CVI Ally: Creating Academic Access for and with Students with CVI

Cortical/cerebral visual impairment is often poorly understood, resulting in absent or inadequate educational access for children with CVI. Often, students and their families must often struggle with a school day designed for their peers who are visually neurotypical, without the accommodations and support strategies they need.

CVI Ally, a book and educational tool currently in development through Perkins Publications, is meant to address this issue head-on. This future publication is intended as a guide and companion for students, their families, and their educational teams as they strive together to create an accessible, fair, and appropriate educational experience centered around the student. CVI Ally is centered around a CVI Academic Access Inventory, which details CVI’s potential impact on all the major domains of the school day. The inventory and surrounding chapters create fertile ground for team collaboration and understanding. It is written so that a student with CVI, family member, math teacher, TVI, paraprofessional, language arts teacher, school administrator, or any other interested party can pick it up and find an ally in their effort to create a more accessible school experience.

Authors Matt Tietjen, Nai Damato, and Rachel Bennett have designed this companion online course to CVI Ally to guide teams in using knowledge of a student’s visual needs to design an accessible school day.

This course relies on a baseline knowledge of cortical/cerebral visual impairment and the general and subject-specific domains of a school day. While all are welcome, participants will be most successful with a foundational understanding of CVI. Please review the posted syllabus to determine if this course is right for you. For our Introductory course, please visit Cortical/Cerebral Visual Impairment: A Foundational Overview and Understanding.

Course objectives

Participants will:

Hear and learn from the experiences and perspectives of individuals with CVI
Learn about CVI experiences at the observable level and the internal level and how these impact the acquisition of academic skills.
Describe the ways that CVI can impact a person’s ability to participate fully in the school environment and describe potential accommodations for a specific student
Describe the wide variety of design tools available to create an individualized plan and approach for access to learning and guide team collaboration to generate appropriate accommodations
Define strategies for fostering and encouraging student autonomy and self-advocacy regarding decisions of access to learning and the learning environment
Understand the multilayered impact CVI can have on learning and application in literacy and mathematics
Partner with families and professionals from a place of empathy and shared goals

Required text

This course will use the texts listed below, which are available through their publishers, as linked. Retailers, resellers, and lending libraries are other good sources for these titles and alternate formats. Additional readings will be provided within the course.

Fialka, Janice; Mikus, Karen; Feldman, Arlene. (2012) Partnering for Children with Disabilities: A Dance that Matters. Revised Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Sachs, Oliver. (2010) The Mind’s Eye. New York, NY: Alfred Knopf