Halifax woman’s diploma a national first
Posted Dec 14, 2009 07:14:04 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Halifax-area woman has become the first blind person in Canada to graduate from an adult education program.
Louise Levesque-Burley has received an adult education diploma from St. Francis Xavier University and says she was surprised to be the first visually-impaired recipient in the country.
She says the school had to learn a few lessons of its own about handling students with disabilities.
“I had to wear two hats,” she explained. “I wore the hat of a student, going in and doing the learning, and then I wore the other hat of educating the department and the facilitators.”
Levesque-Burley says the school digitized the 600-page course textbook so her talking computer could read it – but says there were still simple things that had to be handled, like escorting her to the washroom and classwork.
“If all the students were working out of the binder individually, then I required one of the facilitators to come over and read me the material,” she said.
At age 50, Levesque-Burley says it’s been nearly 30 years since she was in school. She’s encouraging people of any age or disability not to be dissuaded from furthering their education.
