Introduction to Deaf-Blindness SUSAN BASHINSKI: Part 1: Introduction to Learners Who Have Deaf-Blindness SLIDE 1 My name is Susan [INAUDIBLE] I'm a professor of Special Education at East Carolina University in North Carolina. I have the opportunity to talk with you today about some general introductory information about learners who have deaf-blindness. work We'll start by looking generally at, what does deaf-blindness mean? So let's get started. SLIDE 2 I think one of the most important things, if you have no take-away from this webinar today other than this point, it's a very, very important one to remember. Deaf-blindness does not imply that an individual sees absolutely nothing or hears absolutely nothing. That's really wrong. That's a myth out there on the street. But it's important you realize that a learner, or one of your children if you're a parent, is that if your child has a label of deaf-blindness, it simply means that that child, that adolescent, experiences some type of vision loss and some type of hearing loss to some degree. That's really all it means. And I'll share with you some statistics in just a little bit about how many kids do actually see nothing and hear nothing. But it's a very small portion of this population learners. SLIDE 3 Deaf-blindness is a disability. And these are the three main points I would encourage you to try to remember about this disability category. It is a disability about information gathering. And that's how we all learn, right? We have to learn things about our environments from other people about other people, about objects, about-- even about ourselves and our own bodies. You have to gather information. And a learner who is labeled as having deaf-blindness is very limited in terms of how he or she can gather information. Secondly, deaf-blindness is a disability which limits access. And of course, as [AUDIO OUT] imagine, the more significant, the more severe, a learner's vision loss and a learner's hearing loss, the more limited his or her access to the world [INAUDIBLE] people is. And thirdly-- very, very important-- deaf-blindness is a disability which is exponentially more than a hearing loss plus a vision loss. It really isn't simply a combination of those two things. SLIDE 4 I think there are two key questions to ask. The first question you want to ask is, does she have enough vision to compensate for her lack of hearing? And secondly, does she have enough hearing to compensate for her lack of vision? Although this is not necessarily 100% consistent with the way in which the federal law, the current federal special education law, defines deaf blindness, it's certainly along those same lines. SLIDE 5 We'll talk about distance senses and impact senses. And those words really apply to deaf-blindness as you would use them in everyday life and everyday conversation. We, as individuals, have two senses that are our primary distance senses, vision and hearing, the third one being smell. But again, when you think of how much have you learned through your sense of smell-- although important and powerful, not that much of learning that goes on in schools is through that sensory channel. So two of the three, vision and hearing, distance senses are affected by deaf-blindness. This ties back to what we said before of how deaf-blindness impacts a learner's information gathering, because it affects two of the three distance senses. It also limits access, because it affects two of the three distance senses. The learner with the label of deaf-blindness does have other sensory channels to use to collect information, to gather information, to access the world and other people in it. You look at these. They're impact senses. Taste-- you have to be right there. You have to have something on your tongue, in your mouth. Touch-- exactly what it means. You have to have some kind of contact. That's why it's called an impact sense. Kinesthetic-- your movement, your sense of movement and [INAUDIBLE] It's got to be right there, immediate to your own self, your own body to gather information. SLIDE 6 This is something that Jan van Dijk, who's really the father, in many people's minds, of teaching kids with deaf-blindness-- and he speaks of when we try to teach a learner with deaf-blindness or we partner with a learner who has deaf-blindness, he says, what we're really trying to do is to invite the child out, out of her own body, to join us in the world. SLIDE 7 Remember, deaf-blindness is a disability about information gathering. Don't forget it. It's very, very important. SLIDE 8 The way we gather information-- and I use that term, information gathering, to describe learning because to me, that's what learning is. There's direct learning when you are sitting down with your child as a parent or you are sitting down with a learner in your class as a teacher and directly engaged in instruction. Secondary learning is possibly when you might be doing a lesson about trying to help your child learn to brush their teeth at home. Secondary learning might be if you move the left handle instead of the right one, the water's hot. And you don't like that. Incidental learning is that learning that so many of us and learners who are typically developing just sort of do by being alive. You learn by modeling your family. You learn by modeling your peers. It's when you pick up a new skill that nobody is directly trying to teach you. But typically, kids with deaf-blindness really have trouble with incidental learning because they don't have the sight, they don't have the vision, to allow them to gather information at a distance, right? SLIDE 9 So a few fact-y facts. Sometimes some facts give us a little bit of an anchor of what we're going to talk about. These are statistics from the National Deaf-Blind census from all 50 states. They compile those data so we have some idea of the number of children and youth from birth through 22 years of age who experience deaf-blindness. And it's just over 10,000 such kids. Of this 10,000, approximately only 5% experience total deafness and total blindness. Approximately 91% of these 10,000 children and youth have other disabilities.