Landscapes of literacy: how visually impaired students navigate the academic space

Abstract

My research explores the intersection between disability, linguistic landscapes and academic literacy in an attempt to understand how three visually impaired students at the University of the Western Cape navigate the academic space, and the ways in which this can constrain or enhance their success as students. In addition, it explores the various ways in which signage in spaces of learning is ‘read’ or ‘sensed’ and incorporated into visually impaired students’ personal narratives of place. Furthermore, this research explores how visually impaired students engage with academic literacies. This research makes use of a qualitative approach. The data includes narrated walking interviews and a focus group interview with participants. Using purposive sampling, three participants were selected to take part in twelve narrated walks and one focus group interview. This data was transcribed and analysed thematically. Through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), I generated three themes that capture patterned meaning across my data: using your senses to orientate yourself, navigation through social engagement, and positioning yourself for academic success. These themes represent my interpretive analysis of how the visually impaired students in my study actively engage with their environment, peers, and academic spaces to create conditions for learning and success. Drawing on the social model of disability (Shakespeare, 2007), the decolonial approach (Canagarajah, 2023), literacy as a social practice (Barton, 1994; Prinsloo and Baynham, 2008; and Hamilton, 2010) and a sensescapes approach (Prada, 2024), my analysis emphasizes the multisensory and embodied nature of navigating the academic space, highlighting the interplay between power, space, and identity in shaping literacy practices. Through their senses, multimodal resources, such as text, audio and assistive technologies, students interact and move through their academic space. They draw on shared knowledge and support networks within the university in order to accomplish navigating both the physical space and their academic work. In addition, these students make use of the multimodal signage in the linguistic landscape in order to move through and navigate the space. Understanding how visually impaired students move through their university and how this intersects with literacy highlights that learning does not occur only in the classroom or within the mind, but through a student’s embodied, social, and sensory engagement with the academic environment.