Shared uncertainties: mapping digital teaching artistry in youth performing arts during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This article considers a pilot research project that examines the successes, failures, and best practice approaches for delivering online performing arts education experiences to young people around Australia. In conversation with 15 teaching artists and 18 youth-based arts organisations nationally, it evaluates the challenges and innovations in live online arts education experienced during the COVID-19 pivot. In doing so it examines pedagogies that foreground embodied and playful collaboration and diversified access for participants. It recognises the role of youth arts in reshaping creativity learning and opens considerations of the role digital educations may play in increased arts accessibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital
• education
• performing arts
• embodied
• pedagogy

Introduction

COVID-19 witnessed rapid pivots in the live and performing arts sector on a global scale. It witnessed equally rapid pivots in multiple tiers of the educational sector, and in the case of the tertiary sector, necessitated rapid innovation where demand for interactive digital learning appears set to remain (Rapanta et al. 2020). In the aftermath of the COVID-led digital pivot, disciplinary scholarly and media attention have been primarily directed towards the tremendous transformation theatre, dance, music, and performing arts companies achieved in delivering live arts productions on a range of digital platforms – from livestreamed zoom ensembles to slow-release twitter feeds (Davis 2020; Fairley 2020; TDR Editors 2020). Emergent threads in these discussions have most often been concerned with how accepted notions within the new media dramaturgies lexicon (Nicholls and Philip 2012) – such as distributed presence or somatic collaboration across distance – attest to what Filmer et al. refer to as the ‘transferable principles, proposals, prototypes, models, and recommendations for new approaches to the practices of theatre’ (Filmer et al. 2020, 383). The notion of ‘transferable principles’ here indicates the dynamic ways in which theatre, performance, and other live arts practices worldwide have modelled a rapid adaptability and infinite agility of form by recalibrating live arts dramaturgies for the interactive dynamics of digital space.

The interrelated issue of live arts pedagogy as that which similarly embodies ‘transferable principles’ also emerged in this context but has received substantially less attention. As a response to scale as well as necessity, scholarship concerning the adaptation of live arts educational practices to digital contexts has primarily focused on the performing arts and drama schoolroom (Cziboly and Bethlenfalvy 2020; Gallagher et al. 2020), the university arts-based studio (Pollitt, Blaise, and Gray 2021) and the community-based arts practice (Hancox et al. 2022). In these discussions there has been an emphasis both on teacher impacts and wellbeing (Davis and Phillips 2020) as well as pedagogical innovation in the context of student disengagement and/or disadvantage. Less has been documented regarding the central role youth arts practices have played in supporting youth during this specific cultural moment. Where youth arts have been discussed in relation to COVID-19, there has been a focus on what Schoenenberger refers to as ‘extended performance engagement’ (2021, 91) in the context of young people’s experiences of recorded performances viewed at home. While mapping shifts in extended audience engagement is part of the picture, there has not yet been a schematic focus on the use and development of the digital for synchronous, co-present pedagogies in youth-based arts contexts.

The gap here is telling. In Australia, the youth arts sector both drives live and performing arts futures and supports the building of young peoples’ confidence, community, and wellbeing. The vital contributions it has made to areas of digital pedagogy during COVID-19, or what in this article is referred to as digital teacher artistry, have been largely overlooked. This is despite the fact that youth arts practitioners not only build young people’s communities and shape intergenerational arts ecologies, they also play an increasingly central role in reshaping the language and practices of creative educations (Australia Council and SOH 2020), and in particular, in answering calls to reform broader educational futures by grounding learning in principles of experiment, play, and collaboration. The Sydney Opera House’s 2020 ‘Cultivating Creativity’ report offers powerful evidence for the ways in which ‘creativity will help us – and our young people – thrive in uncertain times’ (Australia Council and SOH 2020, 4). Less considered, and still emerging, are important questions regarding how the practices underscored by youth performing arts teachers embody – and instil – what this article refers to as creativity literacies. The expanded notion of literacies here aims to identify key features evoked in the psychology of creative learning and thinking, such as taking ‘beautiful risks’, committing to uncertainty (Beghetto 2019), or even ‘unlearning’ learning (Robinson 2011). These are ways of knowing differently about how, as well as what, a learner might come to know. They anchor learners in the kinds of somatic experience in which they are invited to sense their capacities for kinaesthetic forms of not only expressing, but also discovering and intuitive problem-seeking.

