Browsing by Subject "näkövamma"

This study researches the pedagogic methods used by visually impaired handicraft instructors. The aim of the study was to research what visually impaired handicraft instructors’ work is like when instructing adults, how their own visual impairment affects their work as a handicraft instructor and what is the role of the assistant in the work of the handicraft instructor. Even though there is a lot of research on the visually impaired and their handicrafts, the work of the visually impaired handicraft instructors hasn’t been researched that much. However, teaching of the visually impaired children has been studied quite a lot, so based on those researches, some examples of the pedagogic methods can be adapted to teach handicraft to adults, such as hand-on-hand guidance or drawing on one’s body. This study was a qualitative case study, and semi-structured theme interviews were used as the method of collecting data. The study had six informants that were invited to participate personally or via Näkövammaiset Käsityöntekijät ry (Finnish association of visually impaired craftsmen). The interviews were made as individual interviews in the Uusimaa region. The collected data was organized with qualitative content analysis, which helped forming different categories from topics arisen from the transcribed data. The most important result of this study was that the most important pedagogic areas of work of the visually impaired handicraft instructors were personal guidance and building one’s own personal identity as a handicraft instructor. Also assistance and assistive devices are an im-portant part of using pedagogic material and to help learning. In fact, assistive devices are being seen part of pedagogic methods, and trying to separate one from another would be ar-tificial. The most essential effect of visual impairment to one’s work as a handicraft instructor was the lack of visual information and the consequently need of help in certain areas of work. However, the informants do not see this as a big problem since they have a great amount of assistance around them. The assistants were considered as the most important assistance for the visually impaired handicraft instructors, since they help instructors to see by bringing them visual information they lack. The assistants act as the instructors’ eyes in a very tight collaboration.