Teaching Sports to Blind Children
Camp Abilities Makes Sports Education Accessible to Sight Impaired
Oct 30, 2009
Few people have done more to make sports accessible to persons with visual impairments than Lauren Lieberman, founder of Camp Abilities, which each year empowers over 100 students through sports education.
Since 1996, Lieberman, a professor of Adapted Physical Education at the State University of New York at Brockport, has developed many systems to assess physical skills and teach the fundamentals of numerous sports and activities, including beep baseball, tandem cycling, and rock climbing, to children who are often sidelined by their disability.
Lieberman earned her Ph.D. in Human Performance from Oregon State University. She has taught in the Deafblind program at the Perkins School for the Blind (Watertown, Mass) and has co-authored several books, including: Strategies for Inclusion: A Handbook for Physical Educators (Human Kinetics, 2002).
What is Camp Abilities?
Camp Abilities is a developmental sports camp designed to empower kids with visual impairments to access and be successful at sports. I started it when I realized my physical education students wouldn’t know how to teach a blind child if they didn’t have the experience.
What techniques have you developed to facilitate this?
We created an Activity Analysis Checklist — a set of essential skills that we break down. We also do tactile modeling and physical guidance, and provide several opportunities to engage in each sport. For example, we teach beep baseball and they get to play it over several days. We assess their skills in every sport so they know where they stand.
Camp Abilities Helps Students Develop Self-Advocacy Skills
What are some of the effects you’ve observed?
Several kids go on to join school teams, e.g. swimming, or continue to learn judo. One swimmer is training for the Paralympics; another former camper was just named Athlete of the Week at their college. But more importantly, we know from teachers that students become better advocates for what they want.
What are some sports blind kids do that surprise people?
Riding bikes, kayaking, rock climbing, and roller blading — a lot of people think blind kids can’t do sports at all. At our camp, they do them all day long: they run six-minute miles, dive off the high-dive, and hit pitched baseballs.
How has accessible recreation for the blind changed in the past decade?
I think things such as tandem biking and goalball are easier to get into — equipment is more accessible and there are more role models. I don’t think physical education has improved that much. Blind kids are seen as a liability and are often excluded from classes. We need to be doing just the opposite.
Camp Abilities Develops Sports Education Products for Blind Children
How has Camp Abilities evolved?
We’ve published, through the Perkins School for the Blind, a manual to make it easy for providers to start a Camp Abilities, including all of the forms, rules, timelines, and information on fundraising. We’ve also conducted a great deal of research for products developed by the American Printing House for the Blind (APH), including the Walk-Run for Fitness and Jump Rope for Fitness programs, and tactile representations of the layout of sports fields to help blind kids orient themselves. APH is also publishing our forthcoming book, Everybody Plays, which offers strategies for including blind and visually impaired children in sports.
For Lieberman, the most rewarding aspect of founding Camp Abilities is watching kids learn and grow in confidence and as people. Her camp has helped over 1,100 blind and visually impaired children test and transcend their physical limits through a systematic approach to sports.
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