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As
you can tell by the title, I’m going to be very blunt in this blog post. As an
orientation and mobility instructor for seven years now, I have seen the side
effects of teaching low vision students to visually learn how to navigate. If
you are NOT teaching these low vision students some non-visual techniques, you
are setting them up for epic failure. How’s that for direct!?!
I
have had far too many students come through my door who tell me they’ve had
orientation and mobility training all their life and are “good travelers,” who
have proven otherwise. I teach cane travel non-visually, I do this because I
don’t believe teaching someone with poor vision to navigate visually is
effective—and to be even more honest--I think it’s detrimental to their well-being.
I’ll
describe this oh-too-typical low vision student to you. They walk into my
office, head down, shoulders slouched, they have a short cane in their hand
(only because it’s required of them) that has clearly never been pulled out of
their backpack. The student talks in whispered tones, shuffles their feet as
they try to find a chair in my office, and tilt their head in various
directions in an effort to get some kind of visual cue. Now imagine if this
person walked into your office for a job interview, would you hire them? I
certainly wouldn’t.
These
students are the most typical I see, they struggle, immensely to learn
non-visually because they are fearful, of almost everything! One student
recently walked into my office and told me what a great cane traveler they were
after nearly 10 years of cane travel instruction. They proceeded to tell me
that they don’t need the sleep shade training but it’s their only option at the
moment. When I press further to find out what their goals are—most often, they
have none. These students, and many others, have been taught that struggling
through life is okay and even admirable. They’re told they are lucky to have
what vision they do have; This type of feedback in ruining these students.
Now
I have to add that I am one of these low vision students myself. I can’t tell
you how many times in my life growing up I was forced to, “just try to see”
using this telescope, this magnifier, your feet, this monocular, these glasses,
this scope…the list goes on and on. And when I failed to be able to see using
these various devices, I felt like an utter failure. I tried as hard as I could
to use the vision I did have and most often I failed, miserably. There is
lasting damage to one’s self-confidence and self-image when you are pushed to
use something that simply doesn’t work. I always thought I was doing something
wrong because I couldn’t see as much as people claimed I could. I felt awful
when my parents took out loans to buy me the latest and greatest magnifying
device only to realize it didn’t help me very much. I was failing at using my
vision and in the process, was also letting others down.
When
we tell our students to use what vision they have, we are only setting them up
for a difficult life full of disappointing moments where our “lucky to have”
vision failed us. We must change things! We must stop forcing people with poor
vision to use something that is broken—we must start giving them the necessary
tools to live a happy, productive life…without the guilt. Non-visual training
is for everyone—no one can convince me otherwise. While there is not a day that
goes by that I don’t use my vision (I use it all the time), knowing how to do
things non-visually has taken away the guilt that I once felt. I no longer feel
like I’m failing when I can’t use my vision because I have the skills to
compensate for that.
We
must stop teaching people to use their vision—it’s failing our blind students.
We must provide them with what they need to be successful, confident,
contributing members of society…free of the pain and guilt of not being able to
self-fix something that’s just not fixable. The tools are available for these
students to find their confidence, their strengths, their equal place in the
world—as teachers, we must give them these tools or we are failing them.
7 comments:
Deja,
I have to disagree with you. Because I'm one of those visually impaired people where my vision doesn't change because my vision is stable with the eye condition that I have. The only way that my vision can change dramatically is if I ever get diagnosed with another eye condition such as glaucoma. During the time was in school over in Utah I only started getting Orientation and Mobility Training at the age of sixteen. And,since I've been getting adult services at the age of eighteen the only tiem I've needed O&M training is when I've moved to a new location or if I go somewhere in the area where I'm living where I haven't been before.
Hey Jess,
I appreciate your feedback on this topic--I know it can be a little touchy for those of us with remaining vision. I also have an eye condition that hasn't really changes since birth, and most likely won't change in the future. It's often a hard like to walk when it comes to non-visual training for us, are we sighted? Or, are we blind? I struggled for a long time with this. One of the things I think is so great about getting quality non-visual training is you NEVER have to get addition O&M training, not when you move, not when you are in a new place. Non-visual training can expand many years and you don't have to be re-trained, it's one of the reasons I think it works so well. Thank you for sharing your side to this, it's sincerely appreciated!
