Individualized Meaning-centered Approach to Braille Literacy Education (I-M-ABLE) Case Study: Ajay's Story

Abstract

The following case study documents the strategies employed and successful results of implementing Diane Wormsley's Individualized Meaning-centered Approach to Braille Literacy Education (I-M-ABLE) with a student with multiple disabilities, including autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), who was also learning English as a second language. Ajay (a pseudonym), a 5-year-old boy, entered our public school system at the beginning of the school year shortly after moving to the United States from India during the summer. Ajay had significant language delays in English and Tegulu (the primary language spoken at home), and he communicated through incomplete sentences to express wants and needs. He had medical diagnoses of autism, sensory-integration disorder (SID), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and ADHD (Ajay was primarily hyperactive, with attention deficit). Ajay had progressive Leber's congenital amaurosis with approximately 20/1000 acuity. Ajay was placed in an enhanced autism classroom, which specialized in applied behavior analysis (ABA) strategies, with 10 hours per week of direct services from a teacher of students with visual impairments. INITIAL LITERACY SKILLS Ajay arrived at school with a few key literacy skills. He could read and write English upper and lower case letters and his first name in print, although he could not read his handwriting. Ajay understood that letters make up words and that words have meaning, and he could spell a few words in English. Given a book, he oriented it correctly and attempted to visually examine the pages, turning one to three pages at a time. Ajay's parents consented to braille instruction, but they requested that he also be instructed in print. The enhanced autism program implemented a literacy curriculum that paired picture symbols with words. Ajay participated for only two months, because he could not visually engage with the content. PURSUING I-M-ABLE When considering teaching Ajay braille, I wondered how to show him that braille had meaning, just like the print he already understood. I knew that Dr. Wormsley's I-MABLE would provide the best chance of success, given its ability to tailor instruction to his specific interests and needs. The combination of Ajay's disabilities meant he either perseverated or quickly disengaged from activities. To capture and maintain his attention, his literacy instruction had to be highly appealing. I was reluctant to implement I-M-ABLE, however, because although I know braille, I am not a reading specialist. With the encouragement of my mentors, I started I-M-ABLE, and soon became caught up in Ajay's rapid skill acquisition. Before I introduced any key words, we embarked on a series of emergent literacy and tactile skill activities. Ajay and I worked individually in a quiet room for 30 to 90 minutes a day, for an average of 60 minutes a day. We focused on activities such as scribbling on the braillewriter together, tracking a line of braille, sorting strips of lines and broken lines, and reading braille and tactile books together. These activities reinforced appropriate hand-finger placement and concepts including left, right, top, middle, and bottom, depending on where we placed different baskets along his braille mat for the sorting activities. INITIAL STRATEGIES--READING AND WRITING When considering initial key words to teach Ajay, I realized that he had already selected them. He knew his name could be written in print, so we explored his name. The next words were P.E. (physical education was his preferred school activity, written pe to teach him the letters without the extra braille characters) and tape measure a noisy object he became fixated with during his functional vision and learning media assessment. Because they were topographically unique in braille, Ajay soon mastered these words, and we slowly added more. One mistake I made in the first months was introducing two key words that were too similar in braille for Ajay to discriminate between them. …