Teachers at the Da Nang Support Centre for Integrated Education Development, whose forerunner is the Nguyen Dinh Chieu school, have made great devotion to wholeheartedly taking care of and educating visually impaired children.

Teacher Khuong has actively engaged in educating visually impaired pupils at the municipal Support Centre for Integrated Education Development

The experienced, dedicated teachers, thereby, have helped disadvantaged pupils maintain their strong belief and love for life, and become useful citizens in society and valuable contributors to the city’s progress.

Teacher Hoang Van Khuong is really a bright example of overcoming his visual impairment to pursue his passion for the teaching profession.

Born with normal visual capacity, Khuong, who graduated from the Dak Lak Province’s Junior College, started to experience faltering eyesight in 1997 when he was teaching at a school in mountainous area in this Central Highlands province.

At that time, he was initially believed to suffer from short-sightedness, but despite wearing medical eye glasses he still could not see the board clearly.

Afterwards, he was diagnosed with a medical condition which could damage eyesight to the point of total blindness, and he has had to live in total darkness ever since.

Escaping from the disappointment due to the “life imprisonment” to a most unwanted physical condition, Khuong applied for a teaching job at the then Nguyen Dinh Chieu school.

In his mind, he is still better off than many other blind people as he already once saw the world. As a teacher, he thinks that also better off than many elders who have to be out on the streets under harsh sunshine and torrential rain selling lottery tickets.

Apart form giving meaningful lessons to his beloved pupils, the strong-willed teacher usually spends much time informally chatting with them, and he is willing to share joy and sorrow with them, and give great encouragement to them.

Unlike Khuong, Le Thi Giang is an able-bodied teacher. After graduating from the Da Nang University of Education, Giang is eligible to teach at schools in inner-city areas. But instead, her fate led her down a path teaching visually impaired pupils at the municipal Support Centre for Integrated Education Development.

The challenge of adapting teaching methods to meet the needs of disabled pupils was not a small one, it was really a big change in Giang’s life.

Giang has been actively engaged in wholeheartedly assisting her sight- impaired pupils in using Braille. This is a tactile reading and writing system used by blind and visually impaired people who cannot access print materials. It uses raised dots to represent the letters of the print alphabet. It also includes symbols to represent punctuation, mathematics, and scientific characters, music, computer notation, and foreign languages.