Learning through Touch

Supporting Learners with Multiple Disabilities and Vision Impairment through a Bioecological Systems Perspective

Mike Mclinden, Steve Mccall, Liz Hodges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429536328
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully revised and updated second edition of Learning through Touch is essential reading for practitioners who support learners with multiple disabilities and vision impairment. These learners will rely on support from their learning partners throughout their education to mediate their learning experiences. The text explores the key role that touch plays in the education of these learners and provides practical advice about how to develop the skills through touch that they will need to become 'active agents' in their own development. The book reflects international initiatives that seek to ensure that people with disabilities have opportunities to take meaningful control within their learning and their lives.

Key features include:

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• Chapters that support curriculum access for learners with visual impairments;

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• Reflections on up-to-date research studies and guidance for further reading throughout, allowing for a strong conceptual foundation for practice;

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• Portfolio activities designed to help implement effective learning opportunities within your own practice.

Written to assist teachers and other professionals who support children with visual impairment and additional difficulties, this text will appeal to professionals and students alike. It is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to explore the role of touch in creating effective learning experiences.

Part 1

Making connections

Chapter 1

Revisiting learning through touch

Introduction

A learner with vision impairment develops in a world that can be difficult to manage alone. Impairment of vision directly affects access to information within this world. A reduction in such access can influence both the quantity and the quality of the information that reaches the brain and supports learning. Many learners with vision impairment also have significant additional disabilities that can serve to reduce this information further. For example, learners with vision impairment who also have hearing impairment may not hear distinctly the information carried in the sounds that come from the speaker’s mouth, but also they may not be able to see clearly the compensatory clues to that information that could be derived from reading the speaker’s lips. Learners with vision impairment who also have a physical impairment may have a reduced neural capacity to perceive through touch but even if their neural capacity is intact, then access to the information that comes incidentally from moving freely through the environment and from actively touching, feeling and manipulating it may be compromised.

Operating with reduced information is hard enough but if you add to this a cognitive impairment that reduces your capacity to process this reduced information then your world becomes a progressively more challenging place to manage by yourself. In short, learners with vision impairment in combination with significant other disabilities have to manage their environments relying on information that is reduced in quality and quantity and is challenging to process and make sense of. Many of these learners will have support from people who have understanding of their distinctive needs and who can help them to make sense of their respective world. This is where we hope this new edition will be of value.

A key change between the first edition and this one is a shift in our perspective, which comes from our own thinking, that of others we have worked with, and from people we have never met who have informed our thinking through their research and ideas. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the first edition, the relationships between practitioners and children were at the centre of our thoughts. Much of our work at that point was focussed on training teachers and other practitioners to work across the whole age and ability range of children and young people with vision impairment. The crux of the book therefore concerned the nature of the relationship between the practitioner and the child. We are inclined now to shift this perspective to place the learner at the centre of a complex set of influences and influencers, with learning potentially taking place in a range of environments which include practitioners but also acknowledge the important role of families, peers and other people in their lives – referred to collectively in this edition as ‘learning partners’. A key role for the learning partner is to draw on appropriate strategies that will reduce the potential barriers to learning that reduced access to information and reduced ability to process that information can create to promote meaningful engagement with the world through touch.

In the first edition of this book we emphasised the importance of ensuring that a learner with multiple disabilities and vision impairment has opportunities to develop increasingly independent haptic abilities through providing appropriately structured learning experiences within responsive and supportive environments. We emphasised the role of the learning partner in ‘mediating’ haptic experiences over time to make them meaningful to the learner. Although a learner may have restricted abilities to manipulate objects independently, learning partners can structure the learning environment to gradually increase the learner’s potential to discover the tactile properties of objects for themselves (e.g. finding out about the size, shape and weight of an object through guided ‘hand-under-hand’ exploratory procedures with a learning partner). We stressed that the nature of the disabilities meant that the development of a learner’s independence would not follow a predictable and linear progression over a given developmental timeframe and to a greater or lesser extent, these learners would remain dependent on learning partners to support their engagement with the world throughout their educational pathway.

Just think of how you use your senses independently in daily activities to help you make sense of an experience. You might feel a melon to find out how ripe it is and then taste it; you might feel a purse to decide if it is made of leather and then then smell it; you might look at an object to determine if it is made of metal then tap it against your teeth to check it’s not plastic. Now consider what the role of a learning partner might be in helping you to make sense of this kind of information if you are not able to do these things independently.

