The Effective Teacher's Guide to Sensory and Physical Impairments

Sensory, Orthopaedic, Motor and Health Impairments, and Traumatic Brain Injury

Michael Farrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136848599
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

'Michael Farrell offers well sourced overviews of the conflicting and contradictory advice that is available to schools, suggests a variety of solutions to challenges, empowering the reader to make their own choices.' - Carol Smart, Special Needs Information Press

Fully updated with the latest research and advice on best practice, this new edition of The Effective Teacher's Guide to Sensory and Physical Impairments covers a range of conditions that cause learning difficulties for children, including visual impairment, hearing impairment, deafblindness, orthopaedic impairment, motor disorders and health impairments, as well as a brand new chapter on traumatic brain injury.

Teachers are likely to meet children with varying types and degrees of sensory and physical impairments. This comprehensive guide equips you with informed and practical strategies to ensure that all pupils are included and provided for in the best possible way. The new edition has also been adapted to be more widely relevant to readers in different countries, focusing more on the strategies that work regardless of national context.

Writing in his popular accessible style, Michael Farrell suggests the best ways of dealing with a variety of conditions, always with practical classroom situations in mind. In each section, the book:

• explains the legal contexts
• looks at the range of provision
• suggests intervention and support strategies
• gives points for reflection and suggested further reading.

Highly accessible and authoritative, this book provides teachers with an invaluable resource to help you create a truly inclusive classroom.

Chapter 1
What are sensory and physical impairments?

Introduction

This chapter sets the book in the context of ‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ series of which it forms a part, and explains the features of the new edition of this title. I outline the types of sensory and physical impairments with which the book is concerned and outline the content of subsequent chapters. The chapter also suggests potential readers likely to find the book useful.

‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ series

‘The Effective Teacher’s Guides’ series, published by Routledge, concerns different types of disabilities and disorders. These include cognitive impairment (‘learning difficulties’ in the United Kingdom and ‘mental retardation’ in the United States of America), autism, emotional and behavioural disorders, reading disorder/ dyslexia and others. Each book in the series describes practical strategies that enable the educational progress and personal and social development of pupils with particular disabilities and disorders.

The titles are:

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Sensory and Physical Impairments: Sensory, Orthopaedic, Motor and Health Impairments and Traumatic Brain Injury (2nd edition)

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Behavioural and Emotional Disorders: Disruptive Behaviour Disorders, Anxiety Disorders, Depressive Disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (2nd edition)

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Autism and Communication Difficulties: Practical strategies

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Dyslexia and Other Specific Learning Difficulties: Practical strategies

• The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Moderate, Severe and Profound Learning Difficulties: Practical strategies

The new edition

This book, The Effective Teacher’s Guide to Sensory and Physical Impairments: Sensory, Orthopaedic, Motor and Health Impairments and Traumatic Brain Injury, is the second edition of a book previously called The Effective Guide to Sensory Impairment and Physical Disability: Practical Strategies, published in 2006.

The first edition was generously reviewed and well received by readers. This new edition is different in two main ways. First, it seeks to make the content more widely accessible to readers in different countries. The 2006 edition was set within the context of legislation and procedures in the UK. The new edition focuses more on strategies that work without undue reference to a particular national context. Second, the new edition has a wider remit, as the longer title suggests. The three chapters on visual impairment, hearing impairment, and deafblindness have been retained. The former single chapter on ‘Physical and motor disability and medical conditions’ has extended to three chapters: ‘Orthopaedic impairment and motor disorders’, ‘Health impairments’ and ‘Traumatic brain injury’.

Sensory and physical impairments

This chapter outlines types of sensory and physical impairments with which the book is concerned. These are derived from classifications used in the UK and the USA. I consider the importance of information received through the senses, then touch on broad observations about related provision.

In the USA, pupils considered to need special education covered by federal law meet two requirements: they have a defined disability, and the disability has an adverse educational impact. Categories of disability under federal law as amended in 1997 (20 United States Code 1402, 1997) are reflected in ‘designated disability codes’ including the following:

• 02 Hard-of-hearing

• 03 Deaf

• 05 Visually Handicapped

• 07 Orthopaedically Impaired

• 08 Other Health Impaired

• 12 Deaf/Blind

• 13 Traumatic Brain Injury

In England, a similar classification (Department for Education and Skills, 2005, passim) includes:

• Visual impairment

• Hearing impairment

• Multi-sensory impairment

• Physical disability.

The contents of this book reflect aspects of classifications such as those used in the USA and England. Table 1 gives equivalents of disorders and disabilities as they:

• are delineated in the present text

• might be categorised in the UK

• might be categorised in the USA.

Table 1 Broadly comparative terms

Information received through the senses

Even a brief outline of the information that is received through the senses can indicate how much is taken for granted when the senses are unimpaired. The sense of touch gives information on such qualities as hardness and softness, texture, shape, pliability, weight, hollowness or solidity, and atmosphere (dry, steamy, cold, warm).

The sense of smell provides information helping one to recognise such materials and items as leather, wood, metal, paint, flowers, and, more generally, whether the smell is acrid or sweet. Taste includes information on saltiness, sweetness and sourness.

The so-called ‘distance senses’ of sight and hearing also provide a wealth of information. Sight indicates colour, tone, contrast, perspective, depth, size, shape, opaqueness or transparency, reflection, light intensity and duration and enables the use of television, visual print, photographs and so on. Hearing gives information relating to pitch, volume and timbre, allowing one to recognise such phenomena as the human voice, the rustling of grass, household and school sounds, traffic, music, animal sounds and the sea.

Proprioceptive sense conveys information about body position and the position of the limbs and head, muscle position, direction, balance, movement, stillness, weight, acceleration and deceleration.

Provision for pupils with sensory impairments and physical disabilities

Later chapters of the book separately explore provision for learners with visual impairment, hearing impairment, deafblindness, orthopaedic impairments and motor disorders, health impairments, and traumatic brain injury. This chapter indicates something more about the nature of sensory impairments and physical disabilities by touching on the interventions that are used when educating learners with sensory impairment and physical disabilities.

The Special Educational Needs Code of Practice (Department for Education and Skills, 2001) is a document published in the UK mainly providing guidance on processes of identification and assessment of children with disabilities and disorders. As a starting point, it provides a basic description of provision from which learners with sensory impairments and physical disabilities might benefit. These learners require some or all of the following (Department for Education and Skills, 2001, 7: 62):

• appropriate seating, acoustic conditioning and lighting

• adaptations to the physical environment of the school

• adaptations to school policies and procedures

• access to alternative or augmented forms of communication

• provision of tactile and kinaesthetic materials

• access to different amplification systems

• access to low vision aids

• access in all areas of the curriculum through specialist aids, equipment or furniture

• regular and frequent access to specialist support.

Subsequent chapters

...

Table of contents

• The Effective Teacher’s Guides series, all by Michael Farrell
• Contents
• About the author
• Preface
• Chapter 1 What are sensory and physical impairments?
• Chapter 2 Visual impairment
• Chapter 3 Hearing impairment
• Chapter 4 Deafblindness
• Chapter 5 Orthopaedic impairments and motor disorders
• Chapter 6 Health impairments
• Chapter 7 Traumatic brain injury
• Summary and conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index