Personnel Preparation and CVI at Vanderbilt University

Cortical visual impairment (CVI) has been one of the two most prevalent conditions in children who receive services for visual impairments from specialized agencies and schools for the past 20 years; the majority of these students have additional disabilities (Ferrell, 1998; Hatton, Schwietz, Boyer, & Rychwalski, 2007; Steinkuller et al., 1999). For that reason, the needs of students with CVI must be addressed by university personnel preparation programs that prepare teachers of students with visual impairments. As a relatively new professor in the field, I recognize that it is much easier to make that assertion than actually to adopt the practice. In many cases, personnel preparation programs are already challenged to prepare teachers of students with visual impairments adequately to serve students from increasingly diverse families, ages birth to 22 years, and with various abilities (gifted to multiple severe disabilities) and visual function (corrected acuities of 20/70 to total blindness) in a variety of settings (rural, suburban, urban, high poverty). In addition, teachers must be prepared to work in local education agencies as itinerant or resource room teachers or in specialized schools and agencies. Because CVI has received so much attention in the past 10 years from both the medical profession and the field of visual impairment, future teachers of students with visual impairments need guidance in locating information from various sources and in evaluating the utility and trustworthiness of the information. The evidence-based practice movement requires teachers to thoughtfully consider and evaluate information on topics such as CVI, even when information is provided in peer-reviewed journals. To stay current, future teachers of students with visual impairments must know how to access and evaluate such information and then be able to extract, synthesize, and apply information that is relevant for their students. The challenge of integrating information on CVI in our program at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, presented itself last fall when I taught the course on Anatomy and Physiology of the Eye. Vision involves the eye, visual pathways, and the brain. Therefore, in light of CVI, the content of anatomy courses must be expanded to cover the entire visual system, not just the eye and optic nerve, and the titles of courses should also be changed. When I suggested that the heading of the eligibility form for services be changed from "Medical Eye Report Form" to "Medical Visual Report Form" to encompass CVI, I learned that the form was uniformly used throughout the state and could not be changed. The time and energy that would be required to tackle that bureaucratic challenge made me push the issue of the form's title to the back burner and refocus on what can be accomplished within the university to address CVI. The initial content standards and knowledge and skill sets for teachers of students with visual impairments published by the Council for Exceptional Children (2009) are used by most university personnel preparation programs in the United States for accreditation through the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. …