excerpt
Procissão de cegos | Johannes
Wohlfart, 1927
PREFACE
After forty years of enabling blind people to cope with the challenges of living
in a world of seeing people and striving to remove societal barriers so that the
blind
could fully participate, I could not write a book that did not convey a social
message or intent. My intent (or, at least, my hope) is that through these
stories, some of
the 1.7 million Americans who are blind or are in the process of losing their
vision will be reassured that blindness need not be the end of active life but
rather the
beginning of a life in which they will depend on their residual senses. I hope
that this reassurance will be conveyed by the effectiveness with which the
teachers and
counselors portrayed in these narratives assist visually impaired persons to
reenter the mainstream of society.
Beyond my desire to assure those experiencing visual loss that competent
professional help with the adjustment process is available, I also wish to
acquaint readers
with the humorous aspect of the daily work of this small, dedicated group of
professionals. Those who become blind bring to this unchosen condition the full
array of
personality characteristics, including a sense of humor. In fact, some of the
funniest people I have known were blind. Take Bob Ingersol, a blind man from my
hometown, for instance. Many people who knew and loved him were often the
recipients of Bob's practical jokes. As a high school student, far from home at
the
Illinois School for the
Blind in Jacksonville, I looked forward to Bob's encouraging and newsfilled
letters, which usually ended with such bits of earthy humor as, "Some final
advice from
your friendly stock broker: Sit on your American Can and hold your Water."
Lloyd, a blind piano tuner, would slip a few pieces of the family silver in the
coat pockets
of friends who were visiting for the first time in order to enjoy their
reactions when he "accidentally" discovered these items while helping them on
with their wraps.
Then there was Floyd, a lifelong friend, who would respond to the inquiries of
waitresses as to how much cream he liked in his coffee with "just enough to see
if there
is a fly floating in it." Of course, these people were serious, hardworking
folks most of the time, but, like their seeing peers, they had their lighter
side. I have observed
that an active sense of humor is a definite asset to those who are required to
adjust to a life without vision, and it certainly makes the work of the
adjustment teacher or
counselor less stressful and more enjoyable. If these accounts can help to
dispel a commonly held notion that blind people are uniformly somber and that
those who
assist them work under grim conditions, this book may succeed in lowering
society's generalized fear of blindness.
The motivation to write something that could provide emotional reassurance to
the public, particularly the elderly who are most at risk of becoming visually
impaired,
has been with me for many years. The problem was "packaging the message," as the
advertising and public relations people put it. My office and home library are
filled
with books on how to live with blindness, including one I wrote, Psychosocial
Rehabilitation of the Blind, but, according to various public opinion surveys,
society's
fear of blindness has not been reduced by this wealth of published material. In
order to succeed in replacing fear, which creates myths and apprehension, with
facts
and common sense, I believed it would be necessary to communicate factual
material about blindness by anchoring it to positive emotions and optimism—a
formidable
task.
We have known since antiquity that facts are remembered longer when presented in
stories of people and events. This is why most
of us learn history better from historical fiction than from history texts. At
some point, it occurred to me that the most effective avenue to the emotional
acceptance of
facts about blindness adjustment would be to let the public read about real,
believable people engaged with their teachers and counselors in the process of
learning to
live with visual impairment. Personal experience and conversations with
colleagues provided me with a wealth of incidents on which to base stories of
workers with the
blind going about their daily tasks. My task was to develop these incidents into
believable stories, adding descriptive material, action, and conversation to
enhance
plausibility and create interest, amusement, or excitement. Although some
characters have been invented to round out the stories, several colleagues who
furnished
material for a particular narrative—such as Louis Davis, Dorothy Dykema, Harker
Miley, Edith Ingersol, and Verle Wessel—are named. And all of the accounts are
factual and accurate regarding counseling or instruction and blindness
adjustment techniques, strategies, and methods.
PART ONE
LEARNING TO LIVE WITH BLINDNESS: REHABILITATION TEACHING
If you suddenly became blind, from whom would you immediately seek services? A
physiotherapist? An occupational therapist? A vocational counselor? A
psychologist? You might need the services of any or all of these professionals
at some time during your adjustment to visual impairment, but your most
immediate need
would be the ability to carry out the necessary tasks of daytoday
living. You would need some techniques that do not require sight for performing
such routine tasks
as colormatching
your clothes, identifying your medication, pouring your morning coffee, and
setting the thermostat on your heating or cooling system. In other words,
you would need a rehabilitation teacher.
