A New Kind of Trust

A New Kind of Trust

Future Reflections Special Issue on Low Vision TRAINING
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A New Kind of Trust
by Charlene Guggisberg
From the Editor: Charlene Guggisberg is the director of youth services at BLIND Inc. in Minneapolis.
When students come to BLIND Inc., one of their first concerns is the fact that they have to put on sleepshades. We require sleepshades for every student who has any degree of residual vision. A lot of kids argue about it at first. "I've only got light perception!" they tell us, or, "All I can see are shadows, anyway." Even kids with such minimal amounts of sight will try to rely on it, and that gets in the way of their learning. Our rule is that they wear sleepshades, regardless.
Though there is a lot of grumbling at the start, wearing sleepshades very quickly becomes the norm. I remember one time when a totally blind student asked for sleepshades. I knew he had no sight because both of his eyes were prostheses. He wanted sleepshades so he could be like everybody else.
When the kids come in, they tend to expect the hierarchy of vision that they're used to at school. They assume that the kids with partial sight will be the most capable and most responsible students in the program. We see this pattern especially with kids who go to residential schools for the blind. The totally blind kids frequently ask the kids who have some sight to help them find things they've misplaced or to walk them wherever they need to go. That's what they've been encouraged to do at school. We work to change that thinking. We try to teach them that they can find things and walk to unfamiliar places perfectly well by themselves.
Some kids come in with a lot of confidence, but others struggle to absorb what we're telling them. I remember one boy with low vision who kept trying to peek. When he dropped his slate and stylus, he wanted to take his sleepshades off in order to look for them. We insisted that he keep his sleepshades on, and one of the instructors found the things he had dropped. The boy couldn't believe that a blind person had found them. He got angry and accused the instructor of cheating. When we finally convinced him that the instructor was blind, it was a real breakthrough. After that he followed the instructors around for days, observing everything they could do.
Even the totally blind kids sometimes insist that the instructors must be doing things visually. They have completely bought into the idea that sight is necessary in order for a person to be fully competent. Once a couple of our students approached my children and demanded to know if I am really blind. They thought maybe I was faking it. My kids assured them that I really and truly can't see.
We conduct interviews with the children and their parents before they enter our programs. Not long ago I interviewed the mother of a girl who is in the process of losing her sight. "Is she going to be afraid of training here?" I asked.
The girl's mother thought for a few moments. "It's going to be hard for her," she said, "but she's ready. Right now she's surrounded by people saying, 'You poor, poor kid! Let us help you.' She needs to be with people who tell her, 'You can do it. We'll show you how.'"
Once a child or teen learns nonvisual skills, the new techniques can be added to the visual methods he or she knows already. The student can figure out what works best in a particular situation. One of our adult students was a professional videographer before he entered the program. He could still make videos, but he could only work for short periods because of intense eyestrain headaches. He thought he would have to give up on his career because of his vision loss. At BLIND Inc. he learned to use the VoiceOver program with the iPad, and he switched to film editing. He still works with videos, but in a different capacity. He comfortably integrates visual and nonvisual techniques to do his job.
Not only do our students have to learn new skills. They have to learn to trust the skills we teach them. Under sleepshades they are forced to use techniques that don't require vision, and they have the chance to find out that those techniques really do work. When they learn to trust their skills, they can begin to trust themselves.

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