Traditionally, Braille Challenge included just five competition categories. Students are divided based on grade level: Apprentice is grades 1-2, Freshman 3-4, Sophomore 5-6, Junior Varsity 7-9, and Varsity 10-12. But everyone has a different journey to braille literacy, and for students who begin learning braille at a later age or who may have alternate learning needs, these categories aren’t always the right fit.
Enter the Foundational category. This category, adapted in part from the British Columbia Regional Braille Challenge, is designed for braille learners who require more flexibility than what the traditional contest divisions offer.
To celebrate the formal inclusion of the Foundational category in this year’s Braille Challenge, we sat down with Adam to learn the story behind this groundbreaking category.
Adam was one of the first Regional Coordinators to introduce this innovative category, which aims to accommodate more students and empower them to participate in Braille Challenge.
Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Adam, we greatly appreciate the leadership you bring to Braille Challenge. For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you share about your involvement in the blind and visually impaired community?
I have been in the community for 18 years. Most of that time has been as a Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments and as a certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist, and I’ve worked in itinerant roles and specialized school roles. Currently, I manage the Provincial Resource Centre for the Visually Impaired alternate format material resource center in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Can you tell us how long you have been involved with Braille Challenge and in what ways you have been involved in the program?
I have been the Regional Coordinator for the British Columbia Regional Braille Challenge for the last 13 years. Our challenge has grown from a very small group of students, less than 10 in our first year, to close to 50 now, from all regions of the province. We have an in-person event that we hold in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. So, we get a little bit of that post-secondary flavor at our regional event. British Columbia is a geographically vast province and so we also have an option for students to participate remotely in their home communities.
Adam, can you tell us a bit about your role as a member of the Braille Challenge Advisory Committee?
I am one of the longer tenured members of the Braille Challenge International Advisory Committee. The involvement really depends on what’s needed, whether it’s consultation on different questions around technology or different approaches to material development, although that’s a separate group who develops the content for the Challenge categories. Also, I’ve been the Canadian voice on there making sure, for example, that if our students spell color with a “u,” that’s not marked as an error!
I think it’s important that regional coordinators be represented on the advisory committee. It’s been amazing to be part of the process where we really think critically about how to meaningfully incorporate and support Foundational category events at the regional level.
The Braille Challenge engages students from diverse backgrounds, including those with varying learning levels and circumstances. Going into the Foundational Category, how have you adapted your approach to include more participants?
I can tell you why it started. The Foundational category started in 2016. That same year, the field saw quite an innovative leap with the publishing of the
“I-M-ABLE” approach—Individualized Meaning-Centered Approach to Braille Literacy Education by Dr. Diane Wormsley.
One of the things that Dr. Wormsley framed for our field was this notion that students can be engaged, joyful braille readers, and not necessarily follow a conventional instructional program in literacy. This meant that you suddenly saw students who we may not have previously thought of as braille readers and writers now engaging with braille in new, fun ways.
The Foundational category was an attempt to meet that moment, because we had students around the province who were reading braille, who were writing in braille, and who were searching for a braille-reading community.
However, at that point in time, we did not have the materials or the pathway to get them to our event. We had Apprentice through Varsity, and we had the opportunity to have students write below grade level. But even still, we had some students who were, for example, so new to braille that they were reading the alphabet and some short words, or maybe just their name and a few highly salient words for them. We needed the ability to personalize their materials.
The other thing we realized is that there was no single profile of a student in the Foundational category. In our first year, we had students who, for example, were reading below grade level, but who also need a more personalized testing environment. They needed to work one-on-one, or they needed to be able to take lots of breaks, and so on.
We were able to accommodate that with the Foundational challenge, because in our event, the materials are proctored one-on-one. Everybody participates in the same room, but it’s always a one-to-one proctoring experience.
Now, on the other hand, we’ve had students who are at grade level, but they’re new to braille. For example, we’ve had students who are in secondary school and transitioning from print to braille reading, but they’re not at a point in their journey where they can sit down and read continuous text.
We’ll have materials that will be relevant and interesting for them, but at a level of complexity in terms of their braille knowledge that suits them. If they really want to read about Bob the Builder, well, we’re going to have passages with Bob the Builder in there. Or if they’re into cats, we’re going to make sure that one of the versions of our materials has questions about cats.
In the Foundational challenge, we’ve always worked to make sure that there is a parallel experience. When our students in Apprentice through Varsity are writing, the Foundational students are writing. If students in Apprentice through Varsity are doing reading comprehension, students in Foundational are doing reading comprehension. They may look very different in terms of the demands of the materials themselves, but it’s still reading comprehension. Foundational is not separate, it’s just another category.
We love how you’re embracing that braille learning isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience and that you’re personalizing it to these students to keep them engaged. How do you collaborate with students’ TVIs to make sure that they will be engaged? What does that collaboration process look like?
When a Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments registers a student in the Foundational category, they automatically get a survey sent to them. That survey has really grown over the years. When we first surveyed, TVIs, it was really just, “Tell us the contractions they know.” That was it.
Then as the years went by, we thought, “There’s so much more information we could be gathering here to really make this a responsive and engaging experience.” That survey now asks questions about what topics interest the student. We also the TSVI to tell us about writing in terms of, “Are they writing? Do they like to write stories, or lists, or social media posts?”
Further to that, we ask questions about the actual tools they use to write, because some of our students who participate in the Foundational category don’t use manual Perkins braillewriters. They may use Mountbatten electronic braille writers or some other tool, and the Foundational category gives us the flexibility to make sure that we have not only content but materials and formats that are accessible and meaningful for the students.
