Becoming Commuters: Teaching Students Traveling to Work Using Public Transportation

As a teacher of visually impaired students at the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind, I regularly traveled with my students to their off-campus jobs by school van. In my sixth year of teaching, I realized that transportation to the work site is also an important component of successful employment. During the five years before my epiphany, my students would pile into the large, accessible van owned by the school and be driven to their jobs at the local pizza shop, department store, or other workplace. I realized my students might be missing a learning opportunity by being driven to work when I participated in a summer orientation and mobility (O&M) internship at Perkins School for the Blind. There, I observed my Perkins students gain valuable information as they traveled on public buses. These students had to figure out what buses to take and how many stops were passed before their destination. They also needed to decide whether they had enough money on their bus cards to take the bus, or if they needed exact change. They had to speak assertively and organize their questions clearly. As the summer progressed, I began to think of how I could bring the model of instruction I had learned at Perkins back to my students in Arizona. My goal was to teach my students in Arizona consistent use of public transportation to get to their workplace. This article delineates the learning experiences that resulted from the regular use of bus transportation to and from the work site. The change from riding in the school van to using public buses was important for several reasons. When riding the van, the students paid little attention to the route or the direction of their travel unless the driver gave verbal directions. Using buses constantly enhanced the students' learning capacities in six areas, including directionality, advocacy, organization, motivation, safety, and involvement. The students were all high school or postgraduate students. Two of them had a good deal of usable vision and the other two had no light perception. They all communicated through speech, although each of them fell in the spectrum of mild to moderate mental retardation with a severe sensory impairment. DIRECTIONALITY AND ADVOCACY Directionality involves forming a mental image of how one will get from one place to another. In this case, the students needed to envision how they would physically get from the school to the local market where they worked. Before the trip, we modeled and practiced the following questions in the classroom: * What is the number of the bus you will take? * In what direction will that bus travel? * At what stop will you get off? When the students needed to take two buses, I also had them articulate the route they would travel to get to the second bus. They knew what buses they would be riding and in what directions the bus travels (east to west or north to south, for example). If the students understood they were heading east then north on the initial trip, then on the way back to school they could comprehend that they would be traveling south then west. These steps need to be repeated many times for the route to meaningful for the student. Life skills students also learned to advocate for themselves. Many had become so reliant on prompts that they had come to expect others to complete tasks or ask questions of others. Riding the bus provided experiences in advocacy. The students learned to be ready to ask short but pertinent questions and to provide information to the bus driver. When the bus pulled up, the first student to get on would ask whether it is the correct bus. If it was, then the student told the driver where they were getting off. The student round the slot for a bus pass and inserted the card. If taking two buses, he or she would ask for a transfer, which could be used for intrabus travel in the same direction. At first these steps were accomplished with the assistance of a teacher, mobility instructor, or paraeducator. …