Working With Blind Student Led Brouwer To NHD Project
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
Last year, Raquel Brouwer, now a Lakeview Middle School seventh-grader, got to work with a fellow student who was blind.
“He actually used a Braille typewriter, and I thought that was really interesting and I had never really put much thought into the blind and their way of life,” she said.
When she met the student, she decided to do some research on the blind and visually impaired and she stumbled upon the name of Louis Braille. From that was born her National History Day project, an exhibit board titled “Triumph Out of Darkness: The Legacy of Louis Braille.”
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle and high school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages students to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland. The theme for NHD this year is “Triumph and Tragedy in History.”
“Louis Braille is the inventor of the code for languages, Braille. He became blind when he was very young, and (was) inspired when he met an army officer who had invented night writing, a system for the army,” Brouwer said.
Night writing was a system the army used during the French Revolution to read and write in the dark without using light.
She said Braille wanted to make some improvements on night writing. “When he made improvements, he was only a young teen (13) when he actually finished Braille, and he was blind when he made it,” Brouwer, who is 13, said.
Braille went to a blind academy and became a teacher there.
“Originally, the Braille system was not liked at all. They originally used embossed letters and the people who were not blind were the ones making the decision and decided that embossed letters were fine. And Louis Braille did not see this,” Brouwer said. “It actually took two years after (Braille’s) death for the French to actually accept Braille as a national language. And then around 10 years later, the U.S. decided to accept Braille for general use.”
He was born Jan. 4, 1809, in Coupvray, France, and died Jan. 6, 1852, in Paris, France.
Braille never got to see his system put into use.
“It was really tragic and I thought it went really well with this year’s theme, ‘Triumph and Tragedy,’ because he worked really hard. He was a musician, and so he invented music for the blind. And numbers for the blind, and letters. And with all this hard work, he never really got to see his system become a success,” Brouwer said.
She said he is a hero especially to many people who are blind. “He’s given them a way of life that they now can become employed,”?she said.
Braille is “actually an unused system” because of a lack of teachers for it, she said. “Which is one of the reasons I wanted to do the project because there’s not many teachers who teach Braille, and because of that, around 70 percent of blind adults in the U.S. don’t know Braille and that ends them becoming unemployed,” she said.
Technology is providing accessibility to the blind, but it doesn’t always help because “you get a lack of grammar and a lack of literature,” she said.
Brouwer said more Braille teachers are needed. She said she’s tried to learn Braille, but it’s difficult.
“It’s a code for a language, not necessarily a language,” she said.
Working on the NHD project and advancing to nationals in her first year, she said she’s learned a lot about how “overlooked”?blind people are.
“I want to urge a lot of people to learn (Braille). It’s a really interesting topic,” she said.
