Blindness Enters the Classroom

Abstract

This paper addresses blindness in a university classroom. I make use of my experience as a blind professor in order to depict the social significance in the intersection of blindness, sightedness and knowledge. The paper begins with a description of the initial classroom contact between a blind professor and students. It then depicts the presence of sightedness in the classroom in terms of the classroom's social organisation. The paper moves to a discussion of how university teaching makes use of blindness and sightedness to represent ignorance and enlightenment, respectively. The paper ends by reformulating the taken for granted conception of blindness as contingency into an understanding of blindness and the body as an essential aspect of teaching and learning.