Deja
Hi there
I completely agree with you, Deja! For years I was handed huge reams of enlarged textbooks, encouraged to use magnifiers, screen magnification software and to navigate visually. The problem was, I have a degenerative eye condition and as an adult in my early thirties' I now I have to completely relearn and relinquish every strategy as my vision cannot cope with the demands life is placing on it anymore. My one saving grace - being taught to navigate non visually by a blind instructor when I was in my mid 20s. I worry about being able to read, write and use my computer efficiently but at least I'll be able to get to the pub for a glass of wine to console myself :) I moved continents last year and everyone wondered how on earth I'd get around - that was the one thing I knew I'd be okay with :)
Deja et al;
I would first commend you for your courage in stating so concisely what experience has consistently taught us. I would only attempt to tease out one nuanced thread of this discussion. It is a distinct challenge for an SDCT instructor to bite our tongues when our own experience has shown time and time again what a given student has not yet grasped in their adjustment to blindness journey. We know that when someone doesn't see very well, the world says, in effect, try harder. We also know that mastery of nonvisual techniques and associated strategies significantly broadens one's world, accumulating in a real way, the best of all worlds, alternative and visual techniques. The problem arises when we become too definitive or even dogmatic in how we present the universe of possibilities. There is often an expanse of grey area. For example, I used to say with conviction that we don't need to teach people how to see because they've been doing that all their lives with varying degrees of success or limitation. I personally know a number of very capable low vision individuals who successfully completed emersion training at an NFB training center but revert back to primarily visual techniques and strategies afterward. To an extent, I have no issue with that at all. If a person has faithfully undergone the full complement of nonvisual training, they are equipped with the ability to make informed decisions about when their vision is functionally effective and when alternative means are more appropriate. There have been some instances, however, when trying to figure out how and when to employ alternative techniques has, for some folks, been somewhat more challenging. Jeff Altman touched on a few of these issues in his excellent piece published in the Journal of Blindness, Innovation, & Research under the title, "when The Sleepshades Come Off." the point is that I think we need sometimes to be more creative in demonstrating what our experience has already taught us but with which our students are seriously struggling. We may need, for example, to place students in situations where they must confront the limitations of their vision directly but through their own experiences rather than our sales job might be able to accomplish during an evaluation process. Night lessons are good opportunities, finding environments or times of the day when glare is known to be a factor, sun down, hazy conditions, or on a cloudy day. Indoor environments can be more easily designed to present these types of challenges for the student. Doing this type of thing also allows the instructor to observe how the student is using, or attempting to use, their vision and how they compensate when they can't. Some folks are just more show me than tell me types. I would finally add that there are abundant opportunities towards the end of am emersion training program and even thereafter to work with students who continue to struggle with making informed decisions or in applying visual integration techniques after training when appropriate. Richard Mettler covered a number of these strategies in chapter 9 of his pentacle piece on the Cognitive Learning Theory.
I hope I haven't muddied the water too much in this discussion, I have no practical or philosophical disagreement with your premise. When reading it for the first time, I was saying to myself, "right on!" I just think that the longer we spend in the field, the wider variance of students we will encounter and we must always be open to new, creative, and even perhaps untried strategies to get the job done. Thanks for your post.
I am new to this. I started having vision problems two years ago. At this time my vision is not so bad. One eye is gone but the other is corrected with glasses. The future of my vision is unclear. One of the most difficult things to come to terms with was determining how to describe what my status was. I'm not blind. I do have challenges. For a year I carried a hiking stick with me because I couldn't tell when the sidewalk changed levels. Now I don't need it. Sometimes when I'm in a new place I can get nervous and have to pay really close attention to things so I don't bump into them. I learned on my own that the more I could touch something the more secure I felt. For me, the eye sometimes lies but I can trust my hands. It was weird at first but I had to make a conscience choice as to which sense I would trust. I did as much research as I could on the subject. I immediately found A STRONG bias against training people using a sleep shade. Being a foreigner to this new situation I had no personal feelings but found it curious that people would take such strong opinions on the idea. I wonder why we would shun the development of any ability that could be a help to us? I can't prove it but I feel there is a fear of trusting anything other than sight.
Wow Deja! Well said!
This is absolutely brilliant. I'm a totally blind person in a well-known COMS training program and to be blunt, waking up to go to school every day has become a nightmare for me. Every day they find a new way to tell me that sightedness is good, blindness is bad. They're always saying things about how blind people can't learn as much or as efficiently as sighted people and how we can't self-monitor or self-direct because we can't see what other people are doing in order to compare. It's sucking out my soul. This was an excellent post to remind me that there's a world beyond unreliable visual strategies. Thank you! I'm very glad I've found your blog. Now to go and get my NOMC as soon as possible...
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