Undergraduate Student Education Programs Regarding Braille Literacy: A Transnational Comparative Study

Vassilios Argyropoulos,Andrea Hathazi,Magda Nikolaraizi

doi:10.5539/hes.v9n4p44

Abstract

Developing braille literacy skills represents one of the major goals of the education process for students with vision impairment. Fluency and accuracy in reading and writing facilitate access to information, development of knowledge, active participation, functionality, and independence in social contexts. One of the essential factors that can influence the success in the learning process of the braille code consists of the competences of teachers of students with vision impairment who teach braille. The purpose of this study was to investigate the reflections of 95 undergraduate special education students on their training programs regarding braille in their role as future special education teachers. Data were obtained through questionnaires which were administered in two departments of special education in two European universities. The results reported upon undergraduate students&rsquo; reflections on their study in braille and confidence in teaching braille to students who are blind. The findings highlighted the need for further training into the braille code in conjunction with its literary and scientific notation.

Highlights

Braille code is a tactile code through which individuals with severe vision impairments can read and write and become literate, according to conventional concepts of literacy (Schroeder, 1989; Stephens, 1989)
The majority of them did not have any specific knowledge of what braille was (60% for the Greek Undergraduate Students (GUSs) and 65% for the Romanian Undergraduate Students (RUSs) respectively)
It seemed that the vast majority of all undergraduate students preferred to study braille by typing braille characters, even though 41.9% of the RUSs considered the procedure of typing braille characters as one of the hardest parts of their study

Summary

Introduction

Braille code is a tactile code through which individuals with severe vision impairments can read and write and become literate, according to conventional concepts of literacy (Schroeder, 1989; Stephens, 1989). Recent researches have shown a decrease in the number of people with vision impairments that know to read and write braille. According to Schroeder (cited in Kleege, 2006), braille literacy has declined from 51% to 9% during the years 1963-1993. Wormsley (2011) presented that in 2006 in the U.S.A., 64% of the children who were visually impaired were not reading either print or braille while Australian researchers have lighted the same phenomenon a couple of decades ago (Gale, 2001) that braille literacy has declined significantly and is at a critically low level worldwide. The National Federation of the Blind (2009) confirms the same and it seems that this “braille illiteracy” phenomenon has acquired nowadays global qualities (Keil, 2012 in Roe et al, 2014; Penava, Prcić, & Iličić, 2017; Vernon, 2017)

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