Note from the editor: Alfonse Delucia is the First Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of Connecticut and President of the Southern Connecticut Chapter. Alfonse is currently pursuing TVI certification and hopes to establish himself in the field of education as a teacher of the visually impaired. Below, Alfonse shares an interview with Dr. Fredric Schroeder, who was the first visually impaired person in the country to successfully complete a Masters Program in the field of Orientation and Mobility.

The strongest recollection I have of Dr. Fredric Schroeder is a memory I have of him contentedly strolling with a companion on his arm. It was in Louisville Kentucky, last summer, in the lobby of the Galt House Hotel. It was fairly crowded, and I was standing by the entrance when I heard Schroeder's voice. I turned, and as he passed, I noticed that he was escorting a woman. She was gazing at his face, wrapped in attention, as he led the way. I watched as Schroeder, who was talking all the while, used the constant touch technique, with which he found the front desk. Still in conversation, he turned left to make his way toward the elevators.

Personally, I rely heavily on audition, and I have the hardest time talking to or listening to someone while I'm trying to find my way. Hence, despite an awareness of his skill and reputation, I was no less astounded. Yet Schroeder is more. He is a tremendous public speaker, a worthy leader, a caring husband and father, and an individual who sees fit to join, at the drop of a hat, any blind person in facing any adversity. It was during the Connecticut NFB state convention, where he came to represent the national office, that I had my next opportunity to speak with him. On November 8, 2003, I was able to sit down with Dr. Schroeder, and have a discussion about a number of topics relative to the field of orientation & mobility.

AD: "What was it that your teachers in San Francisco saw that created in them the belief that Fred Schroeder, a person with blindness, was as qualified as any sighted person, and was therefore worthy of being certified, to instruct blind or visually impaired students in the area of Orientation and Mobility?"

FS: "Well I don't think that the people at San Francisco State started with a conviction. But what happened was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 included a non-discrimination provision, section 504. It was the first non-discrimination statute covering disability. And since the university programs were all in institutions that received Federal money, they were suddenly covered by 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. And I was the first blind person after 504 regulations were issued. The regulations were issued in May of 1977. I was the first blind person to apply to a university program before then. All the university programs, nationally, had a standard of 20/40 vision. But suddenly with 504, it was up for grabs whether they could really make that standard stick. So when I applied, the guy who was running the program in San Francisco, a guy named Pete Wertzberger, was very open with me. He wasn't necessarily convinced I could do it, but he was willing to try, and honestly so. I mean, there were other people out there who would kind of say they were willing to be open, but really they weren't. They were convinced up front that it was going to fail, but Pete was not like that. He said very honestly: I don't have any idea how this is going to work. I don't know whether it will work, but let's give it a shot, and see what happens. The profession at that time was very much against having me, or any blind person, come into the O & M field. And so there was a lot of pressure put on Pete to keep me out, but he was a guy with a lot of personal integrity, and he wasn't going to keep me out. So I went to the San Francisco State program, and I did fine. When I finished though, the professional organization, at that time it was the American Association of Workers for the Blind, was the certifying body. Now they were a private association, so they were not bound by the non-discriminatory provision of 504. So they still had a standard that said you had to be able to see to be certified. Now what they had done to try to white-wash that is they replaced the straight vision requirement with what they called a functional assessment. But the functional assessment was just simply another, it was kind of a task specific way of measuring vision. For example, you had to be able to monitor certain functions from a distance of 375 feet. I'm not sure that I can remember all the details, but one of them that I recall was that you had to stand on one corner of the intersection, and be able to "scan" the other corners within I think it was 3 seconds. Well, if you were blind, you couldn't physically walk all the way around the intersection in 3 seconds, so it kept blind people out. But any sighted person could stand at a corner, and scan the other three corners in 3 seconds. So it was a sham. It was to keep blind people out. So even though we knew up front there was no way I could win a law suit because they were private, but I went ahead and sued them anyway just simply to make the point that here's a profession that's making it's livelihood off of blind people, and yet discriminates against blind people or probably a pretty shabby practice since they do."

AD: "So as a blind O & M student, what were some strategies you used in order to get through a program?"

