Tanni Anthony

Dr. Tanni Anthony is the Director of the Access, Learning, and Literacy (ALL) Team within the Exceptional Student Services Unit of the Colorado Department of Education. She also serves as the State Consultant on Blindness/Visual Impairment and the Project Co- Director of the Colorado Services for Children and Youth with Combined Vision and Hearing Loss. 

Tanni received her Ph.D. from the University of Denver in Child and Family Studies.  She is a teacher of students with visual impairments and an orientation and mobility specialist.  She has worked with very young children with sensory disabilities and their families in Minnesota, Alaska, and Colorado. 

Tanni presents frequently and writes extensively on the topics specific to pediatric blindness/visual impairment and deaf-blindness. Key topics of interest include early development, emergent literacy, play, sensory assessment, and developmental orientation and mobility.  

Transcript

[Robin Greenfield] Welcome to the Idaho Project for Children and Youth with Deaf Blindness podcast series. This project provides training and consultation to service providers and families of children and young adults who have a combined vision and hearing loss. My name is Robin Greenfield, and I am your host. In this series, you will hear from some of the most well respected experts in the field of deaf blindness.

Good morning. My interview today is with Tanni Anthony. Tanni is currently the Director of the Colorado Services for Children and Youth with Combined Vision and Hearing Loss project. She's been in the field of vision and deaf blindness for a long time. She is nationally and internationally recognized for her expertise, especially in working with young children. Welcome, Tanni.

[Tanni Anthony] Thank you so much. 

[Robin] So you have a long history of working with children who are visually impaired or deaf blind. I'm interested to know how your career began.

[Tanni] Well, it started a while back, Robin. So we gotta go back in time a little bit. I think what's interesting is when you think about why you start in a profession, you do go back to your childhood, and you think about things that really influenced your life. And one of the books that I have in my office is a book that I actually inherited from my sister. I was the last child in my family. So I had hand me downs. And one of the books that was actually a hand me down was a book called The Story of Helen Keller. And I just checked the publication date. And it first came out in 1958. And then it had a 10th reprinting by 1965. So I don't know what age I got this book, but I remember reading it, and you can see that it's really dog eared and loved. 

And what I love is the very first chapter is A Child in the Dark. So I remember reading this and somewhere it just inspired me to be a teacher. I don't think at that time I thought I would be a teacher of learners with deaf blindness. But I knew I wanted to be a teacher. 

And what happened in high school is that we actually had a Bible camp called Red Willow Bible camp that two weeks out of the summer, they open the doors of “the institution for the mentally retarded,” and they let the residents come to this Bible camp. And I signed up for that particular week. I think my sister had done it before me. And I'll never forget standing on the grounds of this camp and the school buses drove up and the doors open. And people started fleeing. And these were adults, all adults who at that time, we would consider people with intellectual disabilities running toward me and I was, you know, all of 100 pounds standing my ground. 

And what I saw was joy on their faces that they were so excited, you can imagine they came from an institution to a wide open space in the woods, freedom. And I had an entire week of just learning and being mesmerized and being enchanted and being full of wonder. 

And then flash forward. I went back to my church and we had kind of a progressive church back then -first Lutheran Church in Fargo, North Dakota. Mrs. Dolly, who was the pastor's wife, started a special education class for kids who had intellectual disabilities. Of course, we didn't call it that back then. It was a segregated class. We also didn't realize that that was wrong back then. And I remember as a sophomore in high school fighting with Mrs. Dolly that Freddy, who was a little guy with down syndrome, could put on his jacket independently, that she was doing too much for the children. So somewhere in those high school years, something got, you know, caught fire. 

Went to school. And I always tell this story, as I knew I would be a teacher, so I had elementary and special ed. And one day, I'm looking at the list of courses and there's a braille class. And my thinking was if I'm going to be a good general education teacher, I should know braille in case I have a blind student, so I sign up for the braille class. And the very first day, my professor and now my friend, Dr. Maria Olson, said, “Is anyone in this class who is not on the trajectory to be a teacher of students with visual impairment?” I had no idea what she was talking about. Everybody knew what they were doing. And I said, “No, I just want to take Braille.” So I learn it. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. 

