Sarah's Story: Using the Individualized Meaning-centered Approach to Braille Literacy Education (I-M-ABLE)

Abstract

I began providing braille instruction to (a pseudonym) at a residential school for blind students when she was 11 years old and had been learning the braille alphabet and whole-word contractions for more than two years. Sara was born with retinopathy of prematurity and was totally blind; and, according to verbal comprehension and working memory testing results, she was intellectually deficient. Her ability to recognize letters was consistently minimal (see Figure 1). Furthermore, when I reviewed the assessments, I discovered that identified only eight letters with 100% accuracy across the seven assessments. displayed a general lack of interest in learning to read braille and exhibited poor braille-reading mechanics and retention. She typically scrubbed (that is, moved her fingers in a circular or vertical motion over a braille character to aid in recognition) individual braille letters and had difficulty tracking and locating new lines of braille. Therefore, I decided to restart Sarah's alphabet-recognition instruction using the Mangold curriculum, which would help with her tracking and perhaps improve her ability to recognize letters at the same time. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] After 2-1/2 months of using a traditional method of teaching to read braille and seeing her twice a week for lessons, I measured her accuracy in identifying 12 letters at 67%. At that same time, I enrolled in a series of weekly I-M-ABLE training sessions given by Diane Wormsley at the residential school at which I worked. We were asked to select a student to use as a case study as part of this training, and since I was concerned about Sarah's continued lack of retention and reading inconsistencies, I selected her as a case study during the training. I-M-ABLE is an individualized instructional method for braille that uses meaningful, student-selected vocabulary. I knew that had interests of which I was unaware, since her hobbies were not something we had discussed during previous braille lessons. After completing an interest inventory by asking questions about her favorite books, music, and things to do during leisure time, I was able to help her create a list of meaningful words. Sarah's first selection of Key Vocabulary or student-chosen words were Chris Brown, SpongeBob, pizza, and music. When the initial list was complete, I reviewed each word with Sarah. Her immediate response was, Thank you for writing all those words! At this point, it seemed as though I had some buy-in from Sarah. I then chose to introduce the words pizza and Chris Brown first on individual braille word cards because these words were tactilely distinct. When she showed success with them, I introduced SpongeBob and music. While and I looked at these words and others on braille word cards, we discussed word cues (unique distinctions of individual words, such as the characters in the words appearing tall, clumpy, spaced apart, or at the top or bottom of the braille cell). became instantly successful at recognizing her new words. Whereas she had previously not been able to recognize letters, she now was able to learn the feel of the new words using the word cues we discussed. As she learned more words, I wanted to use them in stories, which required me to introduce her to some filler words (teacher-selected words, including high-frequency words). Sarah's first filler words were likes and eats. One of the filler words allowed her to read her first key vocabulary story Likes: Sarah likes pizza. likes music. likes Chris Brown. likes SpongeBob. likes it all. By the end of the two-month-long I-MABLE workshop that I was attending, was successfully reading eight words and was using more efficient hand movements while reading (that is, she was no longer scrubbing). In addition, I watched her become extremely motivated to learn to read braille using this new approach. …