Wednesday, December 9, 2009
From the course syllabus to material on the final, Kansas Audio Reader volunteers read aloud all of the texts of the courses for a visually impaired area vocational school student. This is the first time volunteers have ever read all of the required readings for a student with multiple courses, and, not to mention, deadlines.
Run by the University, Audio Reader usually reads daily newspaper, magazine and books into a microphone on special radio subcarriers for visually impaired KU students. But the volunteers undertook an additional task of reading a whole set of course textbooks for a student at the Massage Therapy Training Institute, a health and wellness school in Lawrence.
Jennifer Nigro, volunteer coordinator for Kansas Audio Reader, said it was a task that involved dozens of books.
“This is the first time that we were responsible for an entire course,” Nigro said.
Last week, MTTI awarded its first Academic Partner of the Year award to Audio Reader for the volunteers’ work from January through October.
Rachael Gehringer, director of MTTI’s Lawrence campus, said she knew the school had to find a partner to read books for a visually impaired student during the admissions process.
“We were just trying to find as many options as we could,” Gehringer said. “If Audio Reader wouldn’t have been an option, we probably would’ve ended up just trying to tape everything, which would’ve been really hard to do.”
Gehringer said the school picked Audio Reader because it was more convenient for the student to pick up the audio CDs in a timely manner to listen to them, would be in town and the school could to pick up CDs to meet course deadlines, and because the service, run by volunteers, was free.
Nigro said the volunteers worked together to get readings done, because they were under the unique situation of having multiple course deadlines. She said she assigned multiple readers to one book.
“With that came a lot of coordination in just keeping track of who’s accomplished what, and who needs to pick up where,” Nigro said.
Judy Taylor, volunteer for Audio Reader, said she read books on massage therapy and physiology for the course. She said she not only read text, but described pictures and graphics on the pages.
“I had to describe the placement of the hands and how the body was lying on the table, where the practitioner would be standing,” Taylor said. “There would be page after page of drawings.”
Nigro said this experience has better prepared the service for the future.
“Our goal is to provide information that’s needed,” Nigro said. “If someone were to come to us again and say, ‘I need help getting through this course,’ we would be more than happy to take that on. Now that we’ve done it once, we can say ‘Yes, we can handle something like that.’”
— Edited by Jacob Muselmann
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Comments
Actions speak louder than words
I'm curious about the relationship of the title"Actions Speak Louder Than Words" to your subject matter? Certainly, if one is an aspiring massage therapist or even a massage client this might be the case, but is there be a minor element of self-congratulation here? I appreciate the way the article focuses on the struggles of the volunteer readers to stretch themselves in their understanding of their role in order to better make a whole course of study accessible to such a motivated and deserving student.
I do believe that an organization that enables people to meet their educational goals and accomplish their dreams has a legitimate mission. Sharing knowledge and helping people create their own knowledge empowers. Likely, I read about the student in question in the LJWorld.
I have a visually-impaired professor-friend, also the editor who published one of my first scholarly articles. He teaches by using voice-recognition software in order to read and grade his students' papers and reads either completely by electronic means or through scanning things into his computer and then using special software to listen to them. People can do amazing things when you don't impose false and insulting limitations on them or get in the way of their own self-motivation to use their God-given talents and abilities.
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