Music Teaching Strategies for Students With Low Vision, Including Blindness

This study is about music teaching strategies for students with low vision, including blindness. Based on a two-case ethnographic design, this study focuses on understanding what decisions in terms of activities, lesson plans, and curricula, six participants from two different schools adopted for their students, as well as how these decisions relate to these students’ special needs and the context of these two schools. One of these school was located in Santiago, Chile, while the other in New York, USA. Data collection included observations and fieldnotes, interviews and informal conversations, artifact and document collections, and the use of a reflective journal. Findings encompass a variety of strategies recorded in several formal learning spaces such as instrumental private lessons, music theory lessons, instrumental ensemble rehearsals, choir rehearsal, accessible music technology lessons, braille lessons, general music lessons. These strategies, in turn, seemed to be highly conditioned by the students’ special need as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of the two schools observed.