Teaching Math to the Visually-Impaired in Uganda
When I came to Gulu High School last January, my first task as a Peace Corps volunteer was to identify areas of need in the school. After a number of conversations with different administrators and teachers, it was obvious that while there had been valuable efforts to make accommodations for the students with visual impairments, there were still many ways that these students were not on an equal playing field with the sighted students. There was a Braille embosser (to "print" Braille documents), a computer lab and a very dedicated Head of the Special Needs Department (Odoch Daniel).
However, Daniel explained to me that there was no math teacher for the visually impaired students. Instead, they were placed into the class for sighted students where the lectures were predominantly visual, and it was effectively impossible for a visually impaired student to follow. It would have been possible to incorporate visually impaired students in a lecture to a class of perhaps 20 or 30 students, but when you have 90 students in a class (as is common across Uganda) it is incredibly difficult to accommodate students with special needs in your lessons.
And so the students focused on their other classes and routinely failed their national
Dear Sandra,
Man having just received his white cane. There were new blind persons that attended the meeting and they requested me to obtain for them the white canes. I have given some to a few because I only have very small canes (for young children) only. If you have the possibility of getting more white canes it would help me addressing their needs.
Please enjoy Linz Craig’s blog: