A Very Special Educator
excerpts of an article by Dave DeRoche
Lilli Nielsen, born 78 years ago (in 2005) on a remote Danish island, is the world's premier teacher of the blind and multiply disabled. If the multiply disabled pose the biggest challenge to educators, then Lilli is the ultimate teacher. Dr. Nielsen has all the advanced education degrees, has read all the books and all the research and all the footnotes, and has written many groundbreaking books herself. Her innovative but time-proven theories are known and studied around the world.
Lilli Nielsen was born on a small island at the eastern edge of Denmark. She was the second of seven children, four of whom were born blind. "I was the strange sister," she says, "because I could see." . When charged at age seven with the responsibility of taking care of her blind younger brother, this serious woman with the pixieish smile and twinkling eyes took the assignment very seriously. She devised her own techniques by trial and error and observation.
She started her career as a preschool teacher, then worked in a hospital, became a psychologist, and eventually was hired to be a teacher of the blind. Lilli visited and studied virtually every blind child in Denmark for 30 years, working as a special advisor for Refsnaesskolen, a Danish national institute for blind children.
Lilli has circled the globe. She has given at least 300 three-day one-person seminars and has visited 220 educational institutions in 24 countries. She is determined that her teachings live on. Her followers and students are most numerous in parts of Europe, throughout Australia and South Africa, and in parts of the United States. In the U.S. the most practitioners are in California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, and especially Michigan, where the exemplary Penrickton Center for Blind Children is the epitome of Active Learning in the U.S.
Lilli Nielsen has invented many important devices for challenged learners: the Resonance Board, the Support Bench, the HOPSA-dress, the Essef Board, the MFA Table, a Velcro vest of toys, The Little Room, and other "perceptualizing aids" for helping development and learning in children with multiple disabilities ( www.lilliworks.com).
Children learn by doing, which starts as play, and disabled children are especially dependent upon learning by doing and by playing/doing. Lilli would say children exposed to her environments exhibit "Active Learning". Indeed, these two words, the term her approach, adopted by thousands, is known by, sum up her approach to education, and to life. Letting children discover and explore their own world — and make their own mistakes — is the basis for success in education, for both the handicapped child and the nonhandicapped as well. In Denmark, people in the 1970s started calling this The Nielsen Approach. "I said No, I'm honored, but we need a name that is useful, not personal, and won't die with me. Thus, Active Learning." (Lilli made her last lecture trip in 2005, as her polio is bothering her increasingly and making travel no longer possible.)