Video
Preparing Students Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired for Success in College
In this webcast, Mary Alexander discusses the "Five Pillars of Student Success" as it relates to students and their success in college.
In this webcast, Mary Alexander, the National Program Director for Learning Ally, discusses the “Five Pillars of Student Success” as it relates to students with visual impairments and their success in college. As a parent of a college student who is visually impaired and a professional in the field, Mary talks about the importance of non-academic skills in a college setting.
Presented by Mary Alexander
Length of time to complete: approximately 30 minutes
- Introduction
- The Five Pillars of Student Success
- Pillar #1: Managing Your Professor
- Pillar #2: Becoming Part of the Community
- Pillar #3: Leveraging the Disabilities Services Office
- Pillar #4: Learning Effectively
- Pillar #5: Making Technology Work for You
- Challenges and Opportunities
ALEXANDER: In 1948, a wonderful woman named Ann MacDonald was watching World War 2 veterans return. They had, probably, what we would call traumatic brain injury today, but they had a lot of vision loss, and they we’re able to access the G.I. Bill to educate themselves so they could feed their families, and it was a real problem.
Being in New York City, I think she probably saw more than many other people would, so she decided to do something, and on the top floor of the New York City Public Library, she started recording books that they needed in school. When I read that story I just get goosebumps because there was a woman who had no connection to blindness other than she saw a need and she filled it.
NARRATOR: We see a photograph of Ann MacDonald, along with an image of a Soundscriber, a device that would record onto vinyl discs to be played back on a record player. This is the device that Ann MacDonald and the other volunteers would read into.
ALEXANDER: So from that point, we grew into an organization that had studios all across the country and many, many, many dedicated volunteers. In the 1990s, we saw that people that weren’t blind were starting to want to use our books. There were students that also had a need, but they had no vision impairment, but they did have a learning difference or a learning disability.
Because that group kept growing and growing and growing, we expanded who we served and our name at that point became Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. We increased some of the types of books that we would record at that point. We added more and more of the early childhood books, as well as the college textbooks; the high school textbooks. We made a very deliberate attempt to serve as many of those types of students as we could.
NARRATOR: We see and hear a video clip of volunteers recording several different books that will be included in the organization’s library and available to people with a variety of disabilities that make it difficult for them to access printed material.
MAN READING INTO MIRCOPHONE: …clinical programs are now encouraged to collaborate as members of an interactive service team.
ALEXANDER: First with families whose students have learning disabilities, but also with, as we’ll talk about later today, families that have students that have vision impairment. Students need more than just an audiobook, and we want to support students holistically; we want to support the student with the resources that they need to help them thrive in their education.
So, we made the decision a few years ago to change our name to Learning Ally because we feel like we can be more than an audiobook provider. So while we still serve the same people with the same types of learning differences, we want to be able to provide services for the whole student, rather than just that audiobook content.
CHAPTER 2: The Five Pillars of Student Success
ALEXANDER: The way that Learning Ally likes to determine where there is a need is to use research. We have a lot of specialists who have been with us for a very long time and we all have our own experiences and our own ideas about what students need, and as well intentioned as we all may be, we really do want to use research to be sure that we are providing a need that is truly out there.
So, through research funded for college students that are blind or visually impaired, the Lavelle Fund for the Blind gave us the ability to do some research. For college students who are blind or visually impaired, the research showed that they are not arriving on campus as prepared as they need to be. And there are several different areas that there are some real deficits in with most college students who are blind.
While our research was based only on a small number of students and a certain geographical area, the prototype calls that we have done on our program since then have really borne this out. You know, after the research; the insights we’ve done, we’ve done a lot of extra calls with students who are blind and visually impaired, we have pulled together, what we consider, five areas, or inside we’ve actually called them the five pillars of success.
We’re pretty sure there are no other resources out there like this and we want to be able to instill success for these students early on in their college career. The five pillars consist of managing your professor, so learning how to advocate for yourself, self-determination skills, but it’s all the resources you would need to manage your educational experience.
NARRATOR: We see a graphic depicting the first pillar.
An orange rectangular column with the resources you would need to manage your educational experience with the title “Managing Your Professor” and these descriptive phrases: Help with advocacy, maintaining assertiveness, and developing empathy.
ALEXANDER: Becoming a part of your community so isolation is not an issue for you; so that you can be a part of the classroom, you can also hopefully have a great social experience, so we’re building some pretty cool things around that as well.
