Hearing and visual impairments: characteristics and management

Visual Impairment

The Effects of Visual Impairment on Education and Effective Techniques for Countering Them

Special needs classrooms are generally thought to be maintained in order to serve students with developmental disorders that are at least partially mentally based. Certainly, this is often their primary purpose, and their usefulness and necessity in this regard cannot be overestimated. This is not, however, the sole purpose that such classrooms exist, and in fact there are a wide array of purely physical impairments that can nonetheless have marked developmental effects. Special needs classrooms serve students with such impairments and disabilities in a variety of ways, and the classrooms and instructors are just as essential at ensuring optimum developmental possibilities and an effective learning environment for such students as they are for those with mental disabilities.

Blindness and visual impairment are among some of the most common physical impairments affecting children's development, and though such problems might appear simplistic despite their profundity visual impairments can actually have many long-term and far-reaching effects on a child's development and a student's learning. Many students with visual impairments also suffer from other developmental disorders and issues, but even when these are not present there are greatly increased difficulties in learning and developing for students with vision impairments. The vast majority of information an average human being takes in from their world is processed visually, and the same is true of most teaching settings, even (and perhaps especially) in special needs classrooms. This can lead to serious hindrances for students who are unable to take n information visually.

A visit to one of the primary school special needs classrooms in Brooke County, West Virginia makes this very clear. Though the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act explicitly mandates a free and appropriate education for students with visual impairments, just as it does for children with all other disabilities, in practice this population of special needs students is often left lacking the appropriate materials and instruction; students with other disabilities can often be taught using the same or slightly modified methods as each other, but students with visual impairment require very specialized materials and instructional methods to absorb the same information and lessons non-visually. With many (if not most) special needs classrooms and districts already facing severely limited resources, the visually impaired often receive a lower consideration.

The educators in this classroom are obviously aware of this discrepancy, and were also obviously powerless to do much about it. Despite having a licensed special needs teacher and a near-full-time aide, there were simply too many students needing attention and instruction for the two severely visually impaired students in the classroom to receive the level of individualized attention and instruction that was truly necessary. There was an assortment of materials, including a wide array of books in Braille and one Braille writing machine for each of the two students (the books were very well used; the machines were new and, I subsequently learned, had been purchased by the parents and in fact belonged to the students privately -- this was deemed for efficient and cost effective for all concerned). Group instruction, however, often found these two students only half paying attention.