frustrated if their typical strategies alone are not
effective for students who are deafblind.
For a person who is Deaf, accessing visual information can be very efficient and effective. For a
person who is Deaf and has a vision loss, s/he
must now work even harder to use her/his visual
sense and it is often inefficient. The reverse is
true for individuals who are blind and lose hearing. When students need to rely on vision or
hearing to compensate for the other loss, the use
of the primary sense becomes less efficient and
students often fatigue easily or have performance
less than expected. Appropriate deafblind strategies are needed to help students facilitate access
to information in an efficient manner and to improve outcomes. How do we monitor the effectiveness of these strategies? I suggest through
monitoring engaged learning.
I would like to share with you a model for facilitating engaged learning for students who are deafblind based on what my son, Dylan. Dylan is
deafblind from CHARGE syndrome and has been
my best teach over the years. The suggested activity is particularly useful for teams to do together
as they get to know a new student. Allow me to
teach through our story.
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Background
We knew Dylan had no hearing when he was
only 5 days old. We knew he had large blind
spots caused by colobomas or clefts in the eye by
2 weeks. What we didn't know was how much he
could see; we were told to wait and see. We
quickly accepted our son as Deaf with a vision
loss and began to learn and use American Sign
Language when he was an infant. Providing Dylan access to language as an avenue for learning
and knowing each other was a main focus. We
had parent advisors for vision and hearing loss
