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Abstract:
This article reports on a study of teachers in the United Kingdom who use the Moon Code to develop literacy skills through touch in children with visual impairments and additional disabilities. It explores the motives, purposes, and values that underpin the teachers' decisions to embark on and sustain instruction in literacy for these children.
Since the early 1990s, there has been a revival of interest in the United Kingdom in the Moon Code as a possible route to literacy for children with visual impairments and additional disabilities who are unable to read and write in braille. The Moon Code, a line-based tactile code developed in England in the 1840s and once widely used in the United States, survived in the United Kingdom as a code for elderly persons who are blind who lacked the tactile sensitivity to read braille (see Figure 1). A research project, which began in 1992 at the University of Birmingham, England, investigated the possibilities that the Moon Code might offer in developing the literacy of children with visual impairments and additional disabilities. The Moon Code is now embedded in practice in the United Kingdom as an option for teachers who want to develop functional tactile literacy skills in these children, and a dedicated web site (<www.moonliteracy.org.uk>) has been launched for teachers who want to find out more about its use with children. In this article, we explore the motivations and purposes of teachers who use the Moon Code with reference to the salient cultural values of the teachers and the scripts for conduct that govern their actions (Gallimore & Goldenburg, 1993). We consider why teachers who use the Moon Code regard it as useful for the children they are working with and what factors influenced their decisions to instruct the children in literacy through this particular format.
Review of the literature
Attitudes of teachers and researchers toward the development of reading and writing skills in children with cognitive disabilities have changed greatly in recent years (Downing, 2005; Gambrell & Mazzoni, 1999; Justice & Pullen, 2003). However, in the past, visually impaired children with severe additional physical and cognitive disabilities were routinely excluded from literacy activities (Conners, 1992). For example, in their studies of braille reading in the United...