Proceedings of The 5th World Conference on Teaching and Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind
Florencia Yaque
ABSTRACT:
The following workshop describes a unique and very enriching experience that the speaker went through during lockdown. The aim of this workshop is to sensitize teachers and other actors related to education, and provide them with the experience of feeling into a blind person’s shoes in a foreging language class.
Out of sight, not out of mind will help teachers be more emphatic with diverse students. During the workshop the presenter will describe her personal experience with two blind students from public secondary school. First, she will describe the experience in the classroom before lockdown, and then she will share what happened during lockdown.
After the exposure of the experience, visual illnesses and impairments will be described with non-medical purposes. The idea is to let participants know about them, and be able to adapt activities according to the students’ needs. Then, participants are expected to feel the way students do, in order to do that, they will be asked to create different “glasses” that simulate the different illnesses and impairments presented before, with object that everyone should have in their homes (a plastic bag, piece of paper, pair of scissors and a black marker). When they put on the simulation glasses, the experience begins. First they will be asked to share the way they feel by doing this activity, then they will be asked to put it into practise in a classroom.
In order to do the “putting into practice” activity, participants will be divided into breakout rooms. After that, they will be assigned with a specific role, one of them is going to be “the teacher”, two or three participants will have a visual impairment and the rest of the “class” will be other students. The task will be to implement an activity related to films as a topic. After 15’, everyone will go back to the main session and share experiences and feelings.
To round up the workshop, the presenter will give tips on tools that are useful for blind students, like Google Drive as a collective and accessible tool and NVDA screen reader.
keywords: Blind, low vission, education, foreign language