TEDI 3 Week 3 - Conversations with Teachers about Accessible Teaching and Learning

Watermeyer, Brian; Daniels, Samantha; Bongiwe, Daniels

TEDI 3 Week 3 - Conversations with Teachers about Accessible Teaching and Learning

MOOC

2019-06-01

Abstract

In this video, Brian Watermeyer interviews Samantha Daniels and about their experiences in dealing with accessible and inaccessible learning materials in the classroom. Samantha, a teacher in a special school, discusses the frustration of working with inadequate materials and the need to work around insufficient resources with very young visually impaired learners, and discusses some of the strategies and workarounds she has developed in her class which includes partially-sighted and totally blind learners. She also discusses the difficulties of working with timeframes that may not take into the account the needs of students with visual impairment and colleagues who may not be fully supportive of the needs of special-needs teachers. Bongiwe Daniels, the principal of a special-needs school in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, reflects on her experience of dealing with the infrastructural deficits that had affected the school when she became principal, and how they negatively affected the ability for learners to participate in classroom activities. She discusses how she reached out to civil society and aid organisations in order to raise funds and supplies to provide the resources necessarily to provide quality education. The panel then discusses how to appropriately use (and the skills required to use) assistive technology, such as smartphone and software.