This article fills this critical gap by documenting experiences that speak to the transformations youth-based performing arts teaching artists and educators achieved in reinventing workshop practices that foreground creative literacies for online delivery. At the onset of the pandemic, a sector impact snapshot from 40 of Australia’s leading arts companies working with young people and creating work for young audiences noted that:

0% of programmed activities are running as normal

52% of companies have stood down core staff

69% of companies have stood down casual staff and contracted artists

48% of national workshop programs have been cut or postponed

52% of companies feel it is still too early to understand the long-term implications of the shutdown (Corfield et al. 2020, 5)

The snapshot further reports that ‘the youth arts and theatre sector ha[d] been able to adjust programmes to retain engagement and maintain activity with 48% of workshop programmes modified so they can work online’ (Corfield et al. 2020, 5). In focusing on the specifics of how engagement and activity were maintained, this article locates concepts that have application to the sector as well as to aligned areas of practice that may continue to deliver creative arts services remotely for a range of reasons. In doing so, it points to enhanced efficacy in those practices that were informed by, and hence modelled, synergies of both creative learning philosophy and modality.

Sector snapshot: nation-wide survey

Two research methods were undertaken for this pilot study: a brief sector-wide survey, run nationally, as well as a series of three NSW-based roundtable focus group discussions.¹ Survey respondents were asked to respond to questions around the challenges and affordances of digital learning environments and methodologies, age ranges of participants, and the art forms most successfully adapted for digital use. They were additionally asked to respond to questions around increased and decreased access. Eighteen organisations responded to the survey, with representatives from all states and territories excepting Queensland, and the majority of respondents residing in Australia’s two most COVID-hit states: New South Wales and Victoria. Within that mix only one responding organisation identified as being located regionally. The majority of interviewees reported using Zoom as their primary software platform for the purposes of co-present learning situations.

Respondents additionally represented artforms across the spectrum – with dance and movement, music, visual arts, cross-media arts, circus arts equally represented and an emphasis on theatre, drama, and performance. All age ranges, including early years, were represented with an emphasis on working with 12- to 15-year-olds, 15- to 18-year-olds, and 18- to 25-year-olds. Surveyed organisations were asked about scale: two catered to over 200 young participants annually, and an additional six catered to over 500 young participants each year. This level of scale communicates not only the value of the sector to young people and their communities nationally but the vital importance of its work being sustained across the COVID-19 disruption. It is additionally notable here that a higher proportion of surveyed organisations (20%) identified their target participants as being located within low socio-economic and culturally and linguistically diverse communities of children and young people more than, but not exclusive to, other at-risk communities or groups (for instance regional communities – 8% and LGBTQI communities – 13%).

The survey asked respondents to benchmark which practices operating prior to COVID-19 experienced a pivot during the pandemic, seeking to understand which practices were most commonly maintained and the challenges and benefits of doing so. A startling 35% of responding organisations who did digitally pivot their programmes delivered 80% of their programmes online, with one organisation reporting having delivered all of their programmes online. Most responding organisations pivoted 50% or less of their existing programmes. All catered primarily for age groups within the 8- to 18-year-old range, with the 18- to 25-year-old emerging artist category strongly represented as well. All art forms were represented in the pivot, with again an emphasis on theatre, drama, and performance. Challenges noted by responding organisations included ‘delivering activities in a format we had never used before’, ‘the legal ramifications of children and families participating in the work in their own home’, ‘crowded houses with little privacy’ and navigating the balance and relationship between different modes of delivery such as the use of pre-recorded material, ‘face to face workshops’, and ‘resources for use in their own time’.

