Information literacy for visually impaired teachers in Pakistan

There are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people in the world, 90% of whom live in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a study on visually impaired school teachers in Pakistan in order to examine how they identify, explore, select, organize, create, present, assess and apply information (IFLA’s Information Literacy Empowering Eight model) in teaching and everyday life. Interviews were conducted in January 2015 with 55 visually impaired teachers in 10 schools for the blind located in the province of Khyber PukhtunKhwa, Pakistan. The study also explores their ability to find, evaluate, and apply pedagogical information. Collected data revealed information on different aspects of information literacy skills. Although basic skills of the studied population were assessed; the study found that visually impaired teachers are highly skilled in terms of organizing the information and they prefer to take personal responsibility while searching for required...