As years have gone on, we’ve had teachers who will write into the survey, “I’ve asked my student, and they want to read about these topics, or they want to see these things.”
You know, we had a student one year who really wanted to read about trains. So, when we do charts and graphs, we’re going to make sure that on a little map of the town, there’s train tracks and a train station. We can personalize it in that way to make sure that the students see their interests reflected in the materials that they’re using.
One of my favorite memories from the Foundational category was in our Speed and Accuracy test. In the Foundational category, Speed and Accuracy looks very different from Speed and Accuracy in Sophomore through Varsity categories, in that it is writing prompts. For example, the student gets a prompt to say, like, “Tell us about your favorite winter activity.” and students will just go ahead and write it out.
One student absolutely amazed his team when given a writing prompt during the Speed and Accuracy competition for the Foundational group. The student ended up writing six pages and was still writing at the end of the competition. I had to go into the room in my official capacity as Regional Coordinator and hereby call an end to this year’s competition, because this student was just banging out the pages on his manual braillewriter. This totally blew his team and his family away since the student was, at times, reluctant to write at school.
We had found that sweet spot of the task and the content of the activity just really met him where he was that day. This would have been a student who traditionally would have only done a few lines and then been done. It’s amazing the results you get when you’re able to center students’ perspectives, voices, and what they’re into.
Speaking of these students who you’re using as consultants now, how do you think the Foundational category has empowered them? How do you think it’s prepared them to go into the Apprentice category or change their feelings about Braille Challenge in general?
One of the main motivators for students to return to the Braille Challenge is the community that has developed around the event. Students see themselves as not the only braille user in their school, or in their community, or in their region. We’ve seen friendships develop that have lasted many years.
The other piece that I hope comes through is that students have important things to share. There’s that leadership piece for all our students in general, but specifically in the Foundational category, we want students to see themselves as having valuable input and insights to share that can actually change the course of an event or be reflected in the materials that they and their peers use. I think it’s important that students are not just the recipients of these materials and experiences, but that they feel a high degree of empowerment and that they have a leadership role to play in the Foundational category and in the Braille Challenge at large.
I also want to address participant trajectories in the Foundational category. We have had students who started in the Foundational category, then moved into Apprentice through Varsity. We also have some students who remain in the Foundational category. One student has been participating just because of his unique profile and what his requirements are to have a fun, engaging time, and he competes each year in the Foundational category.
We make absolutely no assumptions about what a student’s trajectory is going to be when they enroll in the Foundational category. It’s important that the Foundational category is accepted and viewed as just one of the competition categories.
I think also of the students who come to the Foundational category later in their K-12 careers because they may be new to braille. In that sense, we want to make sure that the Foundational category for them is not seen as younger or more juvenile, it’s a legit competition category for them.
With the Foundational category being over half of our participants, we have multiple Foundational rooms. We tend to group students by their age and interest in each room. We might have a Foundational room where the students are in middle school to high school, and then one with students in early to middle elementary.
In many cases, community building happens between events. There’s the broader community within the Braille Challenge event, but then there’s also the community that develops between students who may be similar ages or have similar experiences, and they can connect on something other than the fact that they read and write in the same medium.
The thing we live by, or at least we hope we do, when we’re working on the Foundational category is always making sure that we have a more inclusive answer to the question: Who is the Braille Challenge for?
We always make sure that we have a more inclusive answer every year, and one that reflects reality. The Foundational category is the vehicle that allows us to do that and builds out a more inclusive answer to the question of who our event is for.
Can you share what some of our British Columbia Regional Braille Challenge alumni have done after graduation? For example, have they gone to university or started any interesting jobs?
That’s a great question. When we started, we were a pretty young group, so in fact the last of our students who were there at the first BC Regional Braille Challenge just graduated last year, so she just went all the way through.
Many are in post-secondary education at the college or university level. There are a few who are in the workforce, a couple I can think of working for the federal government, and a few more who are working in the accessibility consulting space.
Whatever pathway they take, my hope is that they all take that same drive to achieve personal bests and the importance of personal challenges away from their participation in the Braille Challenge. I also hope that they take away the importance of their being community around braille reading and writing.
We just want to finish off by recapping why we’re here today. So you are one of the first regional coordinators to introduce a foundational category in your program. Your team identified a need and worked to create materials for this group of students to participate. As a regional coordinator and a member of the Braille Challenge Advisory Committee, your leadership and advocacy have led to the formal inclusion of the Foundational category in our 25th year of Braille Challenge, and that’s something to be celebrated.
Absolutely, this is huge. Thank you. I’m so excited because we can now collectively, as a broader Braille Challenge international community, have a more inclusive answer to the question: Who is the Braille Challenge for?
We can all join in that. There’s been a lot of great pioneering work for many years across regionals that might not have been called the Foundational category. But now I think we’re able to move together in a more coordinated way thanks to this more formalized recognition of the Foundational category as a core and integral part of the broader Braille Challenge experience. It’s not an add on, it’s not “nice to have,” it’s a core experience.
Thank you so much again to Adam for sharing the origins of the Foundational category with us. We’re looking forward to finding even more ways to make Braille Challenge an inclusive, empowering experience over the next twenty-five years.
To learn more about the British Columbia Regional Braille Challenge, visit their website at https://www.prcvi.org/outreach/british-columbia-regional-braille-challenge/.
Interested in participating in Braille Challenge? Learn more about the international program and find a regional near you at https://brailleinstitute.org/braille-challenge/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA_NC9BhCkARIsABSnSTZsdniWJ0DhEqDFxmCU0fZxY6Cv42RKqg-J8JIskYfLweHzA50Yt9UaAsl1EALw_wcB.
