VISUALLY IMPAIRED CHILDREN: Supporting a VI child in the transition to secondary school

Thursday 23 February 2012

Supporting a VI child in the transition to secondary school

Introduction

Every stage of schooling has its particular difficulties for the visually impaired child and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. For this reason I am proud to be working with a highly skilled and dedicated workforce where I work. Charlotte is one such young graduate who was recently thrown into the deep end with this young man, whom we shall call Freddie. Charlotte very kindly agreed to share her initial thoughts on the challenges of working with Freddie, who started at his secondary school last September. This is a brief introduction to how she has found it. Thank you so much Charlotte for your contribution.

The challenges of working with a visually impaired boy in a secondary school

In September 2011 I began working with Freddie (pseudonym), a visually impaired boy who had just started secondary school. Freddie suffers from very low vision, caused by nystagmus, which means his eyes involuntarily dart from side to side. Having never worked with a child with a visual impairment before, this role presented itself as a big challenge to me, but 5 months down the line I can safely say that my time supporting Freddie has been rewarding and hugely enjoyable.

As Freddie attends a mainstream secondary school, the resources used by teachers (such as textbooks and test papers) are not designed with the visually impaired in mind. Consequently, one of the most important parts of my job is ensuring that resources are adapted for Freddie so that he can properly access them in class. In my early days of doing this I spent a lot of time acquainting myself with the photocopier and quickly became an expert at using its many enlargement functions! As Freddie also finds it difficult to read certain fonts and text colours, I edit and print out copies of the PowerPoint presentations that are to be used in his lessons so that he has a suitably adapted copy on his desk to refer to.

The Internet has proven itself to be a really useful tool for finding resources and equipment for the visually impaired. A website called www.largeprintbooks.com has been particularly useful as it offers enlarged versions of hundreds of different popular books. I managed to order all of Freddie’s English texts from this website and believe this has really helped Freddie feel comfortable at his new school. Not only can he properly access the novels being studied, but he also fits in with the rest of the class as he has a normal book like everyone else. Online forums for professionals who work with visually impaired children have also been really helpful. When I was struggling to buy Freddie a suitably enlarged protractor to use in Maths, I discovered online that other people had had similar problems and came across the creative idea of photocopying and enlarging a normal sized protractor onto acetate and then laminating it.

Being an LSA (learning support assistant) is not just about making practical resources; a big part of my job is ensuring Freddie feels comfortable and happy at school. Something Freddie and I agreed at the start of the year was how important it was for him to not feel as if he stood out. Starting secondary school is hard enough without looking as though you are being given lots of extra attention and understandably Freddie wanted to be given space to settle in and make friends independently. This calls for a lot of tactical positioning in lessons on my part. I never sit by Freddie in lessons unless he asks me to; instead I help out the whole class, making sure I walk by Freddie every so often to check he is on track. As Freddie often suffers from headaches or tired eyes, I also made him a “Time-Out” card to show to his teachers when this happens. Strategies that may seem small like this actually have a big effect on how comfortable Freddie feels at school; rather than having to explain to the teacher in front of the whole class every time he has a headache, all Freddie has to do is show the card and he will be allowed a few minutes outside of the classroom. To ensure Freddie didn’t feel overwhelmed with questions and attention from his class teachers regarding his visual impairment, we set up fortnightly meetings between the two of us to discuss how he is getting on, which lessons and strategies are going well and which might need some extra adaptation.

Communicating with Freddie’s teachers about his needs and keeping them up-to-date on how he is getting on is a really essential part of my role, especially as Freddie attends such a big school with a large body of staff. In the past I have organised a training session with Maurice and Freddie’s teachers which gave them a space to raise their own questions about teaching a child with a visual impairment. I have also compiled handouts and ‘help sheets’ for teachers to ensure they are well informed about Freddie’s needs and the sorts of strategies that help him properly access his lessons.

Looking back on Freddie’s time so far at his new school, I feel really proud of him. He seems to be really enjoying school and is working hard in all his subjects, never letting his visual impairment stop him from achieving. I am really looking forward to the rest of the year with Freddy and from my chats with Maurice, have lots of ideas for other strategies to help him do his best at school.

