Teaching with and through Maps

RATIONALE 

According to the CDC, more than 6 million Americans have vision loss, defined as “best corrected visual acuity 20/40 or worse” and 1 million Americans are blind, defined as “best corrected visual acuity 20/200 or worse”. Despite the wide variety of abilities and disabilities in my student population, less than 1% of children 12-17 are considered low vision, and .05% are considered blind. ³ This small population means many of my students do not have personal experience with or peers who are blind or have low vision and so stereotypes about what life is like with low vision are able to persist in their minds. 

When I do have a student in my class who is legally blind, the other students voice confusion as to why they would take a visual arts class, because of their belief art and blindness are incompatible. One of the stereotypes that furthers this idea that blindness and art are incompatible is the misconception of blindness as seeing total darkness, when that only applies to 18% of blind people. ⁴ This is not to argue that that is the only population unable to do art – after all, why couldn’t that population still be sculptors, performance artists, or painting with a new focus? The goal of my class is for students to expand their idea of what can be art.  This unit will discuss the work of Carmen Papalia to dispel the myth that those with low vision cannot be artists. 

My students also wonder how they would navigate the world blind. Space is a concept we explore in the art room, and this unit seeks to expand that concept beyond visual space. Additionally, many difficulties that emerge in wayfinding as a blind person come from the designed space. Goering states “For many people with disabilities, the main disadvantage they experience does not stem directly from their bodies, but rather from their unwelcome reception in the world, in terms of how physical structures, institutional norms, and social attitudes exclude and/or denigrate them”. ⁵ This unit will explore mapmaking to explore the different ways of navigating the world, and how design choices can make these methods more accessible or less accessible. We will use maps as a topic because every student has a relationship to place, everyone comes from somewhere.

By exploring life, art, and space without vision, we will address and dispel common fears and stereotypes my students hold. This will benefit blind members of their school and home communities, but also, it will benefit their future selves. The prevalence of vision loss and blindness in age cohorts rises as you get older, with the CDC reports that a whopping “20% of all people older than 85 years experience permanent vision loss.”  ⁶

May all my students live this long and longer, and may they be unafraid of how their bodies will change in that time.