It's the Journey, Stupid!

The joy is in the journey. We all know that, but how often do any of us have the time to reflect on our careers in this wonderful field of ours? Well, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), where I have worked since 1972--some 36 years--has asked me to do just that. The long journey of my professional career began, appropriately enough, with a weeklong road trip across the United States from New York to San Francisco. The year was 1963, and I had just completed my undergraduate studies in music education. I could not be certified to teach in California until I took a course in the state's history. Off I went to San Francisco State University for a night course and ended up staying until I earned a master's degree in creative arts with emphasis on voice and keyboard. Meanwhile, I became certified to teach elementary school, which I did in Oakland. Because of a requirement for my degree, I learned music braille and wrote about it for my master's thesis. Little did I know that some day I would be chair of the Braille Authority of North America at a time when the final revision of the International Braille Music Code would be reviewed and passed! THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME I continue to be amazed by how much I have learned and changed, as the ideas of the field have changed, over the years. For instance, in the early days of my career there was a strong belief that a teacher of a blind or "partially sighted" child had to determine as early as possible whether a student was a print or braille reader. The idea that a student could learn both print and braille at the same time was heresy. It was a given that everything in print had to be reproduced exactly in braille. Although the method I used wasn't widely practiced at the time, I taught every one of my students who were blind to sign their names in block writing, using the braille cell as a guide to making each letter. You could certainly pick the signatures of my blind students out in a crowd, because their handwriting was all the same. Raised-line drawings were considered useless, especially for congenitally blind children, and the use of raised-line coloring books was completely out! Verbalism was a hot topic. The accepted belief at the time was that one should never assume that a visual description articulated by a child who is blind reflected intrinsic knowledge of the concept the blind child was describing. Perhaps it is true that a blind child's visual descriptions are more an imitation of the sighted world's descriptions. By the old model, however, even Helen Keller would have been supposedly uninformed about the things she described. So much for the importance of assimilation into the "sighted world"! For many decades, it was believed that only sighted orientation and mobility (O&M) instructors were acceptable, even though there were wonderful teachers at the time who were visually impaired. The practice of excluding visually impaired people from training as O&M specialists changed, like so many others, in the course of my career. Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Ghandi FINDING A HOME IN THE BLINDNESS FIELD After working as an itinerant teacher in Daly City, California, I returned to the east coast, to Princeton, New Jersey, to marry and teach at the New Jersey Commission for the Blind. Georgie Lee Abel, who was then part of the education faculty at San Francisco State, had given my name to Josephine Taylor, then director of the New Jersey Commission for the Blind, as someone with potential, and Jo Taylor hired me. I had found my new family. By 1972, I had completed all but the dissertation for my doctorate coursework at Teachers College, Columbia University, and was just starting at AFB. My dissertation, on defining competencies for university personnel preparation programs in the field of blindness, turned out to be a springboard for much of my future work. …