As a child, Dr. Natalie L. Shaheen envisioned herself becoming an engineer. She loved math and science, and she couldn’t wait to take advanced placement calculus and physics in high school.
Appears InBut first came chemistry.
“I worked really hard, but I had a difficult time understanding the concepts,” Shaheen said. Until then, she had always excelled in the sciences.
“I just couldn’t quite get why this class was so hard for me. I managed to pull off a C. It was embarrassing,” she remembered. “I learned from that class my junior year that I am bad at science, and I shouldn’t do it anymore.”
Shaheen never took physics, a decision she still regrets. She enrolled in only one more science class in college—“the easiest one (she) could find”—while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in special education.
A decade after that fateful chemistry disaster, Shaheen, who is blind, had an epiphany while working with blind chemists to develop accessible high school science curriculum.
“I wasn’t bad at science,” Shaheen said. “The class wasn’t accessible!”
Shaheen recalled that she could only participate in lectures and listen to the textbook on tape. Labs were off limits.
“Nobody could figure out how a blind kid could work with Bunsen burners and acids and bases and all the ‘dangerous’ things, and they weren’t willing to experiment,” Shaheen said. “That’s why I had such a hard time understanding all the concepts. Labs are critical because that’s what science is.”
Now in her sixth year as an assistant professor of Special Education at Illinois State University, Shaheen is on a personal mission to make education accessible and equitable.
Dr. Natalie L. Shaheen, center, collaborates with students to make an electrical grid simulation kit nonvisually accessible.
“I want blind and low-vision kids to learn all kinds of things in accessible ways and then make an informed choice about how they want to spend the rest of their time in school and what they want to do for a career,” Shaheen said. “Whatever they decide is fine as long as they make an informed choice, and their choice isn’t misinformed by inaccessible education.”
The impact of Shaheen’s work is being amplified by a $1.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant she received to address inequalities in science education for blind and low-vision (BLV) students.
“We take great pride in Dr. Shaheen, who has been honored with this prestigious and highly competitive award,” said Dr. Yojanna Cuenca-Carlino, chair of Illinois State’s Department of Special Education. “Since joining the department, Natalie has exemplified the teacher-scholar ideal through her outstanding teaching and research. Her exceptional research is integral to the department’s mission of increasing accessibility to blind and low-vision students and our goal of supporting pre-service and in-service teachers to learn how to create born-accessible classrooms with technology.
“Her award brings a lot of visibility to the department and the College of Education and raises the entire institution’s profile.”
Shaheen is now assembling a team of two postdoctoral scholars, a doctoral student, and several undergraduates for the five-year project. They will first explore what high school teachers of blind students and high school science teachers know about building proactively accessible, known as born-accessible, classes. Later, the researchers will create opportunities for teachers to learn how to create born-accessible classrooms.
“Nobody could figure out how a blind kid could work with Bunsen burners and acids and bases and all the ‘dangerous’ things, and they weren’t willing to experiment.”
—Dr. Natalie L. Shaheen
“What do teachers know about making technology-mediated science classes born-accessible? The information we have in the literature leads us to suspect that teachers don’t know very much, especially about the digital pieces,” Shaheen said. “We want to better understand that because if we know what teachers know now, we can figure out where there might be gaps and what we can do to try and address those gaps.”
Shaheen and her team will begin by interviewing 30 teachers. The researchers will then develop a survey to collect quantitative data from a larger sample of teachers.
Based on their research, the team will create a first-of-its-kind case library and associated learning modules pulled from stories BLV youth and their teachers have shared with Shaheen in previous studies. It will serve to educate current and future teachers about how to make their classrooms born-accessible, particularly when they are using technology.
For instance, computer simulations are often used in high school science classes. A physics class might apply what it’s learning to a virtual roller coaster.
“But the way most of those simulations are built, they don’t work with the kind of access technology that blind and low-vision people use—particularly screen readers,” Shaheen said, referencing software programs that present digital information in synthesized speech or digital Braille.
“When they are trying to access the simulation with their screen reader, all they hear when they move around the screen is ‘Button. Button. Button.’ That’s not particularly helpful,” Shaheen said. “Students are supposed to observe what happens and then make inferences based on whatever they noticed. But if you don’t have any access to what happened on the screen, then you can’t ask questions. You can’t make inferences.”
Shaheen, left, works with Illinois State University students using a PIAF (Picture in a Flash) Tactile Graphic Maker.
But there’s good news. Shaheen said a team of researchers and developers from the University of Colorado are creating free, fully accessible STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) simulations. One of the modules that Sheheen and her team create could highlight how teachers can incorporate these accessible simulations into their born-accessible classrooms.
In a module, Shaheen might also suggest that educators “pull the skeleton out of their closet.” In other words, rely less on simulation technology and more on physical objects.
“Science teachers teaching anatomy often have a physical skeleton that was used back in the ‘olden days,’ which is usually in a storage closet now,” Shaheen said. “A way that we as blind and low-vision people get access is to touch stuff. If we have the option to give the students an actual thing or a replica of the thing they’re learning about, like a replica of a human skeleton, that’s a superior learning experience.”
Modules will likely cover working in high school chemistry labs where there’s often an assumption that experiments require vision, according to Shaheen. A titration lab, for example, involves observing a precise measurement of solution dripping from one vessel into another.
“There’s a piece of technology called a LabQuest. You can connect all kinds of data collection devices to it, and there’s a version of this technology that has a screen reader, so it can talk to you or even push information out in Braille if you want,” Shaheen said. “Using that, we can make the experiment fully accessible.”
By building an extensive case library, Shaheen’s team will pair personal stories of barriers with equitable solutions to help educators keep accessibility top of mind. Shaheen will maximize the impact through Illinois State’s position as one of the largest producers of teachers in the nation and one of the few schools offering an undergraduate low vision and blindness program.
“It shouldn’t be that blind and low-vision youth have to make career choices based on what’s easy for teachers to make accessible.”
—Dr. Natalie L. Shaheen
“Teachers have a lot on their plate and are frankly asked to do too much already,” Shaheen said. “They have limited time like everybody else, so we’ve got to help them to care enough about accessibility to prioritize it, among many other tasks.”
Shaheen said its worth the extra effort. BLV students, she said, are poised to succeed in scientific settings based on their life experiences.
“When you live in a world that’s made for sighted people and you’re blind or low vision, you figure things out through a lot of trial and error and resilience,” Shaheen said. “That’s what science is about. Scientists ask questions, they try things, and they observe very closely. And that’s a thing that we’re really good at as blind folks.”
When provided with born-accessible STEM curriculum, Shaheen hopes future BLV students with science-minded aspirations will be empowered to make their dreams come true.
“It shouldn’t be that blind and low-vision youth have to make career choices based on what’s easy for teachers to make accessible,” Shaheen said. “They should get to choose whatever they want, just like anybody else.”
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2334693. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
