[nabs-l] Taking Action to Improve Braille Literacy

Wed May 9 21:16:06 UTC 2012

I agree completely!!

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Ashley Bramlett
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 5:11 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Taking Action to Improve Braille Literacy

Hi,
We need more TVIS who believe in teaching braille. That is for sure,
currently there is  a shortage of them.
As to aids, they can be a good and bad thing.  It depends on the aid's role.

I do not think they should be there for all classes; I know I did not have
that for all classes and did fine.  I can see an aid doing things like
reading notes from the board, showing you models, filling in visual info;
elementary school seemed more visual where as middle and high school were
more lecture based.
I can see an aid in elementary school being of some help if not
overdominating.
They sure could assist in math and science classes!
But unless you have other disabilities, IMO an aid should be depended on
less and less. As for going to classes, learn your way around the school. 
Have the aid follow for a little while, but soon you should know your way
and be able to do it.
When walking in lines in elementary school, I had a sighted guide who was a
classmate, not an aid. Why not use a cane? Becausee the cane would have
tripped people as we walked in a tight single file line.
So a sighted guide is an option rather than an aid for mobility.
Ashley

-----Original Message-----
From: Sophie Trist
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 3:55 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Taking Action to Improve Braille Literacy

Arielle,

With all due respect, I disagree. I am totally blind and started my Braille
instruction when I was three. I have a one-on-one aide. This person's job is
to make sure I can navigate safely between classes and around the school.
She also makes sure I have all the braille materials when and where I need
them. I also believe that it is not ncessarily a question of money. It's a
question of getting good TVI's. Those are pretty hard to find. To me, hope
lies in us. Lots of college-age blind people are working to become TVI's and
OandM teachers. If more blind people became TVI's, more blind children could
get the services they needed.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Date sent: Wed, 9 May 2012 00:52:06 -0400
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Taking Action to Improve Braille Literacy

Arielle,
All good points.  I went to a resourceful and rich county school system
While IMO my O&M teachers did not have high expectations and encouraged
overliance on vision and memorizing routes, my vision teachers or TVIS as
they are now called, were demanding.  Some more than others.  My first one
is actually nationally known and wrote books on teaching braille published
by AFB.
She taught me print and realized its limitations such as fatigue and
slowness. She then taught me braille. However since I learned it in second
grade, I had to catch up with my peers and this took a few years.
I was
expected to read during the summer. she sent braille material home and the
print copy too so my parents could read with me.  I was drilled on the
letters and later on what each letter represented as a word. I had spelling
tests in braille. Also, a good thing they required me to do was this.  Some
blind people struggle with spelling and literacy because of seeing only
braille contractions. I was required to write the contraction if I knew it
and spell the word out in all its letters, in other words grade 1 braille.
I did this for the class spelling tests, not the ones I had for learning
braille.

This way I learned the spelling with my classmates, but also the TVI saw
what braille contractions I knew and remembered.
I took most exams in braille when my skills were ready for it, maybe in
fourth or fifth grade. I had mostly multiple choice ones; so I just circled
or wrote down my  answer. Same tests as everyone else at the same time; if I
needed it, I had extra time for them.
In upper grades, some textbooks they gave me both formats, so I had a
choice. I had the braille text and the text from rfb.  I often used a combo
of the two. I might listen to the chapter on tape, but skim for the
highlights in braille.
However, the caseload of my TVIs was big and yes they could not spend as
much time as they wanted to.  However, they did encourage practice at home
and in class.  So some of it was up to me. If I did not want to learn and
practice, I would not have improved.  It shouldn't be up to a student to
take that responsibility, but we do given the situation.  Those students who
did not read regularly in braille did not become as proficient.
Sighted students have to do some on their own too, but the difference is
that a blind student can often get by with audio and a sighted kid cannot.

For the braille crisis to stop, IMO we need a team approach; the TVI, parent
and student have to be willing to make the commitment.

And, maybe not all kids need OT; that is why you have an individualized
plan; I know I benefited from it and PT though. Instead of that, hmm, maybe
a reading specialist. I suggest this because a reading specialist can help
with learning deficits and weaknesses. My mom thought I had a learning
disability and sometimes I think so too. For me my deficit was fluency. a
reading specialist could help in this effort; help the child decode faster
and therefore comprehend the words and with rapid decoding and comprehension
comes fluency.  A reading specialist could also fill in the gaps IMO when
the TVI isn't there.  This assumes the child needs help in reading though.
But I suspect most blind kids do. Its my experience the regular ed classroom
activities do not translate well to good emmergent braille literacy. If you
all are not familiar  with education terms, some of this may not make sense;
fluency is reading at a steady pace and decode means translating the letters
to sounds in your head and forming words.

For instance, in first and second grade, we read as a class; the teacher
pointed to words on the board or her book and everyone read together.
Another activity is the teacher wrote on a board or transparency.
Now a
days probably a smart board. Anyway, then she has the class edit it
together.  Still another activity involves matching pictures to words so you
learn what they mean.  My point is that these rely on seeing the teacher's
cues or pictures or something.