NARRATOR: We see a graphic depicting the second pillar.
A green rectangular column with the heading “Becoming a part of the community” and these descriptive phrases: Help our learners connect with students, find networks both on and off campus.
ALEXANDER: You know, there are a lot of existing resources on a college campus, but you have to know how to leverage them.
How do you manage the disability services office? How do you manage maybe some of the accessibility tools that you already have with the disabilities services office? You know, there are a lot of things going on there, and so we’ve pulled together some very good tools around that.
NARRATOR: We see a graphic depicting the third pillar.
A blue rectangular column with the heading “Leveraging the DSO” or Disability Services Office, and this descriptive sentence: Know you legal rights while developing the skills needed to manage formal resources.
ALEXANDER: Knowing and having a knowledge of learning effectively — how do I learn? How do I need to communicate that or how much of that do I need to communicate to anybody on campus? And when do I need to use my strategic independence? So, when do I need to do it myself and when do I need to ask others for help?
NARRATOR: We see a graphic depicting the fourth pillar.
It’s a gray rectangular column with the heading “Learning effectively” and this descriptive sentence: Understand how your visual acuity affects how you learn so you can become strategically independent.
ALEXANDER: Probably one of the key things is making the technology work for you.
So as we know, there is not a lot of training. Once you get to college, there’s not time for training. You need to know how to use the tools that you have, whether they be low-tech or high-tech, and how they can best serve you.
NARRATOR: We see a graphic depicting the fifth pillar.
A light blue rectangular column with the heading “Making technology work for you” and this descriptive sentence: Help with ways to discover and employ technology for effective learning.
CHAPTER 3: Pillar #1: Managing Your Professor
ALEXANDER: Students are very often reluctant to engage the professor, and it goes back to advocacy skills and being able to talk about your disability. If you’re not comfortable with that, you are most likely not going to approach your professor or the teaching assistant and say, “This was not clear to me” or “The professor put something up on the whiteboard that I need access to.”
You know, being able to ask for that and to advocate for yourself becomes much, much harder if your advocacy skills are lacking or you’re just a shy person in general. You know, not everyone is an extrovert so those are very much learned skills and students need to arrive at college having already flexed those muscles; having already exercised that ability because it’s not going to grow up overnight in college, so if they are not able to speak about who they are, how they learn, and what they need, then it’s going to be a very challenging experience for them.
NARRATOR: A photograph shows a college classroom with several students writing notes as the professor stands next to chalkboard at the front of the room.
The professor’s handwriting makes it a challenge for a person with normal vision to read. The photo, taken in 2013, also illustrates the lack of accessible technology in many classrooms.
ALEXANDER: The faculty engagement with students with vision impairments is different everywhere. You cannot say it’s bad, or you can’t say it’s great because it’s different and it’s very individualistic, and it depends on the professor or the faculty member, but very often people are not used to dealing with people with vision impairments. It’s a low incidence disability and if they have never interacted with someone who is either low vision or blind, they may be nervous about that. So the student’s ability to put them at ease would go a long way in how successful that interaction is going to be.
CHAPTER 4: Pillar #2: Becoming Part of the Community
ALEXANDER: One of the first, and one of the key things, that a college student is not prepared to do is to really engage in the classroom in the same way that his sighted peers do. The marginalization of our students from the college classroom experience; you know, that experience is one of the key places that you interact with students, you interact with your professor; it’s so important. But because of various things, they don’t interact in the same way and they tend to isolate themselves, or the instructor or the college isolates them.
That’s a very key finding and that creates a sense of being outside of your peer circle and not fully interacting and not participating, you know, in their instruction.
NARRATOR: A photograph shows two computer work stations set up in a hallway outside of a college disability services office. Above each work station is a sign that reads: Attention, this computer is reserved for people with disabilities. Please be considerate. The words “attention” and “disabilities” are in large red print.
For students who choose not to disclose their learning differences to peers and/or instructors, the public location and the sign, which identifies any user as a person with disabilities, might make the work stations a resource they would rather avoid than utilize.
ALEXANDER: I have a son who is visually impaired who is in his first year of college, and I see this happening to him, but it’s because of choices that he has made. So we had a conversation around it and he just did not have an awareness that that’s what he was doing.
