Caring about deaf music in culturally responsive music education

This chapter considers the question of how we might be more critically reflexive about an ethic of care between music educators and Deaf people in educational contexts. The authors trouble deficit views of deafness (as a medical condition) that may elicit forms of caring responses based on remediation and compensatory measures. However, in light of the recent proliferation of music-making originating from within the Deaf community, the authors advocate for rethinking care in terms of community rather than deficit. The authors offer an analysis of a Deaf Camp video, which promotes a model of what care can look like in the Deaf community. Noddings’s feminist approach to care, coupled with Hess’s critical scholarship on cultural competence provide a rich theoretical framework to examine tensions that can arise when being inclusive of Deaf students in music education.