When asked what the most positive aspects of the pivot experience were, responding organisations overwhelmingly placed ‘maintaining connection with our community of young people’ above other acknowledged benefits such as upskilling, increased access or flexibility. Interestingly, 63% of respondents answered in the affirmative to the questions of whether online offerings had continued beyond lockdown and into 2022. Reasons for this included generating new revenue streams, maintaining far higher levels of participation in select activities as well as ongoing interest in developing and innovating form. In light of the continued application of the digital to specific areas of live arts education, the more granular insights from teaching artists interviewed below become relevant to understanding how the sector is managing and leading in this area of ongoing transformation.

Sector practices: roundtable interviews

In addition to the survey, 15 teaching artists across three youth performing arts organisations based in NSW (Shopfront Arts, Q Theatre and Australian Theatre for Young People) were invited to participate in roundtable interviews, sharing observations and recollections of their teaching practices during Sydney’s 2020–2021 COVID-19 lockdowns. Interviews were coded and analysed for common pedagogical themes and keywords – with approaches to uses of space, embodiment, objects, text, sound, time, and collaboration highlighted as key ‘dramaturgical’ strategies that understand the digital studio itself as a site of platform/form transfer (Filmer et al. 2020, 383–384). Commentaries on risk, vulnerability, creativity, innovation and safety were also frequent, with both affordances and disadvantages of the digital pivot being consistently described in terms of the creative knowledges and literacies they embodied. The value of the live, face-to-face physicality of the traditional theatre/performing arts classroom was largely reasserted. However, strong assertions were also made for the unexpected benefits witnessed in increased participation of new communities of young people for whom the digital appeared to offer a more comfortable and accessible space of belonging.

Findings are communicated below under frameworks that synthesise dominant issues of concern as well as emergent trajectories forwards. These consider interrelated themes across: (i) challenges of making effective use of space, (ii) affordances and approaches of pedagogies that foreground creativity literacies, (iii) innovations and strategies for discovering new pedagogical approaches, and (iv) guidelines for risk mitigation during practice. The conclusion considers sector-wide issues and needs for a future-proofed best practice approach towards increased access in these areas.

Colliding spaces: domestic tensions in the digital studio

Teaching artists collectively reinforced the centrality of space to anchoring dramaturgies of sound, embodiment, objects, and temporality when converting to the digital performing arts classroom. Despite its reputation for being both ‘distant’ and ‘flat’ or ‘two-dimensional’, facilitators emphasised the ways in which digital space tended to multiply – as well as then collide, collapse or merge – in a workshop process. The intricacies of needing to manage the multiplication and collapse of digital teaching space(s), particularly in the context of working with young people, highlight the creative, interpersonal, and temporal affordances as well as risks carried by this mode of practice. One facilitator described her role as demanding a ‘new kind of curatorial work in [which teachers must both] fit their pedagogical practice into the different trajectories made possible by technology and … create a safe space for students online’.

The responsibility to produce safe digital environments was collectively recognised to be in tension with the ‘creative and freely expressive’ expectations of the traditional studio workshop. Spaces allowing students to be physically and emotionally safe and that are private and quiet are the priority of the conventional drama studio. Relocating this privileged realm of alterity to a student’s domestic setting via the digital frame hence presented significant challenges. These were foremost described by discussants as operating at the level of exposure: the visibility of students’ domestic spaces as well as facilitators being ‘privy to seeing … who is around’ split workshop focus and generated a heightened sense of vulnerability – for both teacher and participant.

