Teaching Body Awareness to Students with Visual Impairments and Additional Disabilities

Body awareness, spatial awareness, and positional language, are essential elements of orientation and mobility (O&M). Typically developing students usually learn these concepts and skills incidentally as they interact with various environments. Students with visual impairments and/or multiple disabilities must be deliberately taught these concepts using research-based strategies. Routine-based learning, integration of music, picture and tactile communication, and physical and verbal guidance have been shown to enhance learning by students with visual impairments and/or multiple disabilities. When these strategies are incorporated into individually designed structured movement routines (SMRs), students are more likely to anticipate movements and connect language to corresponding O&M concepts. This session presents an App in development that incorporates universal design for learning principles to improve O&M for these children. The session will provide information on a single subject study currently being designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the App when used by itinerant teachers with this population. Teachers of students with visual impairments and O&M specialists are finding more of their caseloads consisting of students with visual impairments and/or multiple disabilities. The study will show that individualized SMRs can be used to successfully improve students\u27 O&M skills