But what I found out was there was a track for teachers of students with visual impairments. So I signed up, and it just so happened and this is that serendipity or that divine intervention, whatever you want to call it. I took that braille class the exact time that I could complete the rest of the coursework. So when I graduated as an undergrad, I had a background in intellectual disability, elementary education, and this endorsement for blindness.

Went on for my first job. I had two job offers - one as a first grade teacher and one as an early interventionist at a program in St. Paul, Minnesota that specialized with young children with physical or sensory disabilities. And I remember I called my mom and I said, “Really? They're preschoolers. What do preschoolers even know? Why would I do that?” But what I thought is, you know, about anybody could be a first grade teacher, but not everybody can work with little kids who are blind. So I took that job. 

And in the first two years realized all I didn't understand about child development. So that's what packed my bags and sent me to graduate school down in Greeley for the University of Northern Colorado. And that is where I got my first taste of true deaf blindness because one of my professors was Carmela Gates, who used to be Carmela Figacello. Carmela was deaf blind trained out of the Boston area. Was one of the people that did the regional deaf blind centers. And she filled our minds with deaf blindness. Young Van Dyck was on the menu. Jane Eyers was on the menu, you know, learning about audiograms was on the menu. 

So as a teacher, being trained again in blindness, so that was the focus of that degree. I learned about this other part called deafness. And then the combination of deaf blindness. And I always think that my memory of graduate school was me with my hand up. There were seven of us in a cohort, and I don't think I ever put my hand down because I just wanted to learn. So from there, fast forward, out of school, went to Alaska did a baby program for kids with visual impairment, got to hone my skills. Ultimately, I was recruited to Colorado and that is the first time I officially worked for a deaf blind project and have never looked back since 1992.

[Robin] Wow, I love these stories. You know, both David and Maurice got into how they got into the field, talked about it and as you have done, and I think it's fascinating, and as much as all of you are present and know so many people, a lot of those details people don't know at all. So it's just great stories. So I know you have several quotes that you say have driven your career. Can you share those with us?

[Tanni] Yes. And I actually have three, and they’re three that I use a lot because they've really defined me. So I do define myself as an early interventionist, or an early childhood educator. So I'm very much about the little people. And so I'm going to do these in order of sort of how they maybe set up some of my thinking. 

And the first is a quote that I heard when I attended a lecture by Dr. Bruce Perry, and he started off the lecture with a quote that really says, “childhood decides.” It is credited to Jean Paul Sartre, and it's really important because childhood decides. What it means to me, and what I think the intention is, is what happens in the very early years can really decide a lifelong potential, a lifelong disposition, a lifelong trajectory. So that is so powerful in the hands of people who are working with little kids. 

The second one was T. Berry Brazelton, who we all remember as an incredible pediatrician. And one of the things I want to say is that in the field of deaf blindness, we have so much to learn about deaf blindness. And in addition to that, we always have to have this open mind about learning from these giants around us who've probably never even touched a kid who's deaf blind. And one of those might have been T. Berry Brazelton. But what he said about little kids is good for everybody. So it's a long quote, but I often use this in my trainings, because it gives pause to just that powerful aspect of early childhood. 

So I'll read the quote. “It is in the first weeks of life and months of life, that children first try to understand and master their environment and find their efforts encouraged or not. First attempts to concentrate and find it possible or not. First conclude the world is orderly and predictable or not. First learn that others are basically caring or not. It is in these years that the foundation for later learning are laid down or not.”

And that is so powerful, that's for every single kid. But if you come from a lens of sensory disability, and specifically deaf blindness, that resonates because he uses words like concentration, uses words like predictability, which we you know, are so fundamentally concerned about with our kids, mastering the environment. So I love that quote, because what it reminds us is that all children need these basic core tenants of caring people and responsive environments and opportunities for learning. 