The research showed that, for instance, because of some their technology that use, maybe a Braille notetaker or a monocular to be able to see the classroom board a little bit better, a student will purposely isolate themselves from other students within the room; they will sit completely separate from them. One young lady in our research study; she’s low vision, but she hasn’t really self-identified as a low vision student, so she refuses to sit a the front of the classroom because she doesn’t want to appear — no one else sits at the front of the classroom, I didn’t when I was in college, so she just feels like if she does these things that are going to help her succeed, they just brand her as being different.
NARRATOR: In a photograph we see the young woman that Mary Alexander was referring to. Her face has been intentionally obscured. In the photo, she is studying at a table in her home. She uses a slant board for her textbook to provide assistance accessing the print.
In addition, we see her open laptop with a large scale graphic on the screen. These are accommodations she resists using in public.
ALEXANDER: One of the reasons students are marginalizing themselves is that lack of self-determination skills. You know, being able to say this is my vision impairment, this is what it means in my education, and this is what it means as far as how I need to manage the people around me. So, it’s a very, very big piece to expect 18-year-old and 19-year-old students to walk in the door knowing how to do.
That’s a big challenge; to do the amount of studying that’s required and prep for your studying, and then to try to have a social like on top of that. We talked to several students who felt isolated because of that, but also because they had chosen to live in a single dorm room rather than living with a roommate. Their technology might be loud, their screen reader might bother someone, or their working on either a Perkins brailler or a braille notetaker of some kind and they don’t want to bother someone.
Very often the college will make that decision for them and say for students with disabilities, we put you in a single. Well, right away, that’s one of the key places that you make a new friend. Some students also are deliberately steered towards online classes, and if you are in an online class, the interaction with your peers is very limited.
NARRATOR: In a photograph we see a young man who is blind sitting at a desk in front of his laptop. His face has been purposely obscured. He is logging on to an online class.
ALEXANDER: You know, that could be a good choice for one of your classes, but it is very isolating if all of your interactions with school are online. And then the other piece is, because they have a vision impairment, you know when you’re walking around campus, they may not have an awareness of what the social opportunities are.
You know, very often those are things that are posted on bulletin boards, or that there are young people around campus that are handing out flyers, but they just don’t know that they’re out there, and so they very often do not have those opportunities.
We have one young lady that we’ve made calls recently that had joined a sorority, and she’s finding a lot of fulfillment because she has joined a very specific social club, for lack of a better word. It’s a group that she feels a lot of comradery with because it’s a sorority around education and it’s just worked out so well for her. She probably is the student that I’ve spoken with recently that feels the most social engagement with her community and with her campus.
I think that’s a really good thing to take away from it; that you have to find a specific social engagement area or place or club and try to become involved in that.
CHAPTER 5: Pillar #3: Leveraging the Disabilities Services Office
ALEXANDER: We don’t think about everyday that we manage people around us. I really had never thought about this, but the research showed that a student that is visually impaired has to manage a network of people that is much larger than their sighted peers. For instance, they need to, because of the law that directs disability services in the college experience, it’s called the ADA or the Americans with Disabilities Act, that’s the only law that is in place right now, and it allows for certain accommodations for students, but unlike IDEA, which governs students in the K-12 or secondary educational experience, it isn’t proactive, so the student has to be the one who initiates all of these accommodations.
NARRATOR: In a photograph we see a young man who is blind walking in a college hallway. He wears a red t-shirt and a backpack. A sign on the wall to his left reads “Student Services/Testing, Disability Access Center.”
ALEXANDER: So if they don’t learn how to manage the disabilities services office, or they don’t learn how to speak with and manage their professor; you know, learn what the professor expects from them and then be able to turn around and give that back.
Very often colleges might want to provide human note takers for students in a class where there is a lot of visual stuff going on on the board or on the whiteboard. Those kinds of human interactions are really, really – that is a sophisticated interaction between two young people that have no experience with it.
So, just learning to manage all those networks around them is just really key in getting through, at least, that first year of college, because after the first year, you probably intuitively will understand what you need to do. But that very first semester it can be very challenging, and in our research, we did see a couple of the students not return after the first semester, and those were the key reasons for both of these students; lack of self-identification of their vision impairment, but also that management piece.
CHAPTER 6: Pillar #4: Learning Effectively
ALEXANDER: You know, these students are so focused on, when they get assignments in class, the amount of time they have to spend in their rooms, heads down, just getting prepared to study. The prep time for study is unbelievable because if you have a, let’s say that your professor puts up on Blackboard or on Canvas or whatever the student management tool is that your university uses, they’ll put up PDFs primarily, and you’re supposed to download them. Well to do that, students are going to have to, first of all, be able to download documents off of a tool like that.
