A Nonacademic Plea for Common Sense by Barbara Pierce
Anyone who depends on the ability to read and write Braille or who needs strong Braille skills and does not have them undoubtedly finished reading the preceding article frothing at the mouth. To those unused to digging through reports of research findings, the striking point in the authors' argument would appear to be that they surveyed teachers of blind children in Florida and learned that very few of them ever prepare class materials for their students using the slate and stylus. Therefore there is no reason to demand that such teachers learn to use the slate and stylus, and states using the NLS National Literary Braille Competency Test (NLBCT) as part of their certification process for teachers of the blind may eventually be instructed by the courts to throw out this instrument.
A close reading of the article reveals that the argument being presented is actually somewhat more complex but equally disturbing. I do not pretend to comprehend the professional jargon completely, and neither did several academics to whom I showed the article in the hope that they could explain it to me. But I would like to comment on a couple of disturbing things it seems to say.
The authors object to the original decision to construct the Braille competency test to measure knowledge of Braille rather than focusing on the teacher's mastery of teaching methods for working with blind students. They seem to think that assessing teacher mastery of the code somehow means transcription skills are being assessed. Their words are: "The recommendation by peer reviewers to assess only knowledge of the Braille code and not methodology raises particularly the question of the need for teachers to demonstrate ability to transcribe materials using a slate and stylus. There is agreement in the literature that teachers should teach slate and stylus to students. However, if the NLBCT is designed to assess demonstration of the Braille code and not teaching of Braille and related communication skills, the requirement of slate and stylus writing is questionable." Unless I am missing something, this reasoning seems astonishing to me.
The concept of a competency test was first proposed because so few special education teachers of blind students truly knew the Braille code and could use it with any facility. As far as I know, the evidence is anecdotal, but blind people with a good mastery of Braille reading and writing consistently point to a teacher or other adult whose instruction and personal skill enabled the blind youngsters to learn Braille effectively. Teachers who don't know Braille well are typically unenthusiastic about teaching it, avoid doing so as much as possible, and make errors when they are forced to prepare Braille materials.
There is nothing extraordinary about this phenomenon. It pops up in human nature all the time. My children had two different French teachers in high school. One had a beautiful accent, had been to France, and clearly loved the language. Her students were excited about French, spoke it whenever they could, did extra-curricular projects, and enjoyed themselves thoroughly. I suppose the other teacher liked the language well enough to teach it, but no one could ever be certain. Her accent was very poor, and her ability to inspire enthusiasm in her students was nonexistent. When students expressed interest in taking French at the local college, she did what she could to discourage them on the grounds that they would find it too difficult. Everyone assumed that she was really afraid that her own shortcomings would be exposed more obviously if the French faculty saw the results of her instruction. To my mind this is the same set of very human responses at work that we find in the teachers who resist having their Braille skills tested.
The NLBCT was developed, not to predict how successful a Braille teacher would be in teaching Braille reading and writing, but to determine whether that teacher possesses the body of information and skills he or she must teach. A sound knowledge of Braille reading and writing is a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite to effective teaching. I am mystified as to why this point seems so difficult for many in education to grasp.
Another place where ordinary common sense and researcher logic seem to part company is in the section titled "Issues Surrounding Content Validity." Specialized terms are discussed in this section, and in the following passage I do not pretend to understand the term "criterion referenced tests," but it's pretty clear the researchers believe that the best way to test the skills of teachers or would-be teachers is to compare their abilities to those of actual teachers doing the work in the classroom, which seems to be content validity. In other words, if you construct a valid test that measures the skills of the test-taker against the job being done in the field, you can predict how well the test-taker is teaching or will teach in the future. Here is the relevant passage: "Validity of criterion-referenced tests is widely discussed in the literature, but content validity is generally recommended as the primary validation of interest. For teacher certification purposes, test content validation is generally determined through an investigation of practitioners who either report or demonstrate the skills tested while on the job."
What follows this foggy little passage is a long discussion, complete with citations of court cases, to support the concept that generalized notions of what should be taught and assessment of the test-taker's knowledge of a body of material are unimportant or at least less important in the certification process than assessment of the teacher's mastery of methodology.
