[rehab] Help with materials

[adrijana prokopenko]

Maybe I should give the world a little lesson on special education
degree and how it works in Macedonia. This is a 4-year university
degree mainly consisting of general courses regarding disability and
if they decide to choose blindness as their specialty, they have more
of these courses in their final years of study. Most of these courses
are taught by Macedonian professors and are related to history,
psychology and education for the blind and some are full of research
and numbers regarding disability related figures  such as employment
rate and a lot of the time they focus on matters that are long dealt
with in most developed countries and that blind people faced 50 years
or more ago.  These books are not very encouraging and realistic to
describe some aspects of blindness to sighted students who are
studying to work with us and I am glad that these students have the
chance to visit our school a few times a year, do their observations
there and hold a few lessons themselves. Braille and cane mobility are
never taught to them at all and orientation and mobility doesn't even
exist as a choice of study, but I was informed that they are making
braille courses mendatory at the university now. As soon as I found
out about this, I knew that my next task was to somehow do something
to help them, so I started looking up for noncopyright materials to
braille for them and asking editors of magazines and articles to allow
me to braille their materials, hoping that this will help those
students learn and enjoy reading braille and learn lots more about
different aspects of blindness and what life is like for us. I am
brailling everything by hand with my Perkins brailler, because even if
I find magazines I can pass onto them, they are all in grade two, so I
am making everything in grade one for them. If anyone else would like
to help me do this, has their articles or knows of good articles and
people that would be willing to share theirs with those students or
could even provide me with special education course or other materials
in print, audio or electronic format that could help them in their
learning, feel free to email me at:
 adrijana.prokopenko at gmail.com
 so we can talk about it. We would all appreciate your help.