Hopefully that tool is accessible to whatever screen reader or notetaker that they use, and then manage to get it into an accessible format, because not all PDFs are accessible. You know, the thought or the feeling in the college world is well we’ve made all this digital, but they don’t understand that digital is not always accessible, and so the just prep work that they have to get through to get things ready for them to study, and if they do use a human note taker, getting those notes. They don’t show up magically right after class. So, the time is takes to get the notes, make sure you understand the notes, maybe after back and forth a little bit with your note taker to be sure that you’re getting key points on this.
NARRATOR: A photograph shows a page in a spiral notebook with handwritten notes taken in a biology class. Three headings across the top of the page are: Isotonic, Hypertonic, and Hypotonic.
Below are diagrams describing the three states as they relate to the water content in a cell. The diagrams contain arrows, which would require more description before they were useful as study notes to a person who is blind or visually impaired.
ALEXANDER: These students were spending two or three hours just to prepare to study. That’s before they ever get started. And then often you see them using several pieces of technology to study, so they may be putting notes into their braille notetaker, or writing notes in after reviewing things that are in large print on their screen, maybe doing some things audibly. So there is a lot going on for them, so they are completely heads down, and they don’t always have time to focus on being a kid and being a young person in college and all of the experiences that come with that. I think that is a surprise for a lot of them; how much time that they have to put in for that.
NARRATOR: The photo shows a young woman who is visually impaired, again with her face obscured, sitting at her dorm room desk and reading with the assistance of a screen reader, which enlarges the book pages.
Also on her desk are a handheld magnifier and a monocular, which she uses in class and while navigating around the campus.
ALEXANDER: Learning Ally does not want to imply that all students arrive at college with no preparation. We have some wonderful college preparation programs around the country, we really do, but one thing that we saw, both in our research and in some follow-up calls that we’ve made and discussions with students that are blind or visually impaired, is even the students that are most prepared and feel that they are completely ready technology wise and that they are pretty social, outgoing kids and they understand their disability; even those students had a lot of trouble figuring out what success was going to feel like in college and they really never felt like they got there.
Some of our research participants were seniors in college, so we didn’t limit this research to freshman, and one of the most moving interviews was with a young lady who first was describing independence and what it looked like to her, and that independence, the way she described it, she called it strategic independence, which I thought was a great term.
She said I have to know when to ask for help and who to ask for help from, and when to do things on my own. There is a time for each of those, but in my years at college — she goes on a little bit later to explain that while she was in college, she never felt like she did it well. Even as aware as she was of it, she felt like there should have been something better; there should have been some easier way to do this. And this woman is very, very skilled in all of the ways that you would think she needs to be, but I hate that that feeling of success wasn’t there.
You know, when you talk about helping students thrive and succeed, they need to feel like they’re thriving and succeeding, so that was hard.
CHAPTER 7: Pillar #5: Making Technology Work for You
ALEXANDER: So technology is really vital. It’s so important that they arrive on campus knowing their technology, having their technology in hand, and knowing how to use it to study or to take notes or whatever they need to use it for.
When they are in secondary school, in the K-12 area, there is money to pay for that sort of thing; there’s money to pay for training for that sort of thing, but if they didn’t have either good services and training in K-12, or possibly they lost their vision late enough in that experience that there just wasn’t time for them to get that, then once you get into college, the funds for that type of training are probably going to be limited.
It depends on their state rehabilitation services and whether or not they pay for training, because most colleges will not. So if they arrive at school not knowing what technology is going to work for them and what method, they’re really at a disadvantage.
If, for instance, this is a student who has lost all his vision and he hasn’t had an opportunity to learn braille, even though braille is not found everywhere — no one is going to hand him a braille book, that’s not the point. But a refreshable braille notetaker is very helpful for a student who does read braille.
NARRATOR: A photo shows a young woman who is blind sitting at a table in a student lounge area. Her face has been intentionally obscured.
On her laptop, she has opened a document titled “Introduction to Political Psychology.” She is reading the document with the refreshable braille display on her braille notetaker.
ALEXANDER: So he may have to learn to rely on audio, and if you have never been an audio learner, then that’s going to be a big challenge for you in college.