Charlotte

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One of the great inspirations to me must be Helen Keller. Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was 19 months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness left her deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family.

In 1886, her mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice.^[11] He subsequently put them in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anaganos, the school's director, asked former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and only 20 years old, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, Sullivan evolving into governess and then eventual companion.

Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll.

Keller's big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

Due to a protruding left eye, Keller was usually photographed in profile. Both her eyes were replaced in adulthood with glass replicas for "medical and cosmetic reasons". Wikipedia

Ophthalmology and opthalmologists

Ophthalmology is the branch of medicine that deals with the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eye. An ophthalmologist is a specialist in medical and surgical eye problems. The ophthalmologist is the eye doctor. Since ophthalmologists perform operations on eyes, they are considered to be both surgical and medical specialists.

The word ophthalmology comes from the Greek roots ophthalmos meaning eye and logos meaning word, thought, or discourse; ophthalmology literally means "the science of eyes". As a discipline, it applies to animal eyes also, since the differences from human practice are surprisingly minor and are related mainly to differences in anatomy or prevalence, not differences in disease processes. However, veterinary medicine is regulated separately in many countries and states/provinces resulting in few ophthalmologists treating both humans and animals.

History of Ophthalmology

Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The seventeenth and eighteenth century saw the use of hand lenses (by Malpighi), microscopes (van Leeuwenhoek), preparations for fixing the eye for study (Ruysch) and later the freezing of the eye (Petit). This allowed for detailed study of the eye and an advanced model. Some mistakes persisted such as: why the pupil changed size (seen to be vessels of the iris filling with blood), the existence of the posterior chamber, and of course the nature of the retina. In 1722 Leeuwenhoek noted the existence of rods and cones^,though they were not properly discovered until Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus in 1834 by use of a microscope.

Ophthalmic surgery in Great Britain

The first ophthalmic surgeon in Great Britain was John Freke, appointed to the position by the Governors of St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1727, but the establishment of the first dedicated ophthalmic hospital in 1805; now called Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, England was a transforming event in modern ophthalmology. Clinical developments at Moorfields and the founding of the Institute of Ophthalmology (now part of the University College London) by Sir Stewart Duke Elder established the site as the largest eye hospital in the world and a nexus for ophthalmic research.

Ophthalmology and ophthalmologists

Purkinje is a known to all ophthalmologists for Purkinje's cells, Purkinje's images. Jan Evangelista Purkinje was a versatile scholar with wide-ranging interests and an exceptional capacity for innovative thinking. He used the name “Purkinje” until 1850, from whence he used the correct spelling, Pyrkyně. We use Purkinje for the eponyms because that is the more common. Purkinje was a Czech nationalist and had a major influence on Czech cultural life in the middle of the 19th century. He was a friend of the famous German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote about Purkinje: “and should you fail to understand, let Purkyně give you a hand!” Purkinje published a Czech translation of Friedrich Schiller's poems, and translated works of William Shakespeare into Czech.

Purkinje created the world’s first department of physiology at the University of Breslau, Prussia in 1839 and the first official physiological laboratory, known as the Physiological Institute, in 1842. Purkinje used to believe that that experiments in one's own body ("in corpore nobili") gave more practical results than those in animal experiment ("in corpore vili") or in fatally ill patients. And when he was a medical student, Purkinje used to investigate the physiology of sight by experimenting on himself with a variety of drugs, including Belladonna. His interest in the physiology of light led him to make animated cartoons, and thus he became one of the earliest motion picture pioneers.

He is best known for his discovery of Purkinje cells, large nerve cells with many branching extensions found in the cortex of the cerebral cortex. He is also known for his discovery of Purkinje fibers, the fibrous tissue that conducts the pacemaker stimulus along the inside walls of the ventricles to all parts of the heart. It was Purkinje, who introduced the scientific terms plasma. An early user of the improved compound microscope, he discovered the sweat glands of the skin, germinal vesicles. He recognized fingerprints as a means of identification and noted the protein-digesting power of pancreatic extracts. He died on July 25 of 1868.


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Thursday 23 February 2012

Supporting a VI child in the transition to secondary school

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