And then the last quote came from a woman that Dr. Phil Hatlin was engaged with. He was talking with people who were blind and, you know, sometimes there's tension about people who are blind or people who are deaf or people who are deaf blind and the people who serve them. And finally he said to this woman, “what is it you want?” And this is so beautiful, she responded by saying, “the opportunity to be equal and the right to be different.” 

And that has really laid the tracks of a lot of my thinking. Because the truth is, it is our job to make sure that everybody has equal experience and opportunities. But in this day of equity and diversity inclusion, what we always realize is that we have to work a little harder and be a little more sensitive to the equity needs of everybody and the right to be different. That you need accessibility, that you need opportunities that are tailored to who you are as a person and how you learn in order to have that shot, at what we call equal. 

So those are three things that honestly really define my thinking. I think they're good for little kids. I think they're good for older kids. I think they're good for adults. But if we're gonna start early, let's do it right.

[Robin] And they're perfect quotes. I'm not sure I've heard all those, but they absolutely define, certainly, what I know about you and your work. And because of your interests, your particular interest in young children, do you think teachers and even families focus enough on the area of play?

[Tanni] You know, I think it's a great question because, honestly, sometimes play gets a bad rap because people think it's fluff or it's fufu, or it's downtime. But the truth is, I think of play in two ways. I think of it first from the child's perspective, and second from the adults. 

So first, let me just say this about the adults. When we really give children the opportunity to play it is a perfect assessment framework. In fact, books have been written, Dr. Tony Lender, who has been a mentor for me, certainly talks about there's not anything you can't learn about a child if you are observing play. You can gather around a child - in fact, we do it with play based assessment - and every single discipline begins to take notes. What does the child see? How does the child respond to sound? How does the child reach? What is the range of that reach, etc. But the beauty of play is that children not only tell us what they know, but they are in the process of self-discovery. 

And what we know about learning is that when we master something that comes from within our physical capacity, our cognitive file folders inside our head, our social emotional boundaries, that's when learning really happens, because it's in the control and the mastery of the child. So play is about self-discovery. It's about practicing. And what we know about any skill is if you want to be better at it, you have to practice it. And if you watch a child, they have beautiful repetition. They don't have the same weariness that maybe we do as adults of trying something again, and again and again. And with each attempt, something is learned, something is mastered, something is fortified, and something is built into the brain that I know how to do this. 

And so from my perspective, I think when we talk about play, we need to make sure we don't define it so that we actually take all the fun out of it. Because play is supposed to be fun, there's supposed to be an element of joy and enthusiasm with it, but that we give it the credit that it deserves that it is the work of the child. Fred Rogers said that, you know, play is the work of the child. So we have to make sure that how we're defining it resonates with people, so they back off, they observe, and then they learn to enter into that play domain with the child, and really then can take that child to the next level. 

So when we talk about play from an assessment perspective, you're looking at both vertical and horizontal. So horizontal is I'm letting you practice the same type of skill with maybe different objects. So you're getting better at saying “What’s a good shaker?” “What's a good banger?” or “What's a good combination of using two tools together?” So they're learning about it, but in vertical is how you bump it up so a child has a new discovery that the thing that just banged now could be something that could stir a pot, etc. So part of it is just engaging in the glory of discovery, following the child's lead, reinforcing what the kid really needs to do. 

I was rereading some notes from a lecture from Bruce Perry, and he put something down that I thought ‘he doesn't even know that he's talking to me about this specific item’. And here's what he said. “We need to match the experience of the child to the hot zones of their focus.” And why that's important is developmentally, if you understand where a child is developmentally, you can feed that from a play perspective, and it means that you're accurate. You're in that proximal zone that the child is learning about.

