To a child, play represents a source of experience, information and work motivation. Through play, the child realizes their potential, and artistic creation also begins trough the said process. The child observes, imitates and uses various materials to summarize the environment around them in the form of a drawing. By the help of play, the child learns and transfers experiences to everyday life and builds upon them. Yet, we must not forget children with a lack of vision or children without vision. We must also enable them to express their view of the world through art, to learn through it and to obtain new experience and information which they can later transfer to their lives.
Most children with vision impairments have the opportunity to attend regular school programs and beforehand attend regular kindergartens as well, where there is an emphasis on socialization and inclusion of blind and partially sighted children. As a blind or partially sighted child enters a regular kindergarten or school, it is essential to properly train the professionals who encounter this situation for the first time and have no experience with offering the child as much as to the sighted students. Before the school year starts, it is necessary to carefully outline the goals that the child should achieve throughout the year and to put together an individual program for a blind or partially sighted child.
The thesis presented hereby is based on the presentation of good practice. Trough the said thesis, I aim to show ways to attract a child to the work of fine art in a way that enables the child to produce the same or at least similar products compared to their peers with the help of various tools and techniques which the child is able to touch and evaluate them in this way.
In my thesis, I explored the question of what challenges a blind student is facing when learning about fine arts in their home environment, kindergarten and school, and how his parents, educator, teacher, and the child's mobile teaching assistant undertake the task. As part of the thesis research, I also carried out three specially adapted art activities with a blind student, through which we searched for ways to give the boy as many opportunities as possible to carry out the task independently and to make it easier to explain the art concepts hidden in each of the said art techniques.
For this purpose, I included the child's parents, kindergarten teachers, school teacher and a mobile teaching assistant in the research sample and conducted semi-structured interviews with them. I then carried out additional three adapted art activities with the student in order to learn about the three art fields and concepts hidden in the chosen technique, namely the fields of drawing, painting and sculpture. Based on the conversation during and after the activity, I have also analysed my adapted activities.
From the analysis of the interviews and the adapted three activities, I was able to conclude that all participants in the research with the student aim to make sure that the blind student participates in as many activities performed by his peers as possible. Fine art represents one of the subjects which is difficult to explain to a vision impaired child and without the aid of experts or many years of experience working with blind people, it is difficult to present the concept to the child.
An art lesson should be carefully planned and organized since it is necessary to foresee how we will present and offer materials to a blind child so that they can work in a high quality and instructive manner, despite their lack of vision. We rely on materials that can be touched and felt; this is exactly what all the research participants adhere to. They support and encourage each other and share advice, which is crucial in the process of inclusion of a blind boy in the learning process itself.
Accustoming art techniques to a child with vision impairment can be a unique challenge, yet with the right education and professional help, we can achieve all the set goals and more. All we need is an amount of interest, ingenuity and support provided by the management, colleagues and the child's parents.
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