VIDBE-Q Volume 69 Issue 4
Adam Wilton
Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired (PRCVI)
awilton@prcvi.org
Knowledge and skills in the core areas of the Expanded Core Curriculum
(ECC) have long been regarded as essential to meaningful engagement and success
at school, in the workplace, and in the community for blind and low vision
learners, including those with more complex profiles (Sapp & Hatlen, 2010).
However, if ECC instruction does not also equip students to problematize and
address the accessibility barriers that necessitated ECC skill development in the
first place, that instruction is fundamentally compensatory. This article proposes
that by fostering design thinking and engaging blind and low vision learners in co-
design, teacher of students with visual impairments (TSVIs) can shift the
orientation of ECC instruction from compensatory to emancipatory.
If the student does not have the tools and opportunity to transform the
environment to be more responsive to their access requirements, they must instead
compensate for an inaccessible status quo. For example, during access technology
instruction, a low vision student learns to use an Optical Character Recognition
Co-Designing More Accessible Futures with
the Expanded Core Curriculum