More than one teacher commented that the duty of care they normally experienced towards the home-life and well-being of their students outside of their in-person workshops was amplified by the visibility of their domestic spaces during online workshops. Questions arose around levels of responsibility facilitators can be reasonably asked to hold over the safety of the domestic spaces inhabited by workshop participants and what guidelines for participation might arise out of these scenarios (further discussed below). Perceived risk in this context was largely described as being either located within the home space, or in the collision of the domestic and digital spaces, rather than in alternative online platforms a participant might be accessing. In future-focused best practice scenarios and frameworks, further attention is required regarding pedagogical as well as legal frameworks of how concepts of ‘online safety’ exceed those, for instance, concerned with inappropriate online material and behaviours like ‘zoom-bombing’² and involve the lived domestic settings of participants.

The role of the teaching artist on the one hand to acknowledge and manage the realities of student vulnerability in online and domestic spaces, and on the other to also instil creative and social confidence presented itself as a concern. Where teachers found themselves engaged in heightened levels of responsibility towards managing the classroom, they felt an equivalent sense of duty to keep their programmes available to young people during the pandemic. Teachers commented specifically on the difficulties involved in the online environment’s production of ‘challenging behaviours’ that then required new forms of management. One facilitator speculated that these behaviours stemmed from heightened anxieties around new ways of being seen and heard in online workshops, with students wanting to be off-screen when not speaking during sessions, and others wanting to be muted. They also involved the increased capacity for distraction and disengagement in online spaces generally, given the saturation of such spaces in young people’s lives. The inability to resort to swift strategies for managing the drama studio through, for instance, the ‘quiet aside’ was described as a limitation by three teachers, where challenging behaviours had less discreet modes of management that involved ‘calling out individual students, [in ways that] it immediately feels like a spotlight has been put on them’. Teachers noted difficulties here in emotion communication and also management, including ‘picking up on different signals from students to know when they are struggling’ or in communicating teacher empathy across the screen.

Many teachers noted that students were more inhibited in the ways they used their voices and bodies when in the digital workshop space. Some teachers migrated to text-based or scriptwriting workshops because the digital provided what was described as ‘optimal’ conditions for this kind of creative process, in which students seemed to ‘feel calm and relaxed and [were] able to spend time writing in their own space in a way that they might not experience in in-person workshops’. Written work was also more readily shared online than it is in person, as a result of perceived shifts in immediacy. One teacher shifted away from the physical altogether, working with an app that involved students collaboratively writing sentences and then drawing each other’s sentences, allowing students to ‘have fun and socialise’ and at the same time learn though composition and visual language.

Other teachers saw some of the more usually ‘reticent’ students thrive, and they speculated this was owing to focused learning environments and smaller group numbers affording greater individual attention and agency within the creative process. Shopfront Arts described the possibility of continuing to deliver online workshops alongside in-person offerings in the future because of the programmes’ exposure to new cohorts of young people enabled by remote delivery. Shopfront had an increased intake due to the removal of travel and cost-related access barriers made possible by online workshops (offered for free or on a pay-what-you-can model). Enhanced ‘reach’ was seen to occur where, in particular, neurodiverse participants seemed to benefit from the more structured creative space necessitated by online delivery and participants with disabilities had access to different modes of engagement that were made possible by online platforms. The optimal settings for supporting participant diversity in such programmes require further knowledge in order to deliver best practice learning experiences.

Modelling creativity literacies: resilience, agility and adaptability

While the speed of the pandemic pivot presented an enormous challenge for teachers, it also encouraged pedagogical approaches that used the crisis as a means to model a collective and shared way towards creative discovery. What one teacher described as a ‘newfound ownership over creative space in digital workshop delivery’ hence might be considered the flipside to the issues of risk management and youth vulnerability presented by COVID-19. Encouraging resilience and adaptability became a hallmark feature of many teaching artists’ pedagogies when approaching the unknown facets of the digital studio. One described a practice of instilling in participants a creative mindset that recognised how ‘using what you have … can encourage participants to take creative risks or make choices they wouldn't normally make’. Here, teachers collectively recognised that literacies in creative process are skills that transfer to in-person workshops and also to other contexts of social and educational life entirely.