Having conducted no research myself and knowing nothing at all about test theory and test validation, I can only comment based on common sense. Surely no one would argue that anyone who has mastered a body of knowledge can necessarily teach it. All of us have endured teachers who knew their stuff but who could not communicate it to the class. We are not arguing that knowing the Braille code well and having the ability to write it with Brailler or slate guarantee that one can effectively teach a blind child to read and write Braille rapidly and effectively. But it seems self-evident to me that one who does not have those skills and that knowledge will very seldom be able to teach others mastery of Braille and will be unlikely to believe in its importance. One must understand algebra before teaching it. A violin teacher must be able to produce music on a fiddle if his or her students are to learn to play.
Some years ago my local NFB chapter invited the teacher of the visually impaired in our county to come to a meeting and talk to us about the education of blind children. With pride she told us that she had been teaching in the system for eleven years, and never in all that time had a single student in her class needed Braille. She had assured us at the beginning of the meeting that she knew Braille and that, if a student really needed it, she would teach it. What she did not know was that we had been working with the parents of several students in the county who had requested Braille for their children, and all the students had eventually left the school where this woman taught and gone to the school for the blind, where they could receive Braille instruction. When teachers like this one are not teaching what their children need to learn for success in life, how can they possibly provide a reliable reference for determining the standards for teacher competency? This teacher genuinely had not noticed that her prejudice against Braille was actually preventing her from recognizing her students' needs.
Of course, the teachers in Florida surveyed about their teaching do not transcribe much material for their students using the slate and stylus; teachers haven't done much of that sort of thing for fifty years. First grade teachers don't prepare worksheets for their students using pencils either. Yet first grade teachers do use handwriting and are expected to teach their students to write as well as read. The authors give lip service to the concept that slate and stylus instruction should be given to blind students. In their survey, however, the authors did not ask how many teachers taught the use of the slate and stylus, and they certainly made no attempt to ascertain how effective such teaching was. Those questions were beyond the purview of the research, which focused on Braille transcription only.
But I can tell you that very few blind students today are being taught effective and enthusiastic slate use. The Ohio affiliate conducts a Braille-writing contest each year- -or at least we try to. We have just changed the contest rules. We used to present a Braille 'n Speak to the middle or high school student who wrote the best essay about the importance of Braille in his or her life. The essay was to be written using a slate and stylus. Last year we had no contest entrants because, as the teachers told us, their Braille students could write with a Perkins Brailler but not the slate. This year we will award extra points for submissions written with a slate and stylus, but so far none have appeared.
I recently received a report from a Federationist whose affiliate had just completed a daylong trip to the state capital during which teams of Federationists talked with legislators about important bills coming up for action. Six high school students took part in the event, which was wonderful, but not a single one could take notes of the meetings in Braille. It was not that they could not take good notes or make a complete and legible record; these students were unable to take Braille notes at all! It would be hard to assemble a group of six sighted high school students interested in attending and able to take part in such an event who were, to a person, unable to take notes at all.
These are anecdotes admittedly, but they are stories the truth of which I can vouch for, and they have occurred in the past year. In fact, I know only one high school student who is enthusiastic about using the slate and stylus, and she is being home schooled by members of the Parents Division in Ohio and has attended the Buddy Program at BLIND, Inc., for the past three summers. In other words, her exposure to the poor attitudes of many teachers of blind students in Ohio has been minimal, and her absorption of Federation philosophy has been steady and constructive.
Is this little essay of mine merely one more indiscriminate attack on the abilities and attitudes of teachers of blind students? Absolutely not! In my experience no one is more enthusiastic about the importance of Braille reading and writing than those teachers who do know the code well and teach it whenever and wherever they can. They have seen more clearly than the rest of us can how important it is and what a difference it can make to their students at every ability level.
We can only hope that legislators and education officials will depend on their own common sense and the experience of blind adults and those teachers who actually know and effectively teach Braille to their students. If we have our way, most blind students will be learning Braille in the future, and most of their special education teachers will actually be required to know the code they are teaching. We can only work and hope for the best and trust that in the meantime ill-conceived research does not do our children in.