October 26, 2026
By Morrison
A critical examination of the prevailing educational frameworks shaping DeafBlind instruction
The educational experiences of DeafBlind students continue to be shaped by assumptions that deserve careful examination. A review of DeafBlind Model Classroom Resources, developed through the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, provides an opportunity to explore a broader issue within DeafBlind education: the persistent tendency to position DeafBlind students within frameworks developed primarily for students with significant disabilities rather than within frameworks grounded in DeafBlind culture, identity, language, and lived experience. The resource itself describes its focus as serving students with “the most significant disabilities, including deaf-blindness” and provides materials emphasizing emergent literacy, partner-assisted scanning, remnant books, adapted writing, and related instructional support. [med.unc.edu]
The purpose of this critique is not to dismiss the value of these practices for students who benefit from them. Many of the strategies presented have served important roles in supporting learners with extensive support needs. Rather, the concern lies in how such resources are frequently interpreted within educational systems. When materials developed within significant-disability frameworks are presented as DeafBlind educational resources, they risk reinforcing a longstanding misconception: that “deafblindness” itself is inherently associated with significant cognitive disabilities, reduced academic potential, or the need for substantially modified educational experiences. This misconception has shaped DeafBlind education for generations. We need to change that.
The Historical Conflation and Perception of Students who are DeafBlind with Students of Significant Disability
Throughout much of modern special education, DeafBlind students have often been grouped alongside students identified as having severe, multiple, or significant disabilities – and viewed from a medical model as an object (using and referring to them as students with “DeafBlindness” as from a medical standpoint rather than a cultural and linguistic standpoint) . As a result, much of the field’s research, professional preparation programs, intervention models, and classroom practices have emerged from educational contexts serving students with extensive support needs. While these frameworks may be appropriate for some DeafBlind learners who do exhibit additional disabilities, they do not reflect the diversity of the DeafBlind population.
DeafBlind students are not a homogeneous group. Some students may have additional intellectual, developmental, neurological, or medical disabilities, while others do not. Many DeafBlind students demonstrate age-appropriate cognitive abilities, engage in abstract reasoning, master complex academic content, pursue higher education, and develop adequate to high level communication systems. Yet educational planning frequently begins with assumptions associated with significant disability rather than assumptions associated with lived experiences as a DeafBlind person that have a DeafBlind identity, culture, and language). However, for a DeafBlind student to emerge into their DeafBlind identity, culture, and language is often not provided and instead deprived of. Instead, they are treated as an individual that needs intensive support that is therapeutic – when that is not the way to go. Due to this assumption and approach, the consequence is profound.
When educators encounter resources that classify DeafBlind students within a significant-disabilities framework, they may unconsciously assume that DeafBlind students require simplified curricula, modified learning objectives, therapeutic approaches that focus too much on their “disabilities,” or alternative educational outcomes. Such assumptions would not be applied for sighted students with comparable cognitive abilities. Instead, they emerge from historical patterns that conflate DeafBlind access barriers with intellectual limitations. The educational challenge facing many DeafBlind students is therefore not merely one of accommodation. It is a challenge of perception.
Access Is More Than Braille and Accommodations
Discussions of accessibility often focus on materials: braille textbooks, accessible technology, tactile graphics, interpreters, or communication supports. While these components are essential, they represent only part of the issue. The more significant challenge concerns access to language, culture, identity, relationships, and information itself – which so many educators overlook.
Most classrooms are built upon visual and auditory assumptions. Students learn not only from formal instruction but also through observation, overheard conversation, incidental interactions, peer exchanges, visual demonstrations, classroom routines, socio-emotional cues through facial expressions, gestures, and environmental cues. These forms of information are so pervasive that educators often fail to recognize them as critical components of learning. For DeafBlind students, however, access to this information cannot be taken for granted, and many are often left out or treated as a third-class citizen among their classmates.
Without intentional efforts to ensure linguistic and cultural accessibility, DeafBlind students may miss substantial portions of what occurs throughout the school day. They may not know when peers are laughing at a joke. They may miss spontaneous classroom conversations. They may lack access to visual references used throughout instruction. They may be excluded from the informal interactions through which social relationships and academic understanding are often developed. The issue is not that these students are incapable of learning… The issue is that they cannot learn from information they never received – it is not accessible for them and that is not their fault. The fault is in the design of the classroom.
Yet educational systems have historically interpreted these gaps in access through a deficit-oriented lens. When students struggle to follow instruction, educators may question the DeafBlind students’ comprehension skills. When students demonstrate delayed language, they may be viewed through a cognitive framework. When students appear disengaged, assumptions are often made about motivation, capacity, or readiness, or their state of mental health. Rarely does the conversation begin with a different question: What information was inaccessible?
From a Rehabilitative Framework to a Cultural and Linguistic Framework
Perhaps the most significant limitation of traditional DeafBlind educational models is their reliance on a rehabilitative orientation and tools. Within this perspective, educational practice focuses on teaching students how to function within environments designed by and for sighted and hearing individuals. The objective becomes adaptation to fit in an able-bodied (or non-DeafBlind) norm. By contrast, an emerging DeafBlind-centered perspective begins from a different premise. The issue is not whether DeafBlind students can adapt to the classroom; the issue is whether classrooms have been designed to include, enhance, and support DeafBlind ways of learning. This distinction reflects the difference between a rehabilitative model and a cultural-linguistic model.
