“What colour is the wind?” – A talk by Prof. Boguslaw Marek
Date: Thu Feb 06, 2014 - Thu Feb 06, 2014
Location: Asian Confluence Centre, Shillong , Hosts: Asian Confluence
Location: Asian Confluence Centre, Shillong , Hosts: Asian Confluence
Asian Confluence hosted Professor Boguslaw ‘Bob’ Marek, OBE, Department of ELT Typhlomethodology, to deliver a talk with the aim to reach out to the people who are visually impaired and desire education as means to realize their dreams in life. The purpose was to address their challenges and make it easy for them to garner education.
Prof. Boguslaw founder of “Hungry Fingers” – an organization that specializes in designing educational tools which help totally blind learners understand difficult concepts based on visual experience and spatial relations.
In his talk titled “What colour is the wind?” he touched upon the many challenges and solutions that is associated with the world of a blind person. On recollecting his motivation for helping blind people, he shared that he took up the initiative post his PhD when he realized that something was missing from his life. He said that visually impaired people face various challenges in life, which he despises to call problems, and they have solutions. While informing the audience about the different types of visual impairment he gave the example of a child with a blurred vision who can see things as if through a key hole. “For them large printed text is essential,” he said.
Sharing his rich information and experiences on helping blind children overcoming their challenges he said that the common men’s perception of blindness is to treat it as a disability rather than perceive it through some means. “They learn things with a sense of touch and they have made their names all over, such as, blind accordion player, jazz musician, climbing Mount Everest, rope walking, shooting robbers in their chest, earning imprisonment for robbing banks,” he said as the near full hall burst into laughter.