Don't be discouraged by such a clinicalsounding
name. Although rehabilitation teachers are highly trained professionals who
enable visually impaired persons to carry
out virtually all of their daily activities, they do not practice their
profession within the limited confines of some distant hospital or
rehabilitation center. In fact, many
states have a commission, bureau, or department for the visually impaired that
employs rehabilitation teachers to instruct blind persons in their own homes
using their own appliances. To emphasize this fact, these teachers were
originally known as ''home teachers of the adult blind.''
Rehabilitation teaching had its beginning with the London Home Teaching Society
in 1855. Teachers were dispatched throughout England to teach embossed reading
systems to the blind. "Home teaching" came to America with the establishment of
the Pennsylvania Home Teaching Society in 1882. Today, rehabilitation teaching
programs exist in every state. In addition to the delivery of instruction
directly into the homes of visually impaired persons, many public and private
rehabilitation
hospitals and centers now employ rehabilitation teachers as members of
multidisciplinary teams, which can also include mobility instructors, vocational
counselors,
social workers, and psychologists.
Besides instructing visually impaired people in such daily living tasks as
reading in Braille, writing with tactile hand guides, and homemaking,
rehabilitation teachers are
also prepared to understand the emotional impact of visual loss on the impaired
person and his or her family. Teachers use this understanding to enhance the
success
of the teaching program. For example, one of the first assurances a visually
impaired person might receive from a rehabilitation teacher is the information
that he or she
is not the only person facing the loss of sight on that particular day. The
knowledge that 179 other people in the nation have also experienced visual loss
during the
previous twentyfour
hours may lessen the feeling of isolation. Applying the formula of .00253
legally blind persons per 1,000 people in the United States, the Illinois
Department of Rehabilitation Services estimates that there are 29,182 legally
blind people in the state, for example. (Legal blindness is defined as visual
acuity of
20/200 in the better eye or a visual field of 20 degrees or less [180 degrees is
considered normal].) Application of the .00253 formula to an estimated United
States
population of 260 million results in a projection of 657,800 legally blind
people in the nation. Of this number, we estimate that 65,780 became blind
within the past
year—approximately 180 within the past twentyfour
hours, as mentioned above.
Another service provided by the rehabilitation teacher is the
organization of support groups composed of just such newly blinded persons. In
these groups, people receive encouragement from each other and knowledge from
invited speakers about eye conditions and treatment, special devices for people
with visual impairments, career information, and the like.
Whether the services of a rehabilitation teacher will be readily available to
the 65,780 people who lose their sight each year is not certain. This dilemma is
related to
the average age of the typical newly blinded person and the amount of time
needed to be an effective itinerant rehabilitation teacher. The fastest growing
segment of the
population with visual impairments is over sixtyfive
years of age, and most of these people will continue to receive instruction in
their own homes on their own
equipment rather than attend a comprehensive rehabilitation center, which is
usually considered more suitable for young, vocationally bound clients.
Therefore, the time
it takes for the teacher to travel to the homes of students, along with the time
necessary for recordkeeping,
will continue to influence the amount of time the teacher
can spend with students. Records indicate that, if teachers visit each student
every other week for one and a half hours and rely on family members and other
volunteers to monitor progress in such areas as handwriting and sewing, the
average newly impaired person will require one year to complete his or her
program.
Research and experience have shown that a rehabilitation teacher can complete
teaching services with approximately 30 clients in a twelvemonth
period. To
determine the number of teachers needed to serve the 65,780 people who will
become blind in the United States each year, we divide by 30 and find that the
number
is 2,193. This translates into 97 teachers needed in the state of Illinois
alone.
Determining the number of rehabilitation teachers needed is easier than
determining the number actually available throughout the United States.
According to estimates
by experts in the field, there are between 500 and 700 teachers in the nation.
Even if we arbitrarily double this to 1,400, this is still 793 fewer teachers
than are
necessary to serve the thousands of American citizens who lose their vision each
year. The best advice to any
person who becomes visually impaired is to get on an application list of an
agency for the visually impaired as soon as possible. Fortunately, blindness
usually
progresses slowly, allowing the person to continue performing most activities at
reduced efficiency until teaching services can be arranged. Finally, if it is
necessary for
a person's name to be put on a waiting list, most agencies will refer that
person to another program such as the Regional Library for the Blind and
Physically
Handicapped, which provides recorded books at no cost to the patron.