Interconnections between resilience and creativity during crisis, and particularly during COVID19, were well-covered in media as well as in scholarship in areas of creative arts, youth sociology and psychology during the pandemic. In its ‘Strengthening Resilience’ Report, the World Health Organisation (2017) defines resilience as being ‘related to processes and skills that result in good individual and community health outcomes, in spite of negative events, serious threats and hazards’, noting that ‘resilient young people possess the problem solving skills, social competence and sense of purpose that enable them to cope with stressful situations’. UNESCO also makes connections between artistic practices and resilience in times of crisis, publishing focussed stories on youth resilience through art during the pandemic (2020). At the same time, the alignment of the characteristic of resilience with individual mastery is understood by some to perpetuate – rather than contest – neoliberal versions of selfhood whose capacity to change the world, rather than merely adapt to its conditions, is reduced. In this model, the ‘resilient subject … must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, not … conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility, but [is] a subject that accepts the disastrousness of the world it lives in as a condition for partaking of that world’ (Chandler 2016, 68). The tension within the discourse of resilience speaks to how adaptation can also pre-empt transformation – a key finding within this dataset and within creative and performing arts discourses of resilience more broadly.

For example, many approaches focused on making work in the digital studio that recognised, creatively embraced, and strategically deployed the unique characteristics of digital space and the ways in which it resists – and exists beyond – the pure replication of in-person theatre-making processes. Formal innovation, both in pedagogy and in the artistic outcomes produced by such approaches, involved working in ‘context-specific’ ways in order to create ‘a parallel kind of theatre making that lives in this [digital] space’ rather than trying to translate to – or from – the stage. This was a move away from what was described as the phenomenon of ‘proscenium arch Zoom theatre’, in which workshops would simply involve the reading out of scripts. One teacher noted that in instances where the digital workshop was a student’s first time participating in performing arts workshops in any form, they benefited from having no sense of an ‘established practice or an embodied understanding or expectation of what drama is’, creating an increased freedom to play without prejudice or ‘baggage’. Here the challenge of an inhibiting digital environment became the prompt, modelled by teaching artists, for formal discovery and reinvention.

The importance of ‘negotiation’ to discovering new methods and forms was also championed as a key pedagogical method. Facilitators and students negotiated the parameters of their creative learning, generating what was described as a ‘democratising of the process’ which aimed to ‘give more ownership’ to participants. This involved ‘being open’ with students about the ‘shared uncertainty’ of moving into new territories of play that were not familiar to the facilitator and that could not be controlled in the same way as they could in-person. Being open to unknowns within a process, as one teacher described it, emphasised the importance of asking ‘where is the form leading us?’, rather than trying to squeeze pre-conceived ideas into the form. Comments here reinforce the specialised level of craftsmanship demanded of teachers’ approaches to this new workshop terrain. They also indicate the demand for higher order teaching skills in working intuitively and with moment-to-moment agility. Here, teachers evoke their own challenge in terms of the literacies in creativity with which their artforms have supported them; there is a sense in which teacher’s demonstrating particular vulnerability within the new conditions in fact leant agency to participants, who then were able to test and model creative solutions to the challenge at hand.

Where participants benefited from witnessing their teachers model intuition and agility within the teaching moment, the additional learning benefits of being creative in their own home spaces were seen to positively contribute to a dismantling of hierarchies around art-making and preconceptions of the legitimised spaces in which art-making can happen. This insight emphasises the role of performing arts and drama youth training programmes more broadly, where participants have the opportunity to see creativity as part of everyday life, as distinct from something that happens solely for – and upon – a stage. The creative and social resilience cultivated through responding to the limitations, distractions and resources of a home environment presented as a recurrent theme in the interviews. One teacher commented that viewing limitations as something that engendered ‘new possibilities and environments for learning’, was key to their practice. Another described the ‘joy’ experienced in navigating the novel trajectories afforded by the digital environment together with her students, and of giving students a space to share their knowledges in ways that ‘dissolved’ the teacher-student hierarchy.

