The East Texas Lighthouse for the Blind has an opening for an Assistive Technology Instructor.? I have worked at East Texas Lighthouse for a year now and absolutely love it!? We not only work with individuals in our 40-county area, but we also have a great national AT training program (and we have had international students as well).? The Assistive Technology Instructor is responsible for the successful training of all AT clients, identifying and evaluating new AT tools for ETLB, and partnering with all other areas to identify and facilitate new offerings as needed. ?Receiving referrals from the Client Services Case Manager and the TWC Director, the AT Instructor performs all duties relevant to clients and employees accomplishing their AT goals including but not limited to assessments, guidance, planning, training, overall case management, and follow up.? You can find the job posting at the following site: .

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Julie D. Henry, COMS

Orientation & Mobility Specialist

411 W. Front | Tyler, TX | 75702

O: 903.590.4356 | M: 903.316.2272

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Tennessee School for the Blind is looking to fill a position for an orientation and mobility instructor. See links below for information or visit the school’s .

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Joanna Credeur, M.Ed., M.A., CTVI, COMS

Orientation & Mobility Specialist

Tennessee School for the Blind

115 Stewarts Ferry Pike ??Nashville, TN 37214

O: (615) 231-7443 ??F: (615) 871-9312

C: (337) 842-8977

Joanna.Credeur@...

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“Creating Contributing, Participating Members of Society”

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Dear everyone, John here:

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Today someone shared with me a review of my book by a disabled Chinese scholar.? She'd first learned about the book through the Chinese translation of "Against Access."? It warmed my heart to know that the essay sparked conversations there!

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I especially loved that it was not lost on her that there are other contexts to consider, and intersectionalities.? We need to hear from more people how things are woven differently.

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Copied and pasted below.? And the link is:

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John Lee Clark. (2023). Touch The Future: A Manifesto in Essays.

Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. ISBN-13: 9781324035367

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Luanjiao Hu, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Lurie Institute for Disability Policy, Brandeis University

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aggiehu [at] brandeis [dot] edu

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Touch The Future: A Manifesto in Essays is a collection of essays by John Lee Clark, a Minnesota-based “DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the most thrilling development in DeafBlind history, the Protactile movement” (Clark, 2023). Clark was born Deaf and gradually became blind due to a progressive-blindness condition known as Usher syndrome. He is the author of several books including How to Communicate and Where I

Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience and the editor of anthologies Deaf American Poetry and Deaf Lit Extravaganza.

Recognized in the field for his work and contributions, Clark has been a recipient of multiple prestigious awards and fellowships.

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As a Chinese woman with a physical disability currently living and working in the U.S. in academia, I first read Clark from a translated essay of his, “Against Access”, on a Chinese platform committed to introducing anthropological works (Tying Knots, 2023). This happens to be one of the first essays in this book. I remember the heated discussion sparked by this translated work in the Chinese disability community. The idea of “against access” was counter-intuitive and revolutionary, and it resonated with many readers to some extent for its unapologetically claiming disabled people’s subjectivity and power. Clark’s writing is incisive in critiquing prevalent ableist manifestations in disabled persons’ lives, specifically, DeafBlind people’s lives. Admittedly, his writing should be understood from disabled persons’ experience in the U.S. legal, social, historical, and cultural context. Some of his writings may not be the most relevant in disabled people of other countries, yet the insights he gained as a DeafBlind person in a dominantly non-disabled world are precise and could be highly relatable for disabled people elsewhere.

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I found this book quite enjoyable and accessible to read, compared with the common academic literature that I often read as a disabled advocate and academic. My reading experience was almost like listening to an exciting guide or mentor introducing me to a whole new world, or, to put it another way, seeing the common world we live in from a whole new perspective. The writing of the book invites one’s visualization and inspires interaction. Speaking from someone outside of the DeafBlind community, my impression of the book is that it is genuine, imaginative, lively, welcoming, witty, poetic, at times intimate, and overall, highly educational. One can feel the liveliness and welcoming vibe starting from the beginning and many other parts of the book:

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“Welcome, welcome. Steady, friend. Here’s a nice textured wall. I know, I know. You’ve stumbled into a new world. DeafBlind people have been here all along, but now everything is spinning faster than before. Everything you touch is alive with brave and precious pasts, which have now accrued and are opening up futures. This is the power of Protactile. We want to share it with you.” (p. 1)

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The central purpose of the book is to introduce readers to a world of DeafBlind people and to share the power of Protactile. Protactile is a transformative and powerful language born in 2007 from the DeafBlind community. It is still developing and evolving in an exciting way.