FS: "Well, the thing that was interesting about that is I did the program in two successive summers, but I was already teaching cane travel in Nebraska. Historically, most agencies for the blind had not had university trained O & M instructors. Most of them trained their own. There were some states where that was not the case, but by and large, you didn't have to be certified to teach in many state rehabilitation agencies, including Nebraska. So I had worked out techniques, some of which I developed myself. Some of which I learned from other blind people who had taught cane travel before me. And many of those techniques I could use in the San Francisco State program, but the funny thing about it is the university training programs are designed with the idea that the instructor could see. And so, some of the adaptations that I use weren't applicable. In other words, the way a blind person teaches cane travel, the very structure of it, is different. And yet I had to be able to prove that I could teach according to the traditional model. So I developed some techniques to accommodate that, but it was a little schizophenic because basically what I was trying to do in the San Francisco State program was I was having to develop techniques to allow me to teach the way sighted people would teach, even though that's not really the best way for a blind person to teach cane travel. But it worked. A lot of it is common sense. A lot of it is knowing your student, getting to know the student with whom you are working, and knowing in effect what that student's capacities are so that you can anticipate what amount of intervention may or may not be in use. Some of the mechanics of using a cane, you can adapt that auditorily. When you walk behind a student, you can tell by the sound of the cane tip whether the person has a good arch. In other words, if the sound of the cane is very clear, then the arch is wider than the person's body. If it's muffled, then the person's arch is too narrow. And some of the things again are very …well, let me give you an example. If you've got a student who is right handed, which the majority will be, and you're walking behind the student, and they have a good strong right arch, and the left arch is muffled, you can tell that by sound. And it is possible that the person has their hand centered, but the first thing you want to check is if the hand centered. Because what happens with right-handed people is their hand tends to drift off center. So their right arch is good and strong, but the left arch isn't adequate. Okay? On the other hand, if the person is right handed, and they have a good strong left arch, but a weak right arch, it's probably not a matter of the hand being centered. It's probably a matter that they're not bending the wrist back to the right far enough because that's an unnatural motion. So those are your diagnostics. There is the occasional right-handed student that overcompensates so that their right hand is to the left of center, it's overcompensated, but that's unusual. Typically, if a right-handed person has a strong left arch, and a weak right arch, they're not bending the hand far enough back. Very common. If the opposite is true, strong right arch, weak left arch, typically the hand is off center. So these are things you check for, where as sighted people get that information by just simply looking at the person. They don't think about the fact that there are other clues out there that allow you to do the same diagnostic. Some of it, in terms of remediating it, some of it, again by monitoring it, but my view is the best way to remediate a bad habit is to put a person in a circumstance where the environment makes that bad habit a problem. And by that I mean if somebody has, for example, just a very poor arch, put him in an environment where there is a lot of clutter, and they'll quickly figure out that there is a point to having a good balanced arch. I tried, when I taught, very much to make the technique very relevant, as opposed to just simply drilling people on mechanics."

AD: "How much study of a given student precedes your first visit or your first session outdoors, and does that study happen coincidentally with your first time out with a student?"

FS: It depends on the teaching situation, if you're home teaching versus if you're teaching in a facility. I had the advantage that most of the work I did was teaching in a facility, and so therefore, I had a big building, and I could practice on in-door skills, and some in-door orientation, before taking them out. Now if you're working with somebody in their home, then you're going to need to get them out on the street right away. And it depends if the person lives on a nice quiet residential street with good sidewalks, great. You take them right out front, and start in. If they're on a busy or a street with no sidewalks or bad sidewalks, you may have to take that person to where ever you can to get them started. Now the traditional O & M people want that person to start functioning independently as quickly as possible in whatever environment. Whether it's a facility environment or in their home environment, you want them to start functioning independently as quickly as you can. And so one of the things that was different in the way that I believe teaching cane travel is much more independence on the part of the student. In other words, take an in-door environment; I would start a student on the basic two-point touch technique. I'd have them rehearse it until I saw that the person could do it consistently and safely. And then I'd start giving the person routes around the center. At first, I might tiptoe along behind, and monitor the student, so I could gather information about the student. But a lot of that rehearsal would have been done on their own. And then they'd come back, and they'd report back to me, and we'd debrief on how the session went. We do the same thing when we go outside, teach them the skills to be able to function. The facility where I taught, we had a fairly quiet residential area to the south, and more light business to the north, so it was great. Right there, adjacent to the facility, I had a variety of environments. But I'd take the student out, get him familiar with the quiet residential area, make sure they had the techniques so they could find drop-offs safely, and give them the basic techniques, and then send them out on independent travel routes. So from the very beginning, my view is that you say to the student: your safety is dependent on your consistent application of the skills you're learning, not on having me constantly there to hold your hand. Now the traditional O & M people claim they do the same thing. But the solo routes they do are much fewer, and I think frankly the traditional O & M strategy has a much greater focus on safety being the responsibility of the instructor, and I think that's counter-productive. I think the opposite really helps build confidence much more dramatically and much more quickly."

