FINDING A PATH INTO THE GEOSCIENCES AS A STUDENT WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

A hallmark of my experiences in education as a student with special needs has been the quest to become an independent learner. Medical issues since infancy and a learning disability identified in sixth grade have meant that I have spent a substantial portion of my educational life developing an understanding of my strengths, an acceptance of my limitations, and an instinct to use strategies to compensate for my weaknesses. For me, the study of geology has been an opportunity to draw upon my skills as a visual learner. It has also presented me with challenges in terms of processing and expressing written and spoken language.

For example, I benefit greatly from hearing as well as seeing written text. In secondary school, books-on-tape were a vital resource, especially in science classes. As I advanced to college and began to pursue my undergraduate degree in geology, I found that, while libraries of books-on-tape are vast, they rarely included more specialized volumes. Conveniently, over the past few years the quality of text-to-speech computer software programs has greatly improved; voices are more human-like and there are features that allow a reader to annotate the text with notes and to train the program to pronounce the more technical words. My intent here is not to make claims about best practices for teaching students with physical or learning disabilities. Rather, my goal is to describe some specific instances when adaptations have helped me gain access to material and achieve goals that might not otherwise have been possible within my special education.