remote learning. He says it is easy for administrators to overlook the “liberating quality” of art and how it enhances the overall learning experience. It can be therapeutic and even meditative, while still requiring the same focus as the core subjects. He said even parents minimized the importance of art, often asking art teachers who checked in on students during quarantine whether it was really important just to get through the end of the school year.
Technology stood in the way of effective music instruction, too. Costanza says that lag and latency issues with connectivity and devices compromise the aural experience of music. Over a computer, the concept of the ensemble, she says, is gone. Edited video performances, which became popular during quarantine, are too costly, time-consuming, and difficult to be done well for
school bands and choirs. Asaro and Costanza both fear what the coronavirus crisis may do to school budgets and that music and art may lose out to the core subjects. If these classes have to be sacrificed now, there is a fear they may never return.
Arts educators have found ways to give students the creative outlet that is so important to the overall education experience. NYCATA partnered with COPE NYC (Committee on Political Education) of the United Federation of Teacher to invite students to design masks with beautiful artwork to help spread the message about safe practices and social behavior during the coronavirus. Costanza says that music teachers have been using more than Zoom to try to innovate virtually with students, seeing them branch out to other platforms to create collaborative mixtapes. This allows them to still have a creative outlet and also the social-emotional connections that are so vital at this age and are unique to artistic creation and performance.
Costanaza says that she and her colleagues will continue to make the best of, as one teacher put it, “teaching from the space station.” Two hundred sixty art teachers polled by NYCATA are not comfortable returning to the classroom unless they know they can safely share materials and supplies. Colorado State University is currently conducting a study to determine when and how it will be safe for wind instruments and vocal performance to resume. Until then, music students will have to remain 6 feet apart if playing a wind instrument, 12 feet apart if they are singing. Costanza, like so many other teachers, doesn’t know how this year will unfold, but she knows it will happen one way or another. The only thing she and all teachers can do is what is right for their students and families. And that’s what teachers do best.
