What feelings did you have about the people with disabilities featured in this module?
Blindness is a disability that has no equal. ‘The eyes are the windows to the soul’ is a popular analogy that is used to capture the importance that eyes play in our lives. While some people are born blind, some acquire blindness that drastically changes their way of life. From a normal person’s point of view, people with the disability of blindness are quite impaired and cannot easily perform day-to-day duties. While the above perception may be true, the extent to which it is distorted is clearly captured through everyday life activities. Hardly can employers employ blind people to perform administrative or other duties in the corporate world. It is hard to imagine blind people correctly describing an object or a situation or actively participating in any forum with people with normal eyesight.
The common perception that we normally have is that, blind people are trapped in eternal darkness and, can hardly figure out the meaning of physical world like normal people do. More often than not, we are oblivious of the fact that blind people can learn, have brains that function optimally and sometimes, some were one not born blind.
Did the initial thoughts and perceptions you had at the beginning change after completing the module?
After completing the module, the perceptions about blind people change. It is clear from the module that blind people are nothing of what we think about them. The blind man accurately describes the David with precision that only a normal man can do. “I look at his beautiful eyes, incredible eyelids and the tear ducts that no person could see from the ground. The pupils of his eyes were like hearts” (Transcript, n.d, par. 2). He further describes the feelings that he thinks the David is having and especially, how their eyes meet. This particular description only serves to reinforce the popular notion that whatever opinion we have about anything is all in our mind.
Further, the blind man reveals that he was once normal with eyesight that he lost at war (Transcript, n.d, par. 5). The fact that he was once normal means that he understands different phenomena better than those people that were born blind. The revelation helps change our tendency to classify wrongly blind people as one group who have more or les the same experiences to offer.
Share at least one strategy for fostering an inclusive environment in your classroom
After completing the module and realizing that blind people have as much to offer as normal people, it is only fair to think of ways to foster inclusion so that we can reduce the disadvantage gap that exists between normal and disabled people. The strategy involves the use of leaders to foster the inclusion of disabled people to in everyday life activities. This strategy will help in creating and raising awareness, help increase understanding among the population and help in enhancing development of skills on how to handle disabled people.
The strategy will require leaders to carry out an assessment of current perceptions about disabled people and inclusion measures that are already in place. The strategy will also require leaders to set up a vision that captures current reality and what the desired outcomes are. Finally, the strategy must ensure there is in place a criteria of measuring progress on the inclusion measures that will have been put in place.
Reference
Transcript. (n.d). Disability Awareness : Wrap Up: What Do You See? Perceptions of Disability. Web.