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Hudson – Texas Focus 2008
Texas Focus 2008
Providing Access to
a World of Learning:
Access to the General Education Curriculum For Students Who Are Visually Impaired
June 16-18, 2008
Austin, Texas
Family Pre-Conference
Monday Session: 3:30-5:00 PM
Saying What You See:
Describing the World to Your Children
Speaker: Laurel J. Hudson, Ph. D., TVI/COMS and
Author of Classroom Collaboration
Verbal Description: Saying What You See
Presenter: Laurel J. (“Laurie”) Hudson, Ph.D., Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments and Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist in DeKalb County, Georgia, and author of Classroom Collaboration (published by Perkins School for the Blind) and its poster, “Nineteen Ways to Step Back” (published by the American Foundation for the Blind Literacy Center.)
As illustrated in the fable of “A Farmer with Two Horses,” most sighted people are highly visual. In fact, when sighted people look at something, information from other senses almost always takes a back seat. But how do we provide visual information to people with visual impairments? How do we give people with visual impairments access to their home and school environments…to people, places, and things….through verbal description? What do we describe, and how do we put it into words?
Types/amounts of functional vision determine access to visual information, so descriptions need to be tailored differently for people with total blindness, people with high myopia or near sightedness, people with restricted visual fields, people with color blindness, people with reduced vision under certain lighting, and people with monocular vision. Age variables are also significant in what is meaningful to describe, because needs and interest levels vary considerably for young children, elementary aged children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. Additional variables for the people to whom we are describing include: their concepts and labels, their auditory memory, their visual memory, and their personal preferences.
Verbal descriptions are key for individuals with visual impairments, because the limitation related to having a visual impairment is lack of information. Moreover, when people with visual impairments don’t receive ample and appropriate information over a period of time, they develop concepts which are incomplete, inaccurate, and un-integrated. Having said that, it is crucial to recognize that words alone aren’t enough. They fail miserably compared to actual, active, direct experiences through available senses. It’s always better to be able to touch, hear, smell, and move through an experience than to hear it described. But sometimes direct experiences aren’t possible, or they aren’t practical. And sometimes real experiences with people, places and things are enriched through verbal mediation. This topic is for those times.
Let’s first consider descriptions of people. Peoples’ names may be even more significant for those with visual impairments than for fully sighted individuals. John Hull writes, in Touching the Rock,
“…I have just returned from a conference in Ontario. I made a big effort in getting to know all of the eighty or so people there. If I heard someone speaking in one of the public sessions, and could not recognize the voice, I would whisper to the person next to me, asking who it was. I was surprised by the number of times my neighbors were unable to reply. They recognized the speaker; they knew it was the person with whom they had had such and such a conversation, but they did not know the name. Sighted people get to know each other by recognizing each other’s appearance, and all the things the new acquaintance has said and done are associated with that image of what he or she looks like. The name of the person is one additional item of information, but the appearance is the central core around which everything gathers.”
“In Ontario, I worked by getting to know people’s names. Not until I heard the voice and felt the hand clasp which would, from now on, be associated with that name, did I form much of an expectation. Around the name I would build up the story of that person. The name is the verbal cue around which that particular story hangs.” pp 95-97
It seems that for sighted people, knowing people may hang around their physical appearance, while for people with visual impairments, it may hang around their names. Names are also particularly important for individuals with visual impairments for summoning, so the hearer can know that he/she is being addressed. (“Mark, would you pass me the pepper?”) For people with visual impairments, names also serve a particularly important function in greetings, and we need to remember to give both our own name, and the name of the person we’re addressing. (“Hi, Karen, it’s Laurie.”) Lastly, names structure turn-taking for people with visual impairments, as illustrated in the story of Sarah and Kristin.
Beyond names, what’s important to describe about people, for individuals with visual impairments? Their presence or absence, their nearness, the other person’s physical appearance:
- Presence or absence: “Who’s here?”
- Nearness: “Who’s within ear shot?”
- Physical appearance: “What does he/she look like?”