Clark does an excellent job conveying the central purpose of the book via his vivid, friendly, exhilarated, and witty writing. To my knowledge, there are not too many scholars with DeafBlindness in academia. Nor have I encountered much academic or grey literature on issues of Protactile or DeafBlind experiences, except for the ones on the famous Hellen Keller and the contemporary DeafBlind activist Haben Girma in the U.S. This book fills an important gap in disability studies literature by providing a critical DeafBlind perspective and a participant/observant account of the exciting Protactile Movement.

Writing from a disabled advocate and academic’s perspective, I resonated with Clark’s writing greatly and was challenged to reflect and gain new insights on disability inclusion.

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Totalling 187 pages, the book includes a touching dedication essay serving as an introductory text, a main body of four parts, and ends with acknowledgements. I was brought to tears reading the dedication essay, which touched upon the story of Leslie, a multi-talented DeafBlind person, an activist, and a friend. It was bittersweet to read Leslie’s story: his multi-talents, his work and experience looking for work, his impact on the DeafBlind community, and his destiny as someone who’s more disabled by the ableist system/environment rather than his own DeafBlindness. I grieved for the loss of such a talented soul in an ableist world. Unfortunately, our world has been underappreciating and neglecting disabled people such as Leslie for too long.

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Each part of the book is made of three to four essays of various lengths. The four parts add well together to depict a contemporary and contextualized DeafBlind worldview, a lived reality, an evolving community, and the promise and power of Protactile. Part one “Knowing and Being Known” shares how Protactile as a new language was born and how it evolved out of a community. Clark radically problematizes the commonly accepted approach, assumptions, and philosophy in creating “access” to include people with disabilities, hence the title “Against Access”. By providing multiple real-life stories from DeafBlind people including his own experience, Clark introduces Protactile to the world of readers and to provoke readers’ interest in getting to know this language. In his sharing, Clark exudes pride being an active participant and witness in the Protactile movement. Protactile comes natural to DeafBlind community and has immense power to help DeafBlind people stay connected within and beyond their community. As Clark writes, “whenever I talked with fellow tactile listeners, however, I feel alive…. I felt my most authentic, most eloquent, most myself” (p.

33).

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From Part Two (Forever and fluently fumbling) to Part Four (How it feels to us), Clark further dives into different aspects of the DeafBlind world and the Protactile movement. For example, he introduces some key concepts such as “distantism”, “co-navigation”/”co-navigators”, and a brief history of the name “DeafBlind”. He shares DeafBlind experience in the virtual space: how DeafBlind community has traditionally maintained contact and continues to communicate and connect in the virtual space. He writes about how he and other DeafBlind people experience (or not) art in different settings (such as museum, garden, theater, etc.). By writing about the reading environment for DeafBlind people, Clark explains the interesting point that “to be a poet is a very DeafBlind thing” and the role of writing in the DeafBlind community. Lastly, Clark drives the point that providing “access” to maintain/replicate the status quo of a hearing-sighted world does not count as true inclusion. To facilitate true and meaningful inclusion or integration of DeafBlind people (and by extension, disabled people), a transformative framing is needed, and a set of new questions should be asked. Fitting in the existing world is not the end goal for DeafBlind people. As Clark writes, “we’re interested in collaboration. We’re interested in changing the world” (p. 182).

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This beautifully written book comes with many strengths. Clark is undoubtedly a trailblazer in disability studies literature with his eloquent writing grounded in his experience and observations in the DeafBlind community. The book provokes deep reflections on many present practices of disability inclusion. It provides readers with rich texts to understand DeafBlind experience as well as the Protatile movement. Perhaps one limitation of the book lies in its lack of intersectional lens, as there seems little accounts or perspective from other marginalized positions. The book is written from Clark’s personal experience as well as from the perspective of DeafBlind community that he has had access to as a white heterosexual DeafBlind male born into an ASL-speaking family. As readers would imagine, race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, citizenship status, geographic location, and educational background etc. all influence one’s access to resources and experience with disability (such as

DeafBlindness) in the U.S. context.

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References

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Clark, J. L. (2023). John Lee Clark. Clark, J. L. (2023). Touch the future: A manifesto in essays. W.W.

Norton and Company.

Tying Knots. (2023). Tying Knots.

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Dear everyone, John here:

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I’m delighted to share news that the paperback edition of “Touch the Future” is now available!? To celebrate the occasion, there will be a book event on Tuesday, October 22, from 6 to 8 p.m. in Montreal.? Link to the event announcement:

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https://m-a-i.qc.ca/en/2024/10/book-launch-john-lee-clark/

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The location is:

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MAI—Montréal, arts interculturels

3680, rue Jeanne-Mance, suite 103

Montréal (Québec) Canada H2X 2K5

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LSQ and ASL interpreters will be present.

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The book is available through all the major print and audio book vendors, as well as Bookshare.

