On 7 March 2023, the fourth-year Art Education Methodology class visited Prinshof School for the visually impaired to gain insight into the needs of the learners and prepare us for our community project, ‘We and the Others’, which required us to create tactile educational books for them. 

I expected to be moved, to become emotional and to get inspiration for the tactile book I intended to create, but I did not expect to be impressed. As harsh as it may sound, I expected these children to need constant assistance, but what I experienced rocked me to my core. Looking back, I realised that upon arriving at Prinshof I was actually the one who was blind and these visually impaired children helped me to see. 

We see blindness as an impairment, and if we consider how much we rely on sight in our everyday lives, it probably is. However, these children succeed in turning their ‘impairment’ into hyper-intelligence. They may not be able to see like sighted people, but they see the world in a unique way which we will never fully understand. They ‘see’ with their ears, relying on sounds bouncing off walls and doors. They ‘see’ with their noses and are able to smell whose T-shirts belong to whom when their clothes become mixed up. They ‘see’ with their fingertips and read and understand a language that consists of raised dots (Braille), which all feel the same to me. 

I am not afraid of the dark, but when we were blindfolded to experience what blindness feels like, I realised that what I feared was being out of control. As an artist and a teacher my biggest fear is losing my eyesight and never being able to create and see colours, but when we walked into the creative arts classroom I was amazed by the octopuses in beautiful colours made by these exceptional children who take the ‘dark’, the feeling of being out of control, and master life’s challenges anyway.

Prinshof Learners with Special Education Needs (LSEN) School: Blind children leading the way while the students followed

I needed a visit to a school for visually impaired children to realise how impaired my vision was about them. They genuinely impressed me! I no longer feel sorry for them and look forward to creating a useful pedagogical tool that will empower them to gain even more knowledge.

About this project: 

Dr Raita Steyn from the Department of Humanities Education promotes art as a means of communication and encourages the exploration of diverse communities with different environmental problems. To help art education students understand the challenges visually impaired children face, she arranged a visit to Prinshof LSEN School. The students were blindfolded to force them rely on their other senses. The approach aimed to broaden students’ conceptual spectrum and generate knowledge through direct exposure to inclusiveness and socio-cultural awareness. As part of the fourth-year students’ community engagement project, Dr Steyn encouraged her students to create tactile and pop-up books that could be experienced through senses other than vision. All the books will be donated to Prinshof LSEN School.

UP art education students briefly experienced the challenges of visual impairment when they were blindfolded and had to rely on their other senses

Student’s own voice

Jonas Ndlovu, a visually impaired BEd student, interacted with the JMK451 Art Education students’ pop-up and tactile books.  In an email to Dr Steyn he wrote:

Jonas Ndlovu, a visually impaired BEd student, interacting with one of the tactile books

‘I would like to extend my greatest appreciation to you, but mostly to your students, for the incredible initiative you have embarked on of making art inclusive and accessible to blind learners, and the exceptionally warm reception you always give me. As you had me in your class on Tuesday to observe what you have worked on thus far, I was elevated to new levels of sensational intuiting about not only the prospects of what you are doing, but the future of our universe and humanity, as in habitat. The first-hand experience was in itself a marvel, incomparable to anything. The experiences you will create go beyond what you think of them; it is the real impact you will have…’