Becoming Commuters: Teaching Students Traveling to Work Using Public Transportation (Practice Perspectives) (Column‪)‬

As a teacher of visually impaired students at the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind, I regularly traveled with my students to their off-campus jobs by school van. In my sixth year of teaching, I realized that transportation to the work site is also an important component of successful employment. During the five years before my epiphany, my students would pile into the large, accessible van owned by the school and be driven to their jobs at the local pizza shop, department store, or other workplace. I realized my students might be missing a learning opportunity by being driven to work when I participated in a summer orientation and mobility (O&M) internship at Perkins School for the Blind. There, I observed my Perkins students gain valuable information as they traveled on public buses. These students had to figure out what buses to take and how many stops were passed before their destination. They also needed to decide whether they had enough money on their bus cards to take the bus, or if they needed exact change. They had to speak assertively and organize their questions clearly. As the summer progressed, I began to think of how I could bring the model of instruction I had learned at Perkins back to my students in Arizona. My goal was to teach my students in Arizona consistent use of public transportation to get to their workplace. This article delineates the learning experiences that resulted from the regular use of bus transportation to and from the work site. The change from riding in the school van to using public buses was important for several reasons. When riding the van, the students paid little attention to the route or the direction of their travel unless the driver gave verbal directions. Using buses constantly enhanced the students' learning capacities in six areas, including directionality, advocacy, organization, motivation, safety, and involvement. The students were all high school or postgraduate students. Two of them had a good deal of usable vision and the other two had no light perception. They all communicated through speech, although each of them fell in the spectrum of mild to moderate mental retardation with a severe sensory impairment.