Finding Support for Developing Skills
The amount of support that you have available to you for developing special skills that will help you in teaching with a visual impairment is somewhat dependent on where you live. Since visual impairment is considered a "low incidence" disability (i.e., there are not many people who are visually impaired), it may be more difficult to locate support if you live in a small or rural community than if you live in a larger city or metropolitan area. Try not to get discouraged if it takes you a while to locate someone who can help you know where to turn. Be persistent and realize that there are many people who are committed to supporting individuals with visual impairments. Below are some suggestions for finding support in your area:
- Start Local: Ask around to see what kind of rehabilitation services are known in your community. The first person to ask is your doctor (your family physician or eye doctor). It may be that the local hospital has access to a directory of services available to patience who need them. Starting with professionals in a different area of rehabilitation (like Occupational Therapy or Speech Therapy) might help since professionals are often in contact with each other at conferences or professional meetings. Sometimes rehabilitation services are easy to locate through the local telephone directory.
- Ask for advice from others: One of the best techniques for finding something is to talk about it widely. Ask friends, family members and others what they know about community resources. You will be surprised how much you can find out just by asking! This is especially true if you have friends and family members who are employed in social services areas (like teaching and nursing). Networking is a part of the professional game!
- Seek advice from someone else who is visually impaired: The best resource will likely come from someone who has had experiences with rehabilitation services themselves. Connecting with someone else with a visual impairment can have many important benefits. They will be able to help guide you through the sometimes-confusing maze of locating appropriate supports, they can share with you some suggestions about what worked and didn't work for them, and they can be a sounding board for your questions and concerns.
- Use the internet liberally: We are very fortunate to live in a time when research on almost anything is within our fingertips. Of course, you will need to be cautious as you search the internet for information about blindness, visual impairment and teaching. We all know that not everything on the internet is accurate or appropriate. Still, if you can read critically and examine the information on websites carefully, you can find almost anything you want or need through a web search. Using a search engine like Google, you should be able to type in key words such as "rehabilitation services blindness" and find information that might help you. The more specific you can be (e.g., including the name of your province or state) the more likely you are to find local results.
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