AD: "In your career, had you met a variety of students as far as differing abilities, and degree of acuity? Was there a concentration of one or another type of visual impairment or additional disability?"

FS: "I worked with a wide range. I worked with people who had physical disabilities, particularly ones that effected balance. I worked with people who had hearing problems. I worked with people of all ages. I worked with young children, as young as about four or five, I guess would be the youngest, through people who were eighty. You know I think part of what you do as a teacher is, what you do teaching any subject… if I came to you for guitar lessons, if you taught it all the time, you'd have a certain approach. And so then all of a sudden you get a student who's got some neuropathy, and they have some feeling problems in their hands, well you may have to alter your approach some. But it's not like you're going to have to go and take a special course to help teach that person. Most of what you know is still going to be applicable. And so you start making adaptations until you find things that work."

AD: "Had you also had any developmentally disabled students?"

FS: "Yes."

AD: "There is the concept that when working with developmentally delayed students, the emphasis is more orientation than mobility. Can you explain why that would be so?"

FS: "The distinction is that mobility is the mechanics of using the cane, and finding drop-offs, etc. But the more difficult skill is the orientation. Again, there is no rule of thumb; even if you took a population of people with normal intelligence, some people just have better spacial awareness than others. And so you modify what you do accordingly. And of course you get into working with people with developmental disabilities. Part of what you do is, again, try to diagnose what works and what doesn't work. For example, I had a student who was afraid of falling. And so what had happened is she had been taught to go up or down stairs, she should turn sideways, and hold on to the rail, and then side step one step at a time down a flight of steps. That's how she'd been taught in the institution where she had grown up. And she was very afraid of falling. Okay, now the first time I worked with her on crossing streets, she came to a street, came to the corner, found the corner. But then to cross, she turned sideways, stepped off, but now she's not facing across the street anymore. She's facing down the street. Then she started walking. Well, she walked a good half block, and plus her cane was hitting the curb along side her. So ordinarily, a person would know that if you're crossing a street, you don't have a curb next to you. And, of course, none of these things leapt out at her. The first thing I had to do was remediate simply the problem of stepping off, turning, and losing her orientation because the obvious clues that help you and me reorient weren't obvious to her. Now she did improve considerably over time, but the first thing I had to do was just fix the mechanics of having her turn sideways when she went off the step, and then practice with her until I got her where she could just step off a curb, so she could come up to an intersection, stop through her line of travel, and make a safe crossing. I could go through dozens of examples like this, and some of them you can generalize, and some of them you can't. But I never again had a student with that particular problem. But again, over time, with experience in working with people, you start saying: Well okay, if the person isn't tuning into this or that, can I help them do that, can I help them make sense of the environment? Keep working with it, until you feel like you've done as best you can for them."

AD: "How do you test a student? How did you get your proof that you had taught a student well enough?"

