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Lynnie McElwee, Missouri School for the Blind

Art – all levels

To say that Lynnie McElwee teaches “visual art” might be misleading, since many of her students are living with little or no physical vision. Then again, she describes her own work in visual terms: “I'm teaching them to look at things in different ways,” she says.

But how can students look without using their eyes? McElwee has been answering that question afresh for 22 years. Depending on what works for each student, from the youngest first-grader to the nearly-collegiate advanced class, she reinvents her teaching tactics over and over again.

“It depends on their point of reference,” she explains. “High schoolers, in general, understand concepts; and if someone has seen before, then they have a different perspective than someone who's always been blind.”
Most of McElwee's students, though, learn by touch. A tea towel becomes a camel's hide; wrinkled paper is the skin of an elephant. Colors are concepts: yellow means warmth, cheerfulness, sunlight. Any raised surface can become an embossing or a relief drawing. And McElwee's high school students, many of whom she has taught since they were kindergarteners, can discern and create shapes as precise as an octagon or as complex as a hawk's wing with their fingers.

Every project is tactile, from raised-cardboard insignia to ceramics and sculpture. High schoolers create chess sets, visit parks and then design their own, or practice the principles of architecture by modelling “huge, intricate” buildings out of oatmeal boxes and Pringles cans. McElwee wants them to build imagination and a capacity for design by working with their hands.

“All my students should come out with some useful and practical information, so they can function in society and have an idea of what's around them,” McElwee says. Like any good teacher of the arts, she shows her students how to see.