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Amazon is currently offering a sale on the hardcover edition, where it is now slightly cheaper than the paperback edition.?

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Amazon:

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Other places you can purchase copies include:

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Barnes & Noble:

Books-A-Million:

Bookshop.org:

Apple Books:

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A revelatory collection of essays on the DeafBlind experience and the untapped potential of a new tactile language.

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Born Deaf into an ASL-speaking family and blind by adolescence, John Lee Clark learned to embrace the possibilities of his tactile world. He is on the frontlines of the Protactile movement, which gave birth to an unprecedented language and way of life based on physical connection.

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In a series of paradigm-shifting essays, Clark reports on seismic developments within the DeafBlind community and challenges the limitations of sighted and hearing norms. In “Against Access,” he interrogates the prevailing advocacy for “accessibility” that re-creates a shadow of a hearing-sighted experience, and in “Tactile Art,” he describes his relationship to visual art and breathtaking encounters with tactile sculpture. He offers a brief history of the term “DeafBlind,” distills societal discrimination against DeafBlind people into “Distantism,” sheds light on the riches of online community, and advocates for “Co-Navigation,” a new way of exploring the world together without a traditional guide.

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Touch the Future?brims with passion, energy, humor, and imagination as Clark takes us by the hand and welcomes us into the exciting landscape of Protactile communication. A distinct language of taps, signs, and reciprocal contact, Protactile emerged from the inadequacies of ASL—a visual language even when pressed into someone’s hand—with the power to upend centuries of DeafBlind isolation.

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As warm and witty as he is radical and inspiring, Clark encourages us—disabled and non-disabled alike—to reject stigma and discover the ways we are connected.?Touch the Future?is a dynamic appeal to rethink the meanings of disability, access, language, and inclusivity, and to reach for a future we can create together.

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Praise for Touch the Future

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“John Lee Clark’s fervent manifesto for the Protactile language and movement will blow your mind, enliven your body, and connect you to other people in unexpected ways. Touch the Future is a book that enlarges the human world.”—Edward Hirsch, author of Stranger by Night

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“John Lee Clark writes against the grain with intellectual ferocity and dry wit; with linguistic playfulness and unsparing precision; and above all, with an expansive, curious, tireless compassion. Society may ignore and isolate DeafBlind people, but as Clark shows us again and again, it is the sighted and hearing world that is marginalized by its failure to understand DeafBlind life, and never the other way around.”—Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind

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“John Lee Clark’s essays radiate with excitement and urgency. . . . To read Clark is not simply to be taught something by him, but to find yourself immersed and seeking alongside him—you don’t just learn, you come away changed.”—Katie Booth, author of The Invention of Miracles

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“Touch the Future opens doors to the multiple worlds of disability. . . . This is a book for anyone who is interested in the life of the imagination and the mind.”—Stephen Kuusisto, author of Eavesdropping

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“John Lee Clark is equal parts master storyteller, wry comedian, erudite historian, and brilliant teacher. . . . At times urgent, often hilarious, and always illuminating, Touch the Future will touch readers’ hearts while opening their minds to a whole new world.”—Robert Siebert, co-author of Deaf Utopia

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“Protactile leads the way in this exquisite book that invites us into the curious and joyful crafting of choreographies of encounter. . . . This is not a book to hold at a distance. This is a book that teaches us how to get into the tangle, knee against knee, hand enthusiastically tapping the thigh, to feel the world differently.”—Erin Manning, author of For a Pragmatics of the Useless

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“Through John Lee Clark's writing, we witness the emergence of a new language, new sensibilities, new art forms, new forms of embodiment and sociality—nothing less than a new mode of existence. Clark's eloquent writing brings to voice one of the most significant cultural movements of our time.”—Brian Massumi, author of Parables for the Virtual

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Kansas requires full State licensure and graduation from an accredited program to be a TVI. They accept ACVREP Certification for the teaching of O&M. When I was teaching in multiple school districts, most of them required that I provide a copy of my ACBREP Certification, and many district staff referred to it as my “license.”

Michael Byington, Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist

President of Kansas Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Inc.

> Membership Coordinator for Friends In Art of the American Council of the Blind

> 712 S. Kansas Avenue

> Suite 414D-F

> Topeka, Kansas 66603

> (785) 221-7111

> ByingtonCOMS@...??

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Missouri is the only state with a B.R.I.T.E. Bill (the NFB national initiative called the B.R.I.T.E. Act) to my knowledge. It went into effect in Aug 2022 and now mandates an OMS possess either COMS or NOMC and it requires and O&M Assessment be provided for any child suspected of a VI. Missouri’s State Plan does not consider OMS a licensed teaching position – and there is implications for that regarding the public school retirement system.

Kevin

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