FS: "I think it's different than with the conventional approach. And by that I would say that I was taught as a blind person under a conventional model, and then I was trained in a university under a conventional model, and I think there was a lot more emphasis on the mechanics. The mechanics are the easy part. What I think is much more subtle is the confidence aspect, and the problem solving aspect. In other words, there are things that… Alright, I'm going to use a wild example. In this room, there's a coffee pot. Now if I want to make coffee in the morning, there will be two packs of coffee. One will be decaf, and one will be regular. Now I like regular coffee. So I can sit here with tears running down my cheeks, and say: Gosh, I wish I knew, but I don't, so I guess I won't have any. Okay, or I could call up the hotel, and say please send a bellman up to tell me, because I'm blind, and I don't know. Or knowing that I'm going to be staying in a hotel, when I check in, since they typically have extra packs of coffee at the front desk, when I check in, I could ask for a pack of regular, so that when I came upstairs, I didn't have to worry about which one was which. I knew. I had a pack of regular. Or if I like strong coffee, I could put both packs in, and brew them together, until I have regular. Now this is the same thing with O & M. It isn't there is any magical way for me to pick up two packs of coffee, and discern which is regular and which is decaf. But on the other hand, it doesn't mean I'm helpless. So to me, the thing…I mean, why did I send that student up a street, knowing that he was going to run into a park? I did it because I wanted him to truly, when he left, feel comfortable going into a totally new environment, and not being intimidated by the unexpected. Now not every student I had could do that. But every student I had, I wanted to push that student as far as I could. And at some point, we basically ran out of time. In other words, I suppose there's an upper limit. But frankly, your travel, my travel, could be improved with more practice, and more experiences. Every time you and I hit something new, but it's like the coffee. If we hit something new, and we don't have confidence, then we stop, and we wait for someone to bail us out. But if we have confidence, we go and explore it. And then we build our repertoire of experience so that we're better travelers the next time we get that."

AD: "So a good assessment then is putting the student in a situation that is similar to the situation they were trained in, and then seeing if they can apply, and problem solve, so that you can say: Okay, tell me what happened? And based on their self analysis or in the relating of it to you, that in itself is an assessment, and you decide whether they had indeed learned the concept or skill or whether they need to work next on this or that?"

FS: "Yes, although it's not quite so clinical. And partly, to use a religious example, it's sort of like how do you know when somebody's acquired salvation? Partly, it's their own internal assessment. So essentially, one of the things I convey to students is a sense of what they should expect from the learning experience. In other words, say to them: These are things blind people relate to. You're in a meeting in a strange place. You've got to go to the bathroom. Do you feel comfortable just getting up and going out, and trying to find it? Or at an airport, while you're sitting at a gate, do you feel like you have to get somebody to help you or do you feel confident? It's not that it's some kind of miraculous technique. Do you feel comfortable getting up, and going, and doing what you want or do you view movement as stressful? Do you go to the restaurant here or order room service because you're just unwilling to go out and find the TGI Friday's? Not can you. That's a different question. The mechanics aren't that hard. You can get people to the point where they know they can go down to the desk. They can get some basic directions. They could go out of the hotel. They can walk three blocks, and find a Friday's, and come back. Is the prospect of doing that so overwhelming that you don't do it, even though you want to? I can't answer that for a student. But I say to a student: The thing is giving you enough experience to get you over that sense of travel being exhausting, being monumental. If you're sitting at a gate, and you have an hour wait for your flight, and you want a cup of coffee, you don't have to be the world's most accomplished traveler to get up, and go find it, and get back, and be at ease or relaxed, and comfortable doing that. Now maybe some other blind guy who has better natural travel skills might do it more efficiently or a little faster. So what? We saw people making food today. To cook, do I have to be as adept as a professional chef when I chop up an onion? No, I'm sure I'm not, but I don't sit there, and dread chopping up an onion. That's the level that people should be able to expect in their travel. Again, not that all of us will achieve some ultimate level, but you ought not to feel at the mercy of the world around you."

AD: "So should then the student's perception be that they are taking a risk while they're building that confidence?"

FS: "I would call it more a curiosity than a risk taking. A risk taking means that I might get thrown out of that raft, hit my head on a rock, and die. That's a risk, but curiosity is to open up a cook book and say: I'm going to make a new recipe, and maybe I'll flub it, and maybe I won't, but I won't die. I might go out, and make a bad crossing or get tangled up in a parking lot or have some other problem. But I won't die because I have enough basic skills that…teaching people to not die is not that hard. No, I mean it really isn't. There are basic skills. The hard things are the orientation, and the confidence."

AD: "In the field of O & M, there are considered a certain number of distances, at arms length, from thirteen feet away or from fifty feet away, from which an instructor should assess or observe a student. How had you translated having to assess or observe from those distances for yourself as a blind student seeking to complete a program and become certified in O & M?"

