I found this week’s reading topics to be very interesting. I have to admit, I never thought about how difficult it must be to teach literacy to children who are blind and/or deaf. So much of the literacy development we are taught focuses on either visual material or auditory techniques, so it is intriguing to see how teachers modify traditional literacy techniques to fit the special needs of deaf/blind children.
I found an article on teaching literacy to deaf-blind students (children who have both severe visual and hearing impairments). I could understand how teachers could adapt traditional literacy techniques to account for either visual or auditory impairments, but I couldn’t fathom how teachers attempted to teach literacy to children who couldn’t see OR hear. Of course, Helen Keller is a very famous example of how it is definitely possible, with lots of patience and determination on the part of the learner and the teacher, for deaf-blind children to become literate. However, I was a little dissatisfied with the article I found because it didn’t really go into detail on how these specially-trained teachers were teaching literacy. The classrooms, which had young preschoolers and older preschoolers (called ‘transitional’ in the case study), contained many of the literacy centers that we would expect to see in traditional classrooms – lots of print material (mainly in the transitional class), manipulatives, books, writing activities, computer activities, etc. Obviously, there were also special components to the centers, like braille writers and braille paper, that were necessary for literacy development for these children. The teachers focused on communication skills and used “real life experiences” to help the children develop their sense of the world. I think about the famous scene in The Miracle Worker where Helen’s teacher repeatedly shoves her hand into the water coming from the water pump and signs “water” into Helen’s open palm. Finally, Helen realizes that the sign for “water” refers to the wet stuff coming out of the pump, and she can eventually say “water.” I guess what I wanted this article to do would be to give more example of how the teachers attempted to teach literacy to deaf-blind students. Maybe a little more Miracle Worker and less case study procedure…
Do any of the teachers in our class have experience with teaching students who were deaf and/or blind? I think think teaching literacy to these children provides a fascinating challenge.
The article I read was “The Emergent Literacy of Preschool Students Who Are Deaf-Blind: a Case Study” by Amy R. McKenzie and Roseanna Davidson from The Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, Nov. 2007, pp 720-725. The article can be found using the E-Research Tools on UNC’s library page.
Entries (RSS)
March 26th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Although I’ve not taught students with visually impairments, I supervised a teacher of the visually impaired when I worked in a local school district. After reading your article, I realized that the students she worked with were all in the general education classes. Most used large-print or braille textbooks. They used either adapted computers or braille writers to write. I don’t recall her working with any students who were in primary grades. I realized that the students who were unable to be successful in the general education were likely served at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind. Do you know that back then a teacher could get an add-on certificate to teach visually impaired students with just 12 hours of college coursework? Imagine trying to help students with visual impairments learn to read with just 12 hours of training!!!