Guest Post: Supporting Colourblind Students and Staff at School

Hi there! A big thank you to Ciara for inviting me to share my story on her blog. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m David and I run a teacher Instagram account called Múinteoir Dave. I started my account three years ago after finishing the PME as a way to document my teaching journey. Another thing about me? I’m colourblind.

What is Colourblindness?

Colourblindness, or more accurately, colour vision deficiency, is a hidden disability affecting how a person perceives colours. It’s a genetic condition, usually passed down through the X chromosome, caused by an irregular development of colour-detecting cells, known as cones, in the back of the eye. There are three types of cones in the human eye, each responsible for detecting blue, green, or red light. When one or more of these cones don’t develop properly, the brain receives incomplete signals, making it difficult to distinguish certain colours.

There are several types of colourblindness, but the most common include:

• Deuteranomaly (red/green deficiency due to inability to perceive green light)
• Protanomaly (reds and greens looking more muted due to inability to perceive red light)
• Tritanopia (blue/yellow deficiency due to inability to perceive blue light)

In my case, I experience a combination of these. Imagine looking at a paint pallet booklet with hues getting darker as you go down the column. I can differentiate the first and third colours in the column but I cannot differentiate the first and second colours or the second and third colours. For me, when colours of similar hues are in close proximity, they will begin to bleed into each other while I look at them and then the undertones of the colours will begin to become more prominent in a cyclical way which results in the object I’m looking at to constantly change colours and make it impossible for me to identify it’s true colour. For example, if I look at a blue plastic chair in a classroom, any dark marks or specs of dirt on the seat can bleed into the blue, making the chair appear to continually shift between blue, purple, grey, and green, over and over again until I look away. This constant colour distortion is how I see the world every day.

Colourblindness is more common than you might think. Around 300 million people worldwide are colourblind, with 1 in 12 males and 1 in 200 females affected. In an average urban school, this means that in each class there may be two or three colourblind boys and there may be one or two colourblind girls in the school.

My Story

I was diagnosed with colourblindness at age seven, thanks to my First Class teacher, Mrs. Scully. During a maths lesson where we were doing a colour-by-number activity, she noticed that my tree had a bright red trunk and brown leaves, unlike the other kids’ pictures. When she asked me to describe my process, she realised I was getting the sums correct but when it came to choosing the crayon, I’d hesitate. This, she noticed, was because I was trying to find brown but, without any labels on the crayons, I was finding it hard to figure out which one was red and which was brown and, finally, I’d just make a choice and hope for the best. After a conversation with my mom and a visit to an ophthalmologist for some tests such as the Ishihara test, I was diagnosed with colourblindness.

Colourblindness impacts more than just my ability to see colours. Simple tasks like picking matching clothes, cooking (as I can’t tell when food like meat are changing colour or is fully cooked), and even driving at night (I cannot see the colours on traffic lights properly so I rely on being able to see where the light is in order as green looks white, and red and amber are the same) can be challenging. One particularly bad experience came when I gave myself severe food poisoning from undercooking chicken. After collapsing during one of my first shifts at a new job and being severely unwell for over a week, I finally went to my GP whom reported that I was in early stages of organ failure due to giving myself such severe food poisoning, and had only been a short few days away from needing to be hospitalised.

Tips for Supporting Colourblindness in the Classroom

Colourblindness can have a huge impact in the classroom. For me, as a teacher, I must be really careful with how I organise my classroom but also how I teach. Here are some ideas to support both colourblind students and staff.

1. Avoid Over-Reliance on Colour-Coding. During my initial teacher training, a lot of my lecturers for Literacy and Numeracy taught us how to teach particular skills using colour coding. For example, using red, orange and red counters to represent the initial, medial and final sounds in a word while segmenting and blending in phonics might make sense to most students, but to someone who is colourblind, these counters may appear identical and just create further confusion. Other examples of colour coding commonly used in classrooms include colour coding copies or books, storage, groups/teams/tables as well as concrete materials/equipment and emergency exit plans. We even use colours to help us read maps in SESE. We can create inclusive classrooms by making small adjustments through adding a secondary signifier, such as using shapes, symbols and/or words.
2. Use Clear Labels for School Spaces. My school has recently moved into a new building where a lot of the school has been painted in specific colours e.g. blue stairs, green stairs, purple stairs, and directions and emergency exit plans used these colour systems by stating which colour stairs each class would take to exit the building or go to yard etc. In consultation with our school principal, colour-coded stairwells have now been labeled with word signs to ensure that all students and staff can easily navigate the building, regardless of their ability to perceive colours. Likewise, our school calendars and Croke Park schedules have been adjusted to make colour coding more distinguishable.
3. Reduce Visual Overload. Colourblind people can become visually overstimulated in bright, multicoloured classrooms. During my time working as an SNA, then during my school placements throughout the PME and now my time spent in schools, I have seen teachers with the most amazing looking classrooms, bursting with colour! These rooms look incredibly inviting, yes, but they can also be difficult and overstimulating for colourblind people. To make the learning environment more comfortable, try using a cohesive colour scheme; either choose two or three complimentary colours throughout the room or else only use a singular colour in certain parts of the classroom. In my classroom, I use light blue as my main colour for backing displays, paired with a complementary border. This helps my eyes to see the whole environment of the classroom without my eyes being overstimulated by colours my eyes will begin to mix and bleed into one another. This can also help the children in your class to focus and remain on-task for longer.
4. Educate Students About Colourblindness. Children often think colourblindness means you “can’t see any colours,” but it’s far more complex. Consequently, children will not be able to understand themselves if they have the condition but haven’t been identified yet, which can lead to negative self-talk and poor self-esteem when it comes to school. This is why our classroom libraries are so important. Our libraries should reflect back the lives of the children in our classes but also provide a window into the lives of others. There are many book series out there which support this view, such as the Abilities and Me series. However, there’s not a significant number of books out there about colourblindness. I’ve done a huge amount of research and I have found one book in particular that I think explains the condition extremely well to children - Erik the Red Sees Green by Julie Anderson. This story follows a young boy who gets in trouble a lot and has low self-esteem until it’s discovered that he’s colourblind. The book has some really incredible illustrations showing side by side how typical sighted people might see something and then how a colourblind person sees it. I use this book with every class I work with and it really helps them to understand me and may help them understand themselves, too!

If you’ve made it this far, I hope my story has given you some insight into one of the most common hidden disabilities and how we can better support colourblind students and colleagues in our classrooms. A small change in how we organise and teach can have a lasting impact. If it wasn’t for Mrs Scully, I probably wouldn’t have been identified and diagnosed when I was and I wouldn’t have received the supports I needed to succeed in school. I know for a fact I wouldn’t be a teacher today if it wasn’t for her. Let’s all of us be Mrs Scully in our own classrooms and create lifelong, positive impacts on the children that we’re lucky enough to teach!

Thanks so much to David for writing this informative guest blog post all about colourblindness in the classroom. You can connect with David on his Instagram page Múinteoir Dave .