A rehabilitative model focuses on deficits, interventions, and remediation (and not to mention, false assumptions). It asks how students can overcome barriers imposed by their disabilities, conform to the norm.
A cultural-linguistic model focuses on access, belonging, language, identity, culture, and participation. It asks how educational environments can be transformed to enhance the full inclusion of DeafBlind learners.
Within this framework, “deafblindness” is not understood solely as a disability category. This teaches educators that DeafBlind students are understood as having a specified way of experiencing, learning, accessing, and engaging with the world. When DeafBlind students lack opportunities to develop language through cultural-linguistic modalities, when they are deprived of connections to DeafBlind culture and language, or when they are denied opportunities to interact with DeafBlind role models, the consequences can be significant. Educational difficulties that emerge under these conditions are often interpreted as evidence of student limitations when they may instead reflect barriers created by the educational environment itself. What is frequently described as a student problem may, in fact, be an access problem – in other words the space they are in and how they are treated in that space is the problem.
The Missing Voice in DeafBlind Education
One of the clearest omissions within many educational frameworks is the limited involvement of DeafBlind professionals in their development (professionals who are DeafBlind). Educational systems routinely rely upon researchers, teachers, therapists, and administrators who are not DeafBlind nor have the lived experiences to define best practices. Yet DeafBlind consultants, educators, researchers, and community leaders often remain absent from decision-making processes. Often schools refer to vendors that do not have staff who are DeafBlind themselves to work with their DeafBlind students. This absence speaks volumes and does significant harm.
A DeafBlind consultant, a consultant who is DeafBlind, contributes more than technical expertise. They bring lived expertise. They understand: how information flows within DeafBlind environments, tactile communication practices and the positive impact it has, the experience of navigating educational systems not designed with DeafBlind learners in mind, and the relationship between language access, identity development, social participation, and academic achievement. Most importantly, they are often able to identify barriers that others never recognize or assume to recognize.
Here are some examples of having a consultant who is DeafBlind:
A teacher may observe a DeafBlind student who appears inattentive during classroom discussion.
- A DeafBlind consultant will ask whether the DeafBlind student had meaningful access to the discussion in the first place.
A school team may question a DeafBlind student’s language development.
- A DeafBlind consultant would examine whether the DeafBlind student has had consistent access to language.
A teacher may conclude that a DeafBlind student struggles with content.
- A DeafBlind consultant may ask whether the content was ever accessible, and what modality was the content presented in..
These are fundamentally different approaches to understanding educational outcomes.
Reconsidering What Educational Inclusion Means
The future of DeafBlind education requires a shift in perspective and practice. Educational equity cannot be measured solely by physical presence within a classroom or what a typical classroom appears that’s the norm. Nor can inclusion be achieved through curriculum modification alone.
- A DeafBlind student seated within a general education classroom while receiving a substantially simplified curriculum with low expectations is not experiencing educational inclusion.
- A DeafBlind student separated from classroom discourse because communication is inaccessible is not fully participating in the educational community.
- A DeafBlind student who lacks access to language, culture, identity, and information is unlikely to experience the same educational opportunities afforded to peers.
True inclusion requires something more substantial, a true transformation that’s culturally and linguistically sound. This requires recognizing that access is only one component of educational equity as classrooms need to be culturally and linguistically designed. This requires educators to be taught to understand DeafBlind ways of learning, and DeafBlind centered – not centered on “special education” framework. That means, colleges and universities that offer degrees in education, should also have a program that is specified or include Deafblind Education. We have “Special Education,” Deaf Education, Education for the Blind, but nothing for the DeafBlind. This would require investment in DeafBlind leadership by hiring and working closely with educators, consultants, and contractors who are DeafBlind. Most importantly, this shift requires a rejection of the assumption that educational struggles necessarily reflect cognitive limitations.
For too long, DeafBlind students have been evaluated according to their ability to navigate environments that were never designed with them in mind – more the reason why we need to have DeafBlind Education programs in place as a major/degree at colleges and universities. Without this, the result will be a persistent tendency to mistake educational exclusion and inaccessible instruction for intellectual incapacity, language deprivation for cognitive delay.
As DeafBlind scholars, educators, consultants, and community leaders continue to advance new understandings of access, the field faces an important choice. It can continue relying upon frameworks rooted primarily in significant-disability models, or it can embrace models that recognize DeafBlind people as the core members of a linguistic and cultural community with distinct educational needs, strengths, and contributions. The question is no longer whether DeafBlind students can succeed within rigorous educational environments; the question is whether educational systems are willing to create environments and programs in which DeafBlind students have equitable opportunities to do so.
References
Center for Literacy and Disability Studies. (n.d.). Deaf-Blind Model Classroom Resources. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://www.med.unc.edu/healthsciences/clds/resources/deaf-blind-model-classroom-resources [med.unc.edu]
Center for Literacy and Disability Studies. Resource descriptions for emergent literacy goals, partner-assisted scanning, remnant books, predictable chart writing, and related classroom interventions for students with significant disabilities, including deafblindness. [med.unc.edu]
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