This work was made possible by a 2007 and a 2009 Simple Effective Education and Dissemination (SEED) Grant for Astronomy Researchers, Astronomical Society of the Pacific through funds provided by the Planck Mission, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Virginia Player did all of the initial work on the use of the Braille books, the Washington State learning requirements, and the original version of the lessons under the 2007 grant. Virginia and I made two visits to the Washington State School for the blind and covered some of the material with 5 students there. Dr. Sarah Loebman and Natalie Ramien-Shameshima led the efforts under the 2009 grant: revising current lessons, adding additional lessons, and working with two blind students, Nicole and Abby. Sarah and Natalie are responsible for the testing of all of the lessons and adding creative tactile objects to accompany the concepts introduced. I was so fortunate to have worked with this team. It was an extremely worthwhile, invigorating, and rewarding project for all of us. Our goal now is to get the curriculum out there! |
Our creating an introductory curriculum for the blind starting during an open house at the Jacobsen Observatory when a group of sight-impaired students visited as guests of the Space Grant office at the University of Washington. One of those students, partial sight of 20/200, had never seen a star before. That changed when she looked at Vega through the eyepiece of the ancient telescope. Our efforts were born from her reaction and those in the dome with her.
Astronomy education is currently heavily geared towards visual aids; however, roughly 10 million people in North America are sight impaired. Every student should have access to meaningful astronomy curriculum, as an understanding of astronomy is an expectation of national and state standards.
Over the past few decades, Noreen Grice developed Braille and large-print astronomy text books aimed at sight impaired learners. Here we build upon Grice’s written work and present five- to 10-day lesson plans that integrates hands-on activities with readings.Through this curriculum, students will develop an intuitive understanding of the scale of the solar system and the planets, moon phases, the Sun’s activity cycle and interior structure, constellations, large astronomical distances, stellar life cycles, the structure and content of the Milky Way, dark matter, Hubble classification of galaxies, and the Hubble ultra-deep field. These modules have been tested on blind and sight-impaired students. The modules lend themselves equally well to a week long science camp, geared towards middle school vision-impaired students, or as material integrated into a classroom setting.
While the lessons plans are geared primarily towards blind and vision-impaired middle school students (grades 6 – 8), we believe they also contain information that will be engaging to older students and adults with a fondness for astronomy. It was our experience that many of the hands-on activities worked equally well in the traditional classrooms for sighted students, including introductory astronomy classes.
The primary text we use for the readings is “Touch the Stars” written by Noreen Grice, with excellent tactile illustrations by Shirley Keller and Irma Goldberg. The text is in Braille with print and facsimiles of the tactile illustrations for sighted readers. We also used “Touch the Sun” by Noreen Grice, for ‘The Sun’ module (no longer available). Our student testers, Nicole Torcolini and Abigail Traverse, thought “Touch the Stars” had the clearest illustrations.
The lessons rely on large print, Braille, and aural podcasts (to be developed) to present the information. Students then use that content to understand the concepts through multiple 3D printed objects that represent not only things like spiral galaxies but also the graphs like the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram and stellar evolution.