A blind student needs equivalent activities to develop literacy skills.
Maybe a reading specialist in collaboration with  a TVI could fill this
need. Just a thought though which will likely not happen.

-----Original Message-----
From: Arielle Silverman
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 12:09 AM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nabs-l] Taking Action to Improve Braille Literacy

Hi all,
It is obvious to all of us that we need to take action to ensure that the
current and future generations of blind children will get the Braille
instruction they are entitled to and be held to the same reading and writing
standards as the sighted. However, I fear the solution is much more
complicated than just passing a national Braille bill. While I am not
terribly familiar with Braille legislation, I have definitely seen cases
where even in states with laws on their books mandating Braille instruction,
kids are falling through the cracks and not getting it. I know Arizona has
adopted a Braille bill mandating that Braille is the "presumed reading
medium" for all blind children unless the entire IEP team (including the
child's
parents)
determines that the child can read and write optimally with print. But even
in Arizona and other states with similar laws, some kids are not getting
Braille. There are many ways teachers or school districts can get around the
legal mandates. For example they can simply delay holding an IEP meeting for
a child or delay giving tests to determine whether or not the child is a
functional print reader. They can agree to provide Braille but then only
give a child 30 minutes per week of instruction because that's all the time
the TVI has to work with each student. I've even heard of one case where a
TVI insisted a particular child wasn't really legally blind even though this
was clearly spelled out by the child's eye specialists. Passing a national
Braille bill is an important step toward making change, but it won't be a
viable solution by itself unless everyone involved actually wants to obey
the laws rather than finding loopholes around them, and when schools have
the resources to provide the amount and quality of Braille instruction they
are required to provide.
There are several serious problems with the system for educating blind
children that need to be addressed in different ways. The educational system
has long been dominated by professionals who are trained to view blindness
as a deficit. Because of this overarching philosophy, they are not naturally
inclined to aim toward giving blind and sighted students the same standard
of education. I think there has always been too much of a focus in the
blindness field about what blind people cannot do or what we do differently,
rather than what we can do and what we share in common with sighted
students. There is a tendency to be "reactive" and respond to deficits after
they occur rather than being "proactive" and preventing kids from getting
behind in the first place.
There are also lots of very negative attitudes about Braille floating around
in the minds of some blindness professionals. Braille is slow; Braille is
hard to learn; Braille sets a blind child apart from others; Braille is only
for totally blind people, who are maximally handicapped by their condition;
Braille is bulky and hard to produce; Braille is expensive; Braille is
antiquated and obsolete; etc.
etc.
With these kinds of attitudes, teachers aren't motivated to teach Braille,
and are more inclined to delay or avoid teaching Braille whenever possible.
I have wondered whether much of the negativity toward Braille comes from
sighted teachers' own difficulty in learning Braille themselves during
training. For a sighted adult learning Braille is indeed difficult at first,
and building fluency takes time and dedication.
Working from their own experiences, sighted teachers who struggled to learn
Braille may believe that Braille is equally grueling and overwhelming for
their young students--but of course, it's not because learning to read at
five is much different than learning to read at twenty-five. Even if this
error of judgment is only unconscious, it can still affect their attitudes
toward Braille and their motivation to teach it. This issue might be worse
when teachers only spend a few months learning Braille and so they don't
experience the successful improvement that comes from using Braille for
years.
So, I think that legislation is only part of the solution. We also need to
examine the psychology of the people involved in the system and figure out
how to get the key players more excited about Braille.
We want them to truly believe that blind children can achieve full
competitive literacy with Braille instead of forcing them to provide
literacy instruction that they don't really believe in. I think what the NFB
is doing with the TeachBlindStudents and Teacher of Tomorrow programs is
right on. We also just need to get more Braille teachers into the field who
have had good experiences with Braille themselves and who truly believe in
blind people. And, of course, the educational system for blind kids is just
not well-funded and there aren't enough TVI's to go around. So even the good
teachers are being spread thin with huge caseloads and simply don't have the
time to provide daily instruction to every one of their students. We need to
figure out how to reorganize the system so that the teachers' time is spent
as efficiently as possible without skimping on important lessons.
For
example, it seems like some of the special services given to blind kids are
not always necessary and not always as important as Braille.
I may be opening a whole other can of worms here, but it seems like almost
every blind student these days (at least in elementary
school)
has a one-on-one aide who acts as the student's "eyes". Do all of us really
need that kind of help? Do all blind preschoolers need occupational therapy,
physical therapy etc.? what would happen if all the money spent on the aides
and therapists was instead spent to hire more Braille teachers so that
kindergartners received daily Braille instruction? What would happen if
children who were proficient in Braille could read ahead in their books and
then not be so dependent on an aide to read the blackboard because they
could follow along in Braille? Wouldn't it make more sense to give a child
intensive one-on-one time with a TVI for a few years so they won't need very
much extra support in the future? I may be naive, but I would think that
would not only save the school districts some money in the end, but also
bring out a generation of blind students who are self-sufficient and can
become taxpaying adults much more easily.
These are just my thoughts and observations about how we can help make
change. I welcome any other thoughts or comments.
Best,
Arielle

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