Blindness and visual disabilities do not discriminate.
Anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or creed, can face a lifetime of limited vision or no sight at all. For some, it begins at birth. For others, it can come with age, disease or accident. No one is immune.
Members of that population have for 60 years been served well by professionals prepared in the NIU College of Education’s Visual Disabilities program.
Now, thanks to $2.5 million in federal grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education, that tradition will continue while also infusing students with a heightened understanding of, and best practices for, diversity.
Project Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (Project J.E.D.I.) will equip 80 graduate students with master’s degrees that provide the necessary knowledge and skills while also emphasizing concepts of belonging.
Specialties are available in Teacher of the Visually Impaired and in Orientation and Mobility; the grant covers 40 students in each area for a total of 80 funded scholars over the five-year duration of the project.
Recruitment for the Fall 2024 launch also will prioritize enrolling applicants from diverse backgrounds and from communities of color to enhance the workforce. All students receive generous financial aid packages that include full tuition and fees along with health insurance and $9,500 annual living stipends.
The vast majority of the program’s students have three or more job offers on the table by the time of commencement.
“There is a high need for professionals to go into this area of work, so graduates of our program are in high demand,” said Stacy Kelly, professor in the NIU Department of Special and Early Education. “The prerequisites for the program are simply an undergraduate degree in anything on the planet. There’s no pressure to have already been an educator or in special education.”
Colleague Molly Pasley said the “Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Scholars” are vital: “Representation is important.”
“We see a lot of television commercials attempting to reflect the American family. We want our children to see role models and people in leadership who look like them,” said Pasley, an assistant professor, “and that is why diversifying our workforce is needed. We want to have people out there in leadership roles and in teaching roles who look like the clients we serve.”
It comes at a time when NIU is poised to become a Hispanic-Serving Institution and as the College of Education focuses on cultivating an academic environment where all feel welcome, valued, heard, seen and safe.
Meanwhile, the college has in recent years introduced several new programs that help bring more people into the teaching profession by reducing obstacles to degrees.
“NIU is a natural home for a project like this,” Pasley said.
“We’re looking at our courses, adding to them and redesigning them for the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion grants. We are trying to infuse culturally responsive teaching and learning standards. We also want to ensure we are including opportunities for students to reflect on their own implicit biases,” she added, “and to grow in their development on that journey, realizing it is a lifelong journey to dismantle bias, racism and systemic, institutional racism and to call it out when they see it.”
Additional benefits embedded in Project J.E.D.I. are Your Own Diversity Advisor mentors and Finding Opportunities for Relevant and Reflective Cultural Experiences.
Behind the scenes, DEI consultation is being provided to Kelly and Pasley by Eric Junco, the NIU College of Education’s director for Equity. External ideas, insight and guidance will come from Olaya Landa-Vialard, director of the American Printing House for the Blind’s APH ConnectCenter.
Junco already has worked with his NIU colleagues in developing assignments that will “walk us through a natural progression of examining our implicit biases,” Pasley said, “and then determining what we’re going to do with that information.”
He also is connecting the professors with NIU’s cultural resource centers, she added, and making plans to present DEI workshops to the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Scholars that will foster “critical conversations about their own experiences and how those would impact their learners and their own decision-making.”
“One of the things we want to do is to create a program and strengthen it by helping students to understand what it really means to be inclusive from a DEI perspective,” Junco said. “We’re talking about inclusion when it comes to disability, but we’re also talking the intersections of disability with race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”
Doing so requires consistency, he said.
“How can we look at the curriculum ‘as is’ and infuse elements of DEI into it so that our students are getting a constant diet of what it means to facilitate inclusive and equitable environments?” Junco said.
“Too often, we see that a class might have a week or two about inclusion,” he added, “but the research shows that when we don’t make long-term commitments or significant effort toward these types of topics, students struggle to implement what they have learned in real-world context. A steady diet of DEI concepts allows them to transfer that information more readily into a classroom or into their practice.”
Beyond his curricular assistance, Junco is a believer in Project J.E.D.I.’s framework and goals.
“We live in a diverse society, and we want to prepare our students for a global workforce,” he said, “so what that means to us today is that we need to prepare our students to work with and support people from different backgrounds.”
He handles this within the walls of the College of Education.
“Part of my role is making sure our students feel supported. It’s foundational to our ethos here. We want to make sure that students are seen, heard and valued for who they are as individuals, and I am excited to play a role in working toward the curriculum, recruitment and retention with these programs,” Junco said.
“As we’re intentionally trying to recruit a diverse group of students into this program, we know that they need to be connected to people who have similar belief systems while maintaining a sense of their cultural identity,” he added. “I’m working to connect them to the cultural centers we have on campus and to mentorship opportunities as well.”
Even without the added focus and its next-level components, NIU master’s degrees in Visual Disabilities are unparalleled in the field.
The best-practices content is current and comprehensive, and because NIU is home to the nation’s first academic program dedicated to preparation in using assistive technology for people who are blind or who have low vision, students have hands-on access to state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line equipment throughout their programs of study.
“People do not leave our program unsure of what they need to do when they are the educators who are guiding children who are blind or visually impaired and their family members,” Kelly said.
“Oftentimes, parents with a child who is blind or visually impaired don’t know about all the solutions out there to level the playing field,” she added, “and so it is the teacher of the visually impaired or the orientation and mobility specialist who’s empowered with that knowledge.”
It all combines to make Project J.E.D.I. an out-of-this-world prospect for people interested in changing the lives of others while fulfilling their own.
“This is the opportunity of lifetime because there is an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of children throughout the country who are blind or visually impaired and who do not currently have teachers,” Kelly said.
“The sky would fall if sighted children did not have a teacher physically in the classroom,” she added, “but this historically has been the situation for kids who are blind or visually impaired, and the research shows that we’ll never catch up. We need to do something.”
For more information about this opportunity, visit https://www.cedu.niu.edu/seed/graduate-programs/masters-visual-disabilities.shtml or contact professor Stacy Kelly at 815-753-4103 or skelly@niu.edu.
