VIDBE-Q Volume 69 Issue 2
Katie Armstrong
InSIGHTful Vision Innovations
Karmstrong@Insightfulvisioninnovations.com
Target Audience: Educators and/or therapist in and outside the field of visual
disabilities, parents
Hand under hand instruction is a form of physical assistance in which the
hands of an adult are placed under the hands of the student (Lewis & Allman,
2014; Sacks, 2016) to offer support in learning tasks. Hand under hand provides a
student greater control of their involvement (Lewis & Allman, 2014) and feel how
the hands are used (Sacks, 2016) to complete a given task. When used properly,
hand under hand instruction provides a learning environment that feels safe to the
learner. This form of assistance is widely used in the deafblind community,
explicitly taught in intervener training programs, and becoming more prevalent in
the field of visual disabilities. In this short paper, I will first give a quick overview
of the key findings obtained in a study I conducted in the spring of 2023 that
evaluated what happened when hand over hand instruction was replaced with hand
Hand Under Hand,
an Educational Milieu
