For White Cane week in February, this year we have a discussion with Elizabeth Lalonde about the recent completion of her Masters Thesis:

--An Interpretive Analysis of the Effectiveness of Non-traditional or ‘Structured Discovery’ Blindness Rehabilitation in Canada from the Perspective of Blind Service Recipients and teachers

This week on Outlook we’re speaking with Elizabeth about building confidence as a blind traveler and the difference between route training and the “structured discovery method” we’ve often spoke about on this show and of which Lalonde teaches at The Pacific Training Centre for the Blind, which she founded and runs on Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada. She tells us: Structure discovery, it can include routes. Sometimes that’s the best way to get somewhere is you wanna learn the route. So it doesn’t mean that it excludes more traditional forms of rehabilitation. It just means that it opens the door for other ways of perceiving your environment, learning to perceive your environment in a more holistic way."

Elizabeth shares her lived experience of blindness growing up and connecting with an opportunity to “learn blindness skills” training which led her to want to bring the same sort of rehab program to others closer to home. She tells us about the non visual skills they offer at the PTCB and the “Blind People In Charge” program she launched with the help of a grant from the provincial B.C. government.

Elizabeth recognises with non visual learning: “When you have sight, you just tend to use it, (you can’t help it) so it can distract you from using your other senses to get around and to do things.” We talk about the hesitancy, whether new to blindness or not, for many of us to be afraid of wearing things like sleep shades to remove the distraction of any level of seeing when we’re learning how to explore our environment, with all our senses and perceptions, during blindness rehab.

We reflect on the types of messages on blindness and early O and M instruction we were given and training we were taught, we highlight the common sense and lived experience in the expression “the blind leading the blind” as sister/co-host Kerry relates that back to her most recent memory of the community and confidence-building that can come from traveling in a group of blind people, and we examine ways of adapting “structure discovery” for the individual and their specific intersectionalities and unique learning styles,

Regular Outlook co-host Barry says: “We’re getting taught static navigation for a dynamic world,” when it comes to how blind people receive orientation and mobility instruction. This conversational, truly from an international perspective along with our focus on Canada (with the thesis we’re featuring for its historical significance to blindness rehabilitation anywhere) episode provides a fairly comprehensive bunch of topics that return, always, to the subject of Elizabeth Lalonde’s thesis and our lived experiences with it.

We at Outlook want to thank Elizabeth Lalonde for her hard work on presenting us all with a wider window on the landscape of blindness skills training here in Canada, on some more particulars around this thesis, and by doing this on completion of a Master’s degree in Community Development from the University of Victoria. Your work on this topic will be an important study and resource of rehabilitation for the blind in Canada and beyond.

Through multiple modalities: including literature study and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA, a qualitative methodology) ) with interviews she conducted with both students and teachers of the “structure discovery model”, Elizabeth paints a clearer picture of the landscape of Canada’s attitudes and offerings of blindness skills training. To learn more, check out the contents of Elizabeth’s thesis at this link:

https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/items/28e4e9ee-884b-44f7-9111-9ff43af95eea