- Physical characteristics: body language and facial expressions
It also may be important to describe the physical appearance of the person with a visual impairment, himself/herself, and the sometimes delicate topics of body image/sexuality.
Next, consider descriptions of place. This is the “where” of access. “Place” is the layout of food on dinner plates, lines on a graph, objects in a diagram, body positions and movements, busy intersections, a computer keyboard, etc. The “This, That, and There” referred to in Classroom Collaboration clearly isn’t adequate for these descriptions. Place is typically addressed in Orientation & Mobility, and it’s essential, due to key characteristics of the senses. (Because only vision provides simultaneous access to a wide range of objects in the environment, descriptions can fill in by giving a bird’s eye overview of “where.”) In describing place, decide upon and introduce labels related to distances and directions. Informative, appropriate reference systems might include landmarks, positional terms like left/right and over/under, compass directions, and clock analogies.
Beyond describing person and place, consider how to describe things. “What’s the nucleus of a plant cell?” “What’s this picture?” “What does this sweater look like?” “What’s on the menu?” Attributes of things involve so much more than color, like texture, size, shape, temperature, weight, moving parts, and the material the thing is made from. What’s a spiral staircase? What’s juggling? In describing things, it might be most helpful to start with the listener’s body. Borrow from descriptions by people with visual impairments, themselves, as in the eloquent description a blind student gave of her own shoe:
“My shoe is hard like a giraffe’s hoof and extremely sturdy and when I take it off my foot, the tongue sticks straight up in the air. The tongue of my shoe is the thing that is directly in front of the laces, which are things rather like ribbons that must be tied up into a certain way in order to make the shoe stay on my feet. On the heel of my shoe, there’s the tag of the shoe and directly to the right of the tongue is a crack where there is another tag. I do not know why this second tag is there. I got my shoes at a store called Thunder. Whenever I walk on my kitchen floor, my shoes squeak softly and it is hard for me to bend the toe of my shoe when it is off of my foot. The inside of my shoe smells nasty, like sweaty feet and the outside of my shoe smells like Thunder, which kind of smells like a basketball gym. The toe and heel of my shoe are rounded like the curve of an egg. My shoe is hard and the toe is made out of leather and the inside of the shoe is made of suede and kind of feels like it has soft scratches on it. The inside of my shoe is called an arch which is a thing that is oval-shaped, long and skinny and gives my feet more support. The arch is made out of leather. At the bottom of my shoe there are many interesting-looking designs. The designs also feel interesting like tread on a tire. I am blind so that’s why I say the word ‘feel.’ When I bend my toe inside my shoe, I can feel it moving around as if it were a living thing. The bottom of my shoe is blue and I don’t know what other colors it is because no one has told me. I think my shoe’s other colors are black and brown though.”
Finally, in describing things, consider the terminology and sequences in task analyses, such as the author’s detailing “Shoe Tying, in 27 Easy Steps.” Although such descriptions are cumbersome, they may be much more effective than physical guidance in teaching skills involving movement. First, the author established the terms: “right, left, lace, a few inches of lace, loop, palm, palms facing up/down/left/right, pinch, thumb, base of the thumb, index finger, back part of the knuckles of thumb and index finger, pad of thumb and index finger, trail, “sandwich” with lace between pads of index finger and thumb, hold, and pull tight.”
Next, she outlined and named the sub-steps:
1. Tie the first know
2. Form the loop
3. Around the clock
4. The “sandwich”
5. Tightening the bow
Lastly, she added the necessary details for each sub-step, with the following example from the fourth sub-step, the “sandwich:”
- Make a lace sandwich by holding the lace between the pads of your left index finger and right thumb
- Holding this sandwich firmly, slide your right index finger back until it is at the base of your right thumb
- Slide your right index finger back, under a lace, until it finds the lace in the sandwich
- Pinch this sandwich with your right hand pinch
- Let go with your left hand.
As a follow-up, refer to the Classroom Collaboration activities to teach verbal description skills to adults and to sighted peers/siblings.