Making things strange: ‘Hacks’ and innovations

Where innovation and openness to process was foregrounded as learning method, teachers developed learning ‘hacks’ to manage the tensions between vulnerability, safety, limitation and discovery that came with digital space. Often these involved ways to make aspects of the home space ‘strange’ by experiments with objects, space, and settings. One teacher commented that her practice intentionally avoided distinguishing between theatrical and filmic practices/forms, to instead focus on ‘ways of making’ with the resources available, described as ‘the ability to just create things and explore freely’. This teacher prioritised activities focused on compositional attention and approaches to playing with the digital ‘frame’ to replace the Zoom dynamics of talking – students recreated famous paintings, for example. Other innovations involved using ‘video-game-like’ imaginings of space in which students were invited to

escap[e] from a temple in Indiana Jones’ or to flee rolling boulders or evade swords falling from the roof, for example. Fantasy frames transposed into the digital interaction aimed to allow students to become ‘comfortable with both their physical space and the box of the Zoom meeting.

The embodied and physically/visually demonstrative was not, however, the only means of managing the challenges established by the digital frame. One teacher used Zoom with camera off to create radio plays with two high-school aged classes, focusing on auditory storytelling rather than visual experiences. Here, emphasis on the auditory over the visual and physical may be aligned with perceived age-appropriateness and the best possibilities of engagement for that cohort. Another teacher describes transitioning a project from an intended live theatre outcome to an interactive storytelling experience. A story taking place at a party in a share-house came to rely upon a digital (re)distribution of space in order to create an experience of equivalency to a physical share-house experience.

Working with home-sourced objects became a central way to attend to students’ physical energies, while also distracting students from the visualised physicalities of their bodies on screen. Those at the Joan and ATYP found new improvisatory structures in students sourcing their own objects and transforming them or concealing/revealing them through games and exercises. They observed that object games were a useful way of creating focus and stimulating online improvisation as well as building rapport in the absence of ‘other physical ways of doing that’. One teacher commented that the enhanced access students had to materials from the house created improvisatory formats that may not have been arrived at in a studio setting, as in the example of students taking turns to read sentences from books found in the home. Other object-centred innovations involved the provision of tasks to be rehearsed and prepared offline before regrouping online. Shopfront initially designed their workshops around set activity packs that were sent out to students (one example was a shoebox puppet show that students created and shared). This freed up the creative process, relieved parents of sourcing materials, and created a task-based focus for students that offset the inhibition of being visible to oneself and others on screen. Teachers also recognised that students could experience a greater sense of autonomy when being asked to complete tasks on their own.

In this way found objects were key to creating not only focus, but to activating materially interactive learning processes, particularly in the absence of the physical proximity of a traditional classroom. Teachers here evoke a sense of how their digital studio practices transformed – even defamiliarised – the domestic setting, an important outcome when extended lockdowns filled the home space with monotony, tedium, and also often anxiety. One teacher used domestic objects to shape the temporality of the Zoom workshop – students were restricted to 20-second stories narrating the oldest object in their house. Objects, however, were not just material – they were also digital – and here, teachers commented on the ways in which the digital studio enabled for the display of generation-specific digital skills in the form of sharing, research, and repurposing of hypertexts (memes, gifs, YouTube videos, etc). Instant access to digital objects introduced another improvisatory tool that was perceived to enable ‘a greater sense of freedom and a feeling of comfort and relaxation and openness’ through channelling students’ digital literacies. It also however presented challenges in the regulation of contemporaneously shared video content.