As we are increasingly aware, not only does learning not take place in a ‘social vacuum’, it is influenced by a complex interaction between the learner, the changing properties of the settings in which his or her learning takes place and the broader contexts and ‘systems’ in which the learning environment is situated over a given timeframe. To help us understand the nature of this interaction and to illustrate the various influences on development for learners with distinctive support needs, we introduce the bioecological systems theory next, and by including a model of ‘access’, show how it can offer a more holistic perspective through which to illustrate the various influences on effective learning through touch for learners with vision impairment.

Finding out about a bioecological systems theory

You may be familiar with a bioecological systems theory already as it commonly illustrated in texts on human development as a picture of a person surrounded by concentric circles, each of which represents different ‘systems’ that influence his or her development in various ways (e.g. home, school, peers, etc.). The original theory is actually much more complex than just describing this context of development however, and is concerned with the wider ‘ecology’ in which humans develop across the lifespan. The theory was proposed by Urie Bronfenbrenner over 40 years ago to help understand the wider range of factors that can influence human development (e.g. Bronfenbrenner 1977), and has been modified at several key points since (e.g. Bronfenbrenner 2005). As an example, you will have noted that we use the term bio-ecological in the text rather than ecological. The term bio is connected with ‘life’ and ‘living things’; this was introduced at a later date by Bronfenbrenner (e.g. Bronfenbrenner 2005) to ensure that an individual is viewed as being an essential part of the ecology (described as an ‘active agent’ in development), and who is seen to help shape the ecosystem in which he or she lives – rather than just being shaped by the various influences on development. The factors that influence development are broadly divided into those that are close to the child (and so are referred to as being ‘proximal’), and those that are distant from to the child (and are referred to as ‘distal’). In essence then, when thinking about the influences on human development, Bronfenbrenner was concerned with the ‘enduring environment of the child’ (Bronfenbrenner and Mahoney 1975: px), which is referred to as the child’s ecology. We will consider the distinction between the close and distant influences later but it is helpful at this point to think about the use of the term ‘ecology’ as it is drawn upon in this theory.

An ecology tends to be associated with nature, the environment and related to particular disciplines such as biology and geography. But used in a more specific way it is rather an apt description that can be used to examine a particular setting in which education is designed to take place. Think for example of the ecology of a rainforest. If asked to describe what the experience of passing through a rain forest is like, the response from a recent traveller might focus on the physical environment and in particular the temperature and humidity. It might also make reference to the absence of direct sunlight in many places and to the wealth of vegetation and animal life that has evolved – essentially a living and breathing biodiversity that is made of many different but interrelated ‘systems’. Whilst education settings such as schools and colleges are not directly comparable with ecologies such as rainforests, there are comparisons in the systems that can be described about their functioning. As an example, there will be complex relationships existing between various forms of life that mean it is not possible to describe the evolution of one type of form without making reference to other factors, including for example access to water or sunlight. And so it is with educational settings which are designed for learning – complex ecologies that cannot be readily unpicked without understanding the intricacies of how the various factors are interrelated. In this new edition we therefore examine the relationships between the various influences on learning through touch using a lens that is explicitly concerned with these relationships over time. As the name indicates, it is a complex theory but we will now do our best to guide you through it in an accessible way!

As we illustrate in Box 1.1, the cornerstone of the bioecological systems theory was presented by Bronfenbrenner (2005: 107) as the first proposition of a broader (and complex!) theoretical structure.

Box 1.1 Proposition one of the Ecology of Human Development (Bronfenbrenner 2005)

The ecology of human development is the scientific study of the progressive, mutual accommodation, throughout the life course, between an active, growing human being and the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing person lives, as this process is affected by the relations between these settings, and by the larger contexts in which the settings are embedded.

(Bronfenbrenner 2005: 107, original italics)

This is an important quotation in explaining the Ecology of Human Development, and it is worth reading again before we consider it in relation to learning through touch. As the quote indicates, the bioecological systems theory in essence has a focus on the characteristics of an active, growing individual whilst explicitly acknowledging the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of influences on human development. This in itself is not that surprising as most theories of human development acknowledge the impact of environmental influences. Where the theory is distinctive however, is its emphasis on ‘social and historical context, the active person, and the impossibility of understanding individual developmental processes in isolation’ (Darling 2007: 205). Indeed, Darling (2007) draws attention to the active person at the centre of the theory who is described as being ‘the central force in development … shaping environments, evoking responses from them, and reacting to them.’ (p204) If y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Overview
• PART 1: Making connections
• PART 2: Finding out about touch
• PART 3: Identifying and reducing potential barriers to learning
• PART 4: Finishing touches
• Glossary of useful terms
• Portfolio activities
• Useful resources and further reading
• References
• Index