It’s vital that you know, before you step foot on the college campus, or even just for a college visit, you need to know what are the platforms that your college uses. So if they use one of the student management tools that is not accessible with JAWS or with Window-Eyes or with whatever screen reader you use, you’re going to have a lot of problems.
You need to know that going in, and if you do recognize a problem with that and you’re set on that university, then the student needs to start advocating with the disabilities services office right away, so that some type of accommodations can be put in place for them, but just having that knowledge up front that these are the type of systems that my college uses.
NARRATOR: A photograph shows a young man who is blind sitting on the bed in his dorm room. His face is intentionally obscured. On his lap is an open folder that, on one side, contains a tactile graphic of a wave form.
He is reading a page of braille text that describes a problem set involving the wave form. These are the types of accommodations that would need to be requested and prepared ahead of the time the assignment was being given.
ALEXANDER: Very often, the university, but even the disabilities services office, has no awareness of what makes something accessible. I said earlier that digital does not equal accessible, and they still have the attitude that it does. We’ve come a long way from, you know, about 20 years ago. Most things were still in print and things had to scanned and then put into either electronic text or into audio.
We’ve really kind of come past that, but the disabilities services office does not have an awareness of that, and they don’t see that many blind or visually impaired students, and because it’s such a low incidence disability, very often either the student or someone who is helping the student needs to educate the disabilities services office around what is needed.
CHAPTER 8: Challenges and Opportunities
ALEXANDER: So in our research we found that the students who were completely blind felt a lot more comfortable with talking about their disabilities, either with students or faculty, than students who were low vision. I’ m not sure why that is. There is a lot of research out there around that, but the students — for instance, there were two young ladies who are low vision in our research and they have, since high school, tried to pass as having no vision impairment.
So once they got to college, they wanted to pass as having no vision impairment but it was not possible for them to. One of the young ladies is one who has dropped out of college since and is just kind of re-thinking how she wants to go back in on this, but, you know, that’s just a really hard part of it.
If you’re not willing to talk about who you are and what you learn, then the people that are willing to accept you that way, for what you are, because most — I have found with all my kids that have gone to college is that college is something that opens people’s minds. Any kind of education is going to open your mind and students are probably at that period when they’re most willing to accept somebody else with a difference, but if you’re not willing to be a little vulnerable to that, then it’s going to be hard for anyone to know, first of all, but to be willing to accept you as the authentic and wonderful person that you are.
NARRATOR: In a photograph, we see an email from a college disabilities services office to a student who is visually impaired. The student had written to request accommodations.
Among the accommodations granted are the use of calculator and tape recorder, low vision aids, and extended time to complete in-class tests. The student was also encouraged to contact her professors before the start of classes to discuss how the accommodations would be implemented.
ALEXANDER: On the research for the college program, we saw that students need a lot more support, especially during that first year of college, and they need to be both better prepared before they get there, but then they need active support, and almost 24/7 support of some kind, so that when they need it, it’s there for them to find.
That’s what led us to deciding that we also want to serve our students who are blind and visually impaired in a more whole manner, and look at how we can help. Through the research, we decided that we needed to serve them both with resources; knowledge about what resources are out and build some resources of our own that maybe aren’t already existing that talk directly to the student; that it’s in their voice so that hopefully they can engage in it, but make the engagement piece; so how you do your website or what’s their experience when they come to you, you know. Is it a podcast? Is it a video? Is it an article or a quiz or a self-assessment of something.
Make it engaging so that they’ll want to do it, and then the third piece to it is would they benefit from having a mentor. So, a college student who is possibly working on a post-graduate degree of some kind who’s blind or visually impaired, who has had similar experiences and who made it and who can then turn around and in a manner that is very similar to what they’re experience were, is really able to talk to young students about that, or to any student that is new to the college experience.
So we’re developing these now and it’s been really fun. The first area that we really want to build some resources for students is around empowering them to, you know — when we talk about advocacy on your own behalf; sometimes that means you need to have the ability to maybe disrupt things a little bit, and to not allow the status quo to be OK. Because if it’s not OK for the way you learn, then something needs to change, and so we’re building resources around that.
Not only the advocacy piece, but the piece around it’s OK to let people know what you need, and if it’s not already there, then it’s OK to ask for it, and to keep asking for it, and to be, possibly, a little firm about the way that you ask for it; it’s OK because your education is important and it’s worth it.
NARRATOR: For more information about Learning Ally and the resources they can provide, go to learningally.org.