So again, I think it's so important that we describe play as the work and then we also give words to it. “Hey, Mom. Did you see how he reached for that? What I just noticed is that he saw that because that toy was on a high contrast blanket. So you know what going forward, let's make sure that when we put things down, we're looking at the color of the blanket versus the color of the toys. I've just done a little functional vision analysis for that, Mama. But I've not messed with what's important for that kid.”

So honestly, yeah, if we can find the words to describe it so that people invest with us and see the value. And I will also say this, I believe adults need to learn how to play. Some people have an intuitiveness, some people could benefit from a little bit of coaching, and that's okay. We're going to make mistakes with kids. We're going to rush in, we'll do the wrong thing, we might lose the engagement of the child. But for the kid with deafblindness, this is precious, because that kid who is at a diminished capacity for seeing and hearing about its world is learning, ‘I am control.’ These are the things of interest to me. And they have power and value and next steps. So absolutely. We all should be masters of play. I would like people to have PhDs in play if we could do that.

[Robin] Perfectly said and I think everything you also said, really talks about the art of observation. How often we watch children, but we aren't really picking up what they're doing. So that whole area of observation, how critical it is. So the next topic I know is important to you. And it's about literacy. Literacy is a big topic these days for all children. Can you talk a little bit about how literacy can look for children who are more significantly involved? And perhaps not at the level of using symbols of any kind?

[Tanni] So really great question. I think one of the things that's happened in my lifetime, and certainly probably in the last five years, maybe even longer, is that we are really talking about literacy for all learners. There used to be a model of readiness that people literally thought you had to have X, Y, Z before you could commence in more of a conventional literacy path. But what's interesting about that is that we never really did that for typical babies. 

So think about it, we have a brand new baby in our family, Charlie, who just turned two months, and his parents are reading to him. And one of my gifts to him was actually a book, I gave him several things. But one of the things I gave was a book. And that is so critical. We do this with every baby, we put the kid on our lap, and we read. Why wouldn't we do this with all children? Why wouldn't we nurture this with all families? But somewhere along the line, the message sort of got said that these are learners that have to go through other gyrations or steps before we might do something that would just be considered classical typical development. 

So encouraging families to read with their children is paramount. And if the child is pre symbolic at a later age than we might expect, that's okay. That kid is still on the path of emergent literacy. So we want to find the ways and that means maybe specializing some techniques. We may use object books instead of print books with pictures. You know, we know pictures can be the bane of our existence with kids who are blind, visually impaired. We also know with deaf blindness, we have children who are not going to be auditory learners. So that's where good intervention comes in to say, how do you tell a story that may not be about pictures, it may not be about auditory language. So we're using sign language, we're using tactile clues, we're using objects of daily care. So at the end of every day, there can be a story. 

Many years ago, Lois Harrell came to Alaska. And she taught me about an object basket at the end of the day, where the little one is just gathered in the parents’ arms, and you take those objects that happened in the everyday environment of the child, and they're in a basket and they're in the lap. And that's kind of your storybook, so you may take an object out and the child's interacting with it. And there might be some memory, some language, some interaction, some imitation, but you're telling a story. So there are so many ways with our children that we can tell stories and read aloud and bring objects of learning with vocabulary. 

What I would say to a family or even a reticent teacher who questioned why we were doing this is, quite honestly, we got 26 letters of the alphabet. And as kids move toward more of an alphabet understanding, really every word in the world is in their access. So there are many, many things we can do from an emergent literacy perspective that we do with every child, but we might just be using slightly different techniques for the child who’s deaf blind but it's the same core principles. 

And what I would say is every kid is on the path for emergent literacy. And so we need to dig down, find out where that kid is. And then we need to look at what's the next step. Again, doing that vertical and that horizontal. So how do I, you know, keep going so that that child gets good at the skills he or she has? And then how do I slightly elevate it so the child can learn?