Re-working the ensemble: approaching the collective

Challenges in managing the dramaturgies of sound, physicality and temporality generated specific approaches to the production of ensemble work and collaborative processes. Teachers collectively commented that time felt regulated, distributed, and experienced in a different way in online workshops, and this impacted how devising practices could flow. At the same time, these limitations also helped to produce different modes of attention, focus, and listening that created alternative and uniquely productive classroom rhythms. One teacher described their approach towards attention-management within the digital setting as being ‘modular’. Modular pedagogies involve the ‘breaking down [of] more complex tasks, adapting existing methodologies to the way in which time becomes organised by the quirks of the Zoom interface and the modes of attention that are possible’. This created what was described as a new ‘rhythm’ to online workshops, often moving quickly and simply between more straightforward tasks that were seen to ‘get the job done’.

The relationship of speech to habitual modes of collaboration, in particular, was described as a very large challenge to overcome. Zoom was seen to ‘atomise’ individuals within the ensemble and pose difficulties for ensemble-building and collegiality. The limitations of Zoom in recognising multiple people speaking at the same time and its tendency to isolate and privilege the loudest voices while delaying others impacted how traditional ensemble activities could be approached in the studio classroom. This impacted how the collective could, for instance, negotiate the use of voice and sound in improvisation. ‘Choral speaking’ and ‘deliver[ing …] text in unison’ was described by one teacher as being ‘dreadful’ on Zoom. In the digital collaborative space, teachers also observed changes in how participants could work with their own voices, in terms of their willingness to project into space when they could only ‘speak … this far in front of ourselves’. Another teacher interestingly embraced ‘silence’ as a shift in his practice – in the form of asking questions and allowing them to ‘hang’ rather than ‘constantly projecting energy’ into the learning space.

Small scale collaborations were enabled with the use of breakout rooms, which were perceived to be effective but also to present a specific set of risks when utilised for young participants in these contexts. One teacher noted that ‘randomised groups in breakout rooms with clear tasks to focus on resulted in less friction between students that might normally clash during in-person workshops’. Another noted that breakout rooms allowed ‘a greater feeling of connection’ among students (compared to larger groups) and encouraged self-directed learning. Breakout rooms however, did require a level of ‘trust’ between facilitators and students and a ‘surrendering of control’ by facilitators. In this they presented the need to balance the potential for a rewarding learning environment with the possibility of ‘bullying in an unsupervised space’.

Organisations were put to the task of developing guidelines in digital youth arts practices on the hop and without precedent. Approaches to managing the safety risks associated with teaching in online spaces varied, but all included code of conduct guidelines, agreements or briefing documents that outlined what a ‘positive’ domestic workshop space could be and the rules of engagement within. Importantly, these involved clearly delineated boundaries as well as expectations for behaviour and adjusted learning outcomes, often discussed with parents and students in ‘pre’ classroom ‘check-ins’ where agreements were ‘bought into’ collectively. Workshops were also followed up with strict reporting conditions to ensure duty of care was maintained across the often-multiple spaces any one teacher was managing. Teachers commented on the necessity of having more than one facilitator to manage the colliding and multiplying spaces, as well as the presence of administrative and support workers, so that adequate supervision and support could be provided and benefits maximised.

Conclusions: considering digital futures in performing arts youth education

Teacher reflections on their experiences of, and approaches to, digital education in the performing arts during COVID-19 reveal positive outcomes of the digital learning experience, despite the many challenges. Among the positive outcomes they firstly show that digital and physical workshops provide different spaces and modes of delivery for different learning needs and proclivities. In particular, they show that digital delivery necessitates new modes of listening, attention, patience, and focus; it engenders different kinds of collaborative practices and learning environments; it can generate new improvisatory structures, trajectories and rhythms; and allows students to develop important attributes and collaborative skills that may not be so plainly highlighted during in-person workshops.

