6/22/2023
Topic:
Students with Disabilities
Kelly Hardman Parker
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I am in my 38th year as a Florida pubic school music educator, K-12 instrumental and choral. I have had many students with disabilities over those many years, but last school year I had a real challenge acquiring materials for a visually-impaired student. She moved in to our district from far away and had some significant skill on clarinet--which she had developed by ear. As an 8th-grader, she had not had any work with using Braille printed music and was therefore unfamiliar with the associations of rhythm, reading notes or passages: when she first arrived, she could only play with an ensemble by aurally memorizing her clarinet part that I recorded for her. She was provided a teacher's aide who was not a musician. I applied for basic Braille music text books and together, we began learning together the Braille method of musical language that would afford her the understanding to play and perform successfully with a music community, a musical ensemble. These texts were very expensive and only one single text was available for the entire district, as in its printed version, was evidently very expensive. My student took right to the system and she and I worked to prepare her for high school band, where she now performs regularly. |