FS: "One of the problems with the conventional approach is the paradigm is that the safety is ensured by the instructor, and more to the point, by the instructor's vision. And as long as that's your starting point, then blind people will never be very good at it because we don't have vision. But I think that it misses the point in a more substantive way in that, as I was talking about earlier, what you want to build immediately is confidence in using the techniques, and the application of the basic techniques. Frankly, my students have much more truly independent travel then what you get under the conventional model. And the thing that's ironic about that is one of the arguments used to deny certification to blind people is…well, a blind person could never be more than an arm's length away as an instructor, and therefore your student won't learn a sense of independence. Well frankly, how much sense of independence do you get when a sighted person is fifteen feet behind you? You know that person is monitoring so that if anything dangerous happens, he can intervene. No, I was not always an arm's length away. Anyway, it shows that assumption that safety is the responsibility of the instructor, and not the student. Now obviously, the student can't be responsible for safety until he or she has skills. But each step of skills acquisition leads to them being responsible for that."

AD: "Do you believe there is still general resistance to our entrance into the field?"

FS: "Absolutely. There's no question. Some people are talking much more expansively about it. But the profession has in a very short time certified any blind people, and it's a small number. They haven't truly recognized that there is a different approach that blind people use."

AD: "So, again, this is another issue of sighted people's perception, and just living with sight daily, always blocking what we can truly do in spite of a lack of visual acuity?"

FS: "Yes."

AD: "In other words, it's their fear for themselves is thrust upon us. Would you say that the issue is mainly the safety factor?"

FS: 'Yes. Safety is almost always the excuse for discrimination. You know, what if I was going to teach…oh, how in the world…what if a child brought a weapon into class? You wouldn't be able to see it. You can't… okay, a truck, pulling up to an intersection, had a load of lumber strapped on it. The truck stopped, and the load shifted, and a bunch of boards came flying over the cab of the truck, and clattered onto the crosswalk. And one of the sighted instructors said to me: This is why a blind person shouldn't be teaching O & M because you would not have been able to intervene. And I said: Now get real here. You're going to tell me that somehow, as that load of lumber started to shift, you would have seen it, and you're like Superman, and you would have leapt forward and snatched your student out of the way?"

AD: "Exactly. When I had gone into my training for general education, and I knew what was on people's minds, the kid with the gun, which you brought up. Who's to say that just because I have vision, I'm going to be the one to convince that kid not to shoot? If I learned anything about kids, if they have access to a gun, and they feel so compelled to bring it to class, for whatever reason, they will."

FS: "A kid pulls a gun out of his pocket, and the fact that a teacher can see it from thirty feet, they can somehow stop the kid from shooting it? Well, this is how ridiculous this truck thing was. So I said to the guy: Come on, this was an accident, I mean anybody in that intersection would have been hit. And he said: Oh no. As a trained mobility instructor, if I had seen that truck coming down the road, I would have realized that that load would shift, and I never would have allowed my student to cross. Now what that really says is that a blind person is never safe. And I think what really troubles me about that is that this guy was just boldfaced lying. Mobility instructors do not do that. And yet he shook his head very solemnly, and said: Oh yes, as a trained mobility instructor, I would have looked down the street and seen that truck, and thought to myself, that might happen or this is a potentially unsafe situation. It's a bunch of hooey."

AD: "Life has hazards for everyone."

FS: "I think that the general rule of thumb is that if a student is getting into a situation where he or she might be at risk, you need to position yourself where you could intervene if you needed to, and I did that. For example, if you're working with a student on lighted crossings, and they're fairly new at it. You're not a hundred percent sure yet that they've got the skills, and they're not going to drift into traffic. Alright, so you start to cross. The light turns green, the student steps off. But let's say a bus comes along or something really noisy. Well if I'm not sure that that student might not…if I'm not entirely sure of that student's capacity, and now I'm in a situation where I can't hear the student, then I'm going to move up so that I'm between that student and parallel traffic. So that student would have to bump into me before veering into traffic. I think there's some sort of common sense in terms of whether you're sighted or blind, if your student is potentially in a hazardous situation. I mean, the whole reason they're with you initially is that they're learning the skills. They don't come to you with the skills. So you need to be able to intervene if you need to. But I guess where I differ though from the conventional approach is they think that that message of an instructor in a meeting builds confidence, makes a student feel safer. That might make the student feel safer in one respect, but frankly I think it works counter to confidence. In other words, to me, people come to us with the assumption that somebody else has to be responsible for their safety. And so to say to them: Don't worry, I'll be responsible for your safety, perpetuates that thinking. You want the student to make the transition to safety so that he or she can be responsible for their own safety, given the techniques.

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