One of the key areas of learning emphasised by the nature of online workshop spaces and the need for students to adapt to the spaces around them, was creative resilience and flexibility, and seeing and practicing creativity as a discipline, process and indeed literacy that extends beyond conventional/legitimised spaces of art-making and exhibition. This requires recognising both the unique possibilities and legitimacy of the form of digital art-making, and engaging in creative and critical engagements with the form, rather than using digital delivery as a substitute for, or replication of, activities that might happen during in-person workshops. In the future digital engagement will occur not in lieu of, but as an additional option to in-person workshops. As such, digital learning experiences need to be designed around the specificity of digital engagement and need to be designed to sustain interest on their own terms.

For all interviewees, maintaining online programmes had the benefit of being cheaper to run. However, all teachers stressed that the digital could not replace face-to-face teaching but could complement existing offerings because it increased access to previously under-represented groups of young people, suited the learning needs of some students better, and provided unique opportunities for and approaches to making work. Shopfront Arts in particular noted that their digital workshops catered to ‘a demographic of young people [and] emerging artists with disability who already felt isolated and disconnected … [and it] ha[d] actually given them more access’. Inventing new forms of engagement and new methodologies – where online spatial arrangement and technological limitations affected the management of bodies and voices in particular – led to ‘modular’/linear approaches to task-setting and simplifying tasks. On the one hand, this removed the complexity and nuance of learning in a shared physical space, but on the other hand it potentially galvanised a sense of task focus, gave rise to new collaborative rhythms, and opened up new modes of facilitating, creating, and presenting ensemble work.

Where increased access was a perceived benefit, it also highlighted inequalities in living conditions and private access to resources and materials. Teachers here emphasised that online teaching requires different skillsets to manage the different kinds of student vulnerability and behaviour that are engendered by working in home environments online. Strong and clear guidelines are required to manage these spaces into the future. There is ongoing potential for hybrid (workshops incorporating both digital and physical learning spaces) or parallel delivery (workshops that are offered separately in both digital and physical spaces) due to the multiple benefits of maintaining online programmes (cost, access, different learning environments that allow some students to thrive). However, in the case of hybrid models, there was a consensus among interviewees that the workshops need to be designed to optimise the coming-together of digital and physical environments and the possibilities for experimentation and exchange that this opens up.

This article does not advocate for replacement of traditional in-person arts practices with digital ones, and it is mindful of the limited reach of digital access altogether. The Australian Digital Inclusion Index (2020) reports that around 20% of all school students in Australia are from low-income households and are disadvantaged in digital access, services and skills. At the same time, what is potentially surprising about this study is the ways in which online delivery has also enabled new modes of access for broader, diverse, more expansive groups of young people to engage in performing arts educations and the creative benefits they deliver. Given that the spaces created are managing to uncover new skillsets or enable under-represented cohorts to thrive, the promise of ongoing digital programmes requires further investment, support, research, and collaboration. When framing creativity as a literacy in its own right (rather than as a modality in service of other literacies), the insights brought to bear by the practices highlighted in this research become salient for how they prioritise creativity as a competency that enacts, recognises, names and reflects upon modalities of creative action in/as process. The work of youth arts educators in embracing modalities of play, risk, failure, and unknown outcomes is central to not only fostering pathways in the arts, but to fostering broader skillsets that support young learners’ lifelong career pathways. As the work of such educators during COVID-19 shows, these principles – adapted digitally – found ways to reach vulnerable youth, and at times even accelerate engagement with and access for diverse communities. Importantly, they fostered creativity learning, vital to young people’s mental health and resilience during a time of global crisis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The survey was sent to 30 leading youth arts organisations on the 12th of July, 2022, and was left open for one month. The organisations surveyed responded on the condition of anonymity. In addition to the survey, four round-table interviews were undertaken in October, 2021 with teaching artists from the three partner organisations for the project. For the purposes of brevity, individual quotations from these interviews have not been date-referenced. This project has received ethics clearance from the [University redacted, UNSW Sydney] Human Research Ethics Committee No. HC210469.

2 ‘Zoom-bombing’ refers to the practice of unauthorised users accessing online meetings on platforms like Zoom and bombarding meeting participants with offensive, inappropriate, or otherwise disruptive material.