ISaR Projekt

Welcome to this international mix of papers for the September issue of 2015. If you will allow me to change the editorial style for this issue, instead of discussing the very interesting papers this issue contains, I would like to detail the discussion I had in June this year with a visiting PhD student from America. This discussion was around the area of competences and what exactly should the education and learning be for a qualified teacher of pupils with visual impairment (QTVI).

These were extremely interesting discussions, and I thought I would put some of the debates we had over the 4 weeks in this editorial.

The uneven relationship between teacher supply and demand is something we hear all the time in our work place and among our colleagues, in the field of special education, and especially in the area of vision impairment. We constantly ask ourselves what is going to happen when we retire? Where are the younger teachers who are suitably qualified in vision impairment to take over our caseload? Questions like this reverberate around teachers’ staff rooms. Boe (2006) and colleagues (Boe & Cook, 2006; Boe, Cook, & Sunderland, 2005) have written extensively about the long-term trends and the shortage of special education teachers in America, suggesting that there may be a shortfall of around 54,000 special education teachers for students aged between 6 and 21 years (Boe, 2006). Certainly, at Heads of Service meetings held at the Scottish Sensory Centre (SSC), discussions around qualifications, competences, staffing, and workload are common themes on the agenda. So let us have a little look at how you can become a QTVI in Scotland.