Mentoring Inservice Teachers to Support their Inclusive Science Teaching Practices for Students with Visual Impairment

Abstract

The Accessible Science for Students with Visual Impairment (ASVI) mentoring program aimed at developing innovative teaching methods for teaching science effectively to third-grade and fourth-grade students with visual impairment (VI). In order to achieve this, the program aimed to guide classroom or science teachers to develop or adapt instructional materials based on the objectives of the science class and also the needs of students with VI. The study was conducted during 2019-2020 at Aksaray University, in Turkey, with the participation of 10 faculty members (as the mentors) and 23 inservice teachers (as the mentees). The main purpose of the study was to investigate the inservice teachers’ perceptions (as mentees) about the faculty members’ mentoring roles, and to understand the mentors’ self-perceptions. This research was designed as a qualitative case study. The study’s findings revealed that mentors as the focus of the current study, they had the opportunity to implement procedures based on effective mentoring, and were thereby able to help the inservice teachers develop professionally in their preparations. Mentoring was highlighted as a means of overcoming some of the problems that the inservice teachers’ faced in their educating of students with special needs.

Keywords

• inclusive education
• visually impaired
• mentoring
• inservice teacher education