PART TWO
LEARNING TO WORK WITH BLINDNESS: VOCATIONAL COUNSELING
The oldest historical documents relating to blind people describe efforts to
place them in jobs that could be performed without eyesight. An ancient Chinese
ruler
decreed that the occupations of soothsayer and masseur would be reserved
exclusively for blind persons, and special schools were established to prepare
them for
these trades. In ancient Rome, blind boys were employed as oarsmen. Around 1800,
the French government established a program to incorporate blind people into
their society by separating them according to five levels of economic
functioning: those who engaged in business and professions such as law, music,
or teaching; those
who performed skilled crafts, such as piano tuning; those who engaged in home
industry; those who worked and lived in sheltered workshops attached to communal
living facilities; and those blind persons who, because of additional
disabilities or age, were unable to do any significant work and were housed in
what we might term
group homes today. When we remember that Emperor Napoleon was involved in the
greatest military expansion in European history, it seems remarkable that the
French government would have had the compassion or resources to engage in such
an elaborate employment program for a relatively small group of its disabled citizens. However, this relationship between
militarism and the expansion of employment opportunities for the blind has
continued
down to the present century.
Due to the sedentary and repetitive nature of assemblyline
work, leaders in work for the blind recognized the opportunities for their
clients in manufacturing in the
early part of the twentieth century. During World War I, for example, the
Crocker Wheeler Company, a manufacturing firm in Newark, New Jersey, employed
one
hundred blind workers in a special unit that inspected and packed finished
products. Following World War II, the Radio Corporation of America established
the
practice of employing one blind worker for every thousand sighted workers.
Because the public had little understanding or tolerance of disabled people in
the early twentieth century, it is difficult to understand how workers for the
blind were
able to persuade employers to permit blind persons to tour their factories, let
alone actually allow them to operate machinery. This seemingly impossible task
of
securing industrial employment for blind persons was accomplished largely
through the direct demonstration of capable placement agents who were blind
themselves,
such as Joe Klunk. Klunk was so successful in talking his way into factories,
where he would demonstrate the performance of selected jobs without sight, that
he
became the first director of the U.S. Office of Vocational Rehabilitation for
the Blind. With the establishment of college training programs in rehabilitation
counseling, it
was possible to combine the academic knowledge of collegetrained
counselors with the job placement skills devised by such pioneers as Joe Klunk
to provide
agencies for the blind with placement counselors who could address the
psychological problems of adjusting to blindness and confront the practical
problems of
securing employment for blind persons.
PART THREE
LEARNING TO TRAVEL WITH BLINDNESS: ORIENTATION AND MOBILITY INSTRUCTION
[T]he greatest need of those who cannot see is, and always will be,
communication on all levels of existence with those who can see.
—Alan Eaton, Beauty for the Sighted and the Blind
Dr. Eaton's words are as relevant today as when they were written more than a
quarter century ago. In this information age, almost every human activity, from
ordering a Big Mac to performing one's job, depends on the ability to process
written communication, much of which is in the form of icons and other graphic
symbols
not readily accessible to blind persons. If, however, the most severe problem of
those who are blind continues to be the speedy and accurate processing of
written
communication, the second most serious problem remains the difficulty of
traveling from one point to another in order to engage in social and economic
activity.
In fact, the problem of mobility outdates the problem of written communication
by hundreds of years. Reports of blind people using canes to explore their paths
date
back at least as far as the
Middle Ages, when bands of roving blind folk traveled about Europe seeking food
and shelter, using their long canes to find their way and sometimes to attack
unwilling benefactors. Independent travel, requiring extreme concentration of
one's perceptual and physical abilities, has remained a serious challenge for
persons who
cannot see down to the present day, indicated by the overwhelming number of
blind persons who employ the cane method for independent mobility.
-
-
-
-
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To the few hundred committed teachers
and counselors,
blind and sighted, who fan out across the nation every morning,
providing rehabilitation services to the sixty thousand American citizens who
become blind every year
ϟ
excerpt of
'Coping with Blindness -
Personal Tales of Blindness Rehabilitation'
Alvin Roberts | Copyright © 1998
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale and Edwardsville
15.Out.2012
publicado
por
MJA
|
