An Illinois State University professor landed a $1.5 million grant aimed at improving accessibility in high school science education.
Special education faculty member Natalie Shaheen will spend the next five years studying specific inequities for blind and low-vision students through a combination of research and case-learning with pre-career teachers.
It's the largest grant awarded to a single faculty member in her department in 25 years.
“It is a big deal to get this award at any university in this country,” said Shaheen.
The National Science Foundation's CAREER grant is awarded to early career, pre-tenure faculty identified as future leaders in their field.
“When you get this award, it tends to garner you access to spaces that as a junior faculty member you may not otherwise have access to,” she said, adding the grant also could raise the profile of ISU’s blind and low-vision specialist programs.
“We have an awesome program here at Illinois State,” she said. “It’s an undergraduate program, which is very uncommon in our field. This award could, potentially, bring some nationally attention to the program, which is really quite unique.”
Shaheen describes her field as sometimes lonely, since barriers limit access to academia for disabled scholars. The size of the CAREER grant enables her to hire a post-doctoral researcher and build out a team — and will prioritize hiring others with lived experiences with disability.
“Disabled academics have a hard road,” said Shaheen. “So, the more support I can provide to other disabled academics who are behind me, the better off it is more broadly for academia so we can have diverse perspectives.”
Analog methods were more accessible
Ramps, push-button doors and braille signage have become innate features in public spaces, but Shaheen said K-12 education has become progressively less accessible to blind and low-vision [BLV] students as digital tools proliferate classrooms.
“It’s counter intuitive,” said Shaheen. “A lot of times we think technology is an inherent value add — I would say for anybody, but particularly for disabled people.”
This is especially true in science that used to employ tactile learning experiences like frog dissection, and skeletal models have been replaced by virtual simulations. Videos can be made more accessible through visual descriptions, but aren’t as effective for BLV learners as an actual frog and scalpel.
“I often joke with science teachers that we just need to pull the skeleton out of the closet,” said Shaheen. “Like, the one you used 10 years ago, to teach anatomy.”
Proactive v. reactive accessibility
The objective of Shaheen’s research is not to move backward, but to think more proactively about accommodating BLV students in ways that are baked into science curricula.
“The way that we teach presupposes that all of the learners are sighted, and hearing and neurotypical,” Shaheen said. “If you happen to not be sighted, the way that class is taught is inherently not going to work for you — not because science can’t be accessible, but because the way we chose to teach it in K-12.”
It takes time, effort and resources to create “born accessible” curricula — hence the study’s efforts to create a library of teacher resources — and requires buy-in from schools and districts that may not currently have any BLV students.
“It’s also a lot of work to accommodate a child on the back end,” Shaheen said. “The difference is: When are we doing that work, and who is doing that work?”
“When we chose to be reactively accommodating, the work happens later, and most of the work, frankly, is done by the blind student. When we chose to design our classes to be proactively accessible, the adults do that work — which means [students] get to spend all of their time and all of their time learning instead of negotiating access.”
What we stand to gain
Shaheen ultimately wants BLV students to have more options by lowering barriers that have historically limited access for blind people to careers in science. While her study is the tip of the iceberg, its impact could be exponential.
“Blind and low-vision people have figured out how to survive and thrive in a world that’s built for sighted people,” she said. “Because of that, we have really well-developed problem-solving skills. Those problem-solving skills are precisely the ones that make great scientists.”