But I would always associate early reading with intimacy, that connection with the caregiver. And as you know, that's so important with deafblindness. It's about relationships, and then really bringing those objects in that makes sense. And then always honoring that repetition. So another thing when I was reading my notes on Bruce Perry, he talked about the number of words, children now are related to the number of experience of times they've heard those words. So whether or not you can listen to those words, we need to be thinking about good daily ritual experience. So kids have that repertoire of depth. So first point is no kid is off limits for early literacy.

[Robin] Absolutely, yes. Well said, as usual, Tanni. So I know another interest of yours is O and M, orientation and mobility. Do you think teachers and families think enough about when to start O and M for young children? 

[Tanni] That’s a good question! You have good stuff going here. You know, it's interesting, because when I went to school at UNC, that's when I did my orientation mobility credential. And you remember me, I'm the little gal with my hand up in graduate school. Well, I had a professor back then who honestly - and I say this with full complement - had no idea what to do with me, because at that time, in the field of orientation, mobility, there was really philosophy that kids didn't get canes until they were five or six or entered public school. O and M was just kind of even off limits with little kids and there I am, this little, you know, chickadee, who's coming from this baby program in St. Paul, with my hand up in the air saying, “Well, what about this?” And he honestly, if he would not have liked me, for a person, I think he would have washed me out of the program, because I absolutely was the bane of his existence. But it was the perfect timing, because that profession as a whole was starting to ask questions. So it wasn't just me. I was just one of other people who were saying, what about these little guys. And when I meant little guys, at that time I meant preschoolers. It wasn't until I went to Alaska and really worked with babies’ birth to three for nine years, that I was like, what about the three month old? 

So I would say, a good way to package orientation mobility, which I have over the years, is that we're really talking about cognitive development and motor development and how that packages from the very beginning of kids who are in a reflexive pattern who don't have object permanence, and moving them forward with those early cognitive concepts, skills, and those early motor skills to converge into what we call purposeful movement. And what's so exciting about it is, again, it's how we package it to the family. So as this little person is in the crib, you may lean over and say, you know, one thing that we can really look at this crib is just some spatial awareness. Is there something always in a steady place?

So if the baby is constantly leaning on one side facing, do we put one particular toy that’s safely tethered, very safe, on one side of the crib, think of like maybe a little jingle bells or something that we feel safe about? So that kid starts to have some spatial concepts of, hey, if I reach over here, my bells are going to be here. That's an orientation skill. And if I'm far away from it, what do I have to do to scooch over to get to my bells. That's a mobility skill. So, so much of this is how do we package it. So we're giving people the ability to credit that this is a kid who's on the trajectory for O and M skills. And that is huge, that we start to give people insight into normal development that really is orientation mobility. And then later, it gets to be more formal, obviously, when we're talking about adaptive mobility devices, and canes, etc. 

So I'm hoping that most orientation mobility specialists believe that it starts at birth. What we know is the brain craves movement - that kids are born to move. And so we want to capitalize that and make it purposeful and meaningful through daily routines and then expand it out. And it also ties back to that play that we talked about. Because as kids become more mobile, they have more exploration and there's more opportunities for those self-discovery. And you can link the two. If the child has a favorite plaything, you distance it out. So the kid has a reason to move for it or it always lives in a particular cupboard or the storybook on a particular shelf, then there's a reason for that purposeful route at the end of the day. So part of it is not always doing like ‘Hey, now we're doing O and M.’ It's building, building in the opportunities to see O and M in the daily routine. Does that make sense Robin?

[Robin] It does make sense. And Tanni, I was just thinking, as you talked about it - such a critically important area that I don't think people, teachers, even families think enough about. They think of O and M as taking a cane, taking someone's arm, looking at it like that and the way you're describing it is perfect. And I think it's just a topic that is not talked about enough across teacher training or even in our field, about looking at O and M in a variety of ways, but particularly for young children. So it was nicely described. Yes, I love it. So finally, do you have a favorite resource that you use a lot? And why would you recommend it to people?

