Working with Dark Light: Puerto Rican artists are healing the spirits that Hurricane Maria broke

A neuropsychologist and opera singer teamed up to create a form of vocal training for people on the autism spectrum.

Little Kids Rock has helped to revitalize and broaden music education in more than a thousand schools by encouraging children to learn to play popular music, form bands and compose their own songs. Despite a backlash from traditionalists, teaching children to play music they love doesn’t “dumb down” music education—it enriches it.

As popular music has become digital and immaterial in the twenty-first century, record stores are hard to find and those in business struggle to be commercially viable. Used Kids record store in Columbus, OH has been in business for thirty years and is perhaps even more popular now that it was ten years ago. The current management treat the medium of vinyl not as a museum artifact, but rather as a commodity in demand by selling online, holding private events with collectors, and selling the materiality to young people.

An ensemble of New York Police Department officers and members of the public are participating in a theater program designed to bring together the opposite sides of the nationwide debate on interactions between police and minority communities.

Uganda has some of the highest fertility and HIV prevalence rates in the world. Yet the government has banned comprehensive sexuality education in schools, and parents feel uncomfortable talking about the taboo subject. So Chicken & Chips, a television show about puppets, was created to educate the country’s young people about sexual and reproductive health.

"Songs in the Key of Free" is a program in a Pennsylvania prison brings together inmates to play music and write songs that they perform inside, while professional musicians also play the songs in venues outside prison. The program is just a year old and is based on a successful theater program in California that cut recidivism rates and helped decrease prison infractions. The founders of "Songs in the Key of Free" are creating an album of the work, but after that, future funding is unclear.

Italy has had a huge influx of migrants, many of whom are placed in rural areas and struggle to create their new life. An Italian theatre company 'Teatro delle Albe' has helped migrants integrate by including both Italians and African migrants in their productions, helping to foster relationships and help migrants settle.

Some communities in Malawi are beginning to fight child marriage their own way—with music, dance, and a few tears, using theater to motivate cultural change.

In La Paz, local government is using people dressed in zebra costumes to direct traffic and change the behavior of people who break the rules. La Paz borrowed the idea from Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, who discovered that people are more afraid of being ridiculed than being punished. Through humor, the method has improved driving and people's moods on the streets, hospitals, and schools.

Why do schools teach music in a way that turns off so many young people rather than igniting their imagination? A program that taps into students’ passion for pop and rock is revitalizing music education in many schools.