[Tanni] So I was thinking about this question. And I actually have two resources that I think our fantastic. One is the book ‘Remarkable Conversations,” authored by Marianne Riggio and Barbara Miles. I remember when that book came out, it was such a gift, because first of all, just the title of it should blow our minds because that really is the experience with most learners with deafblindness. Is that, A, they're remarkable, every kid is unique. But also these conversations that we have can be something as simple as finding a common topic such as the kid tapping his fingers on the table, and you joining in on a play fashion. To tactile sign language in the palm, or to Dolma. You think about all the things that can be conversations. So that book was really a gift to the field, I understand they're updating it, and they can't do it fast enough. And we will personally probably buy out the inventory with our project to make sure people have it in the state. But I think it's such a respectful, honorable contributory product of deep, deep knowledge, and obviously, by two people who care deeply about our profession and these kids. 

And the second resource, and this one is a little harder, because it comes at a beginning level to an advanced level. And that is our colleagues in the field. So I think back to when I went to my very first meeting that gathered people in deafblind projects, that's actually where I met you, I was actually highly intimidated. Here I was somebody in my field of blindness entering this field of deafblindness with more legitimacy, but feeling like fraudulent, like fraudulent was written all over my face, like who are you to be a deaf blind practitioner? 

And what I discovered in those very early years, were all these people who were willing to help me, I can make a phone call, I could send an email, I could steal abundantly. If you look at our website, our fact sheets are attributed to many other sources of people who have authored way ahead and more extensively than the Colorado project. And what's beautiful, and I know Maurice and David talked about this is the people's willingness to share. So it's kind of like having speed dial in your head that you think I wonder who would know about it. And it's fun because when I mentor my colleagues on my team, I'll say I have this ability that if you say to me deafblindness and communication, I can immediately tell you, at least 10 people that somebody could learn from. If you say orientation and mobility, I can tell you that. If you take say social emotional, if you say, sign language, tactile sign language, I know who those people are. So some of that comes with experience. And that's what I mean that in the beginning, I didn't know all those people. But over the years, it's become very apparent to me who our experts are. And what's really exciting is we're seeing a younger generation of experts coming in. 

So I think our field is exceptional that we have written resources, but we have living resources, who are willing to give us the goods and talk us through people are generous with their information. And for the most part, we circle back and hearken to the same tenants, you know, whether it's that beautiful observation you just mentioned, whether it's respect for sensory assessment, whether it's understanding that self-discovery - we could all gather and we would all be nodding. So there's this beautiful base that we then build on. 

But the other part of it is people who are bringing in other tenants so whether it's a Brazelton or Bruce Perry or Lily Nelson are Gene Eyers or think about you know, people that we think of today, we go outside of the field, we find what they know about children and we bring it back and we deafblind it. You know some people, you know how the people talk about blinging it, you're going to bling it. Well, we deaf blind it so we take those very things that somebody else knows, like Bruce Perry. I think, hey, Bruce, you didn't even know you were talking about - I should say Dr. Perry - you didn't even know you were talking about deafblindness, but when I read and I look at what you're saying about brain development, I go, yep, that's my kid. That's that little bird with deafblindness that we care so passionately about. But it's really the people in our field, we're walking and living encyclopedias and dictionaries and with a welcome mat in front of it. So those would probably be our best resources are those living resources.

[Robin] Well, and you just confirm what both Maurice and David said, too, it's a theme that goes through these interviews that, you know, this is an extraordinary network and always has been. And the support, I'm not sure I've seen it in any other area that I've been associated with. So it's incredibly special. So I could talk to you all day Tanni. But I'm afraid we're out of time. So I really want to thank you for being here today and being a part of our podcast series.

[Tanni] It has been a pleasure and I know I will go to bed tonight saying “Gosh, I wish I would have said this and that.” But here's what I'll end with. Robin Greenfield you have been a mentor and a friend to me, and I thank you for this opportunity because I've learned a lot from you.

[Robin] Thanks, Tanni.