Isabelle Lyon Dean Grant (3 July 1896 — 1 June 1977) was a leader of the blind civil rights movement and worked to improve education for blind children around the world.
Early life
Grant was born in Lossiemouth, a town in Moray, Scotland. Her parents were Jane and William Dean. She had 3 siblings. Her 3 of her maternal uncles were captains of schooners, while her father was not. He instilled a love of education into Grant during her childhood.
Grant attended public school in her hometown and Elgin Academy. In 1917, she earned a master's degree from University of Aberdeen in English and French. She taught in England and Scotland for 5 years after the completion of her degree. Additionally, she studied at Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Madrid, where she became fluent in Spanish.
She moved to the United States in 1924 with her husband aboard the . They settled in Los Angeles. Grant earned her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California in 1940.
Career
Grant was the first blind person to teach in the California Public School system. She began as a teacher in the Los Angeles, California public school system in 1927. She was an advocate for Mexican American students and often went with them to court if they got into trouble.
Due to her vision loss in the 1940s, she was forced from her position as Vice Principal at Belvedere Junior High School into early retirement by the Board of Education. The National Federation of the Blind and the Belvedere Junior High School Faculty Club fought the Board of Education to keep her out of forced disability retirement. They retained her, and she ended up working for thirteen years as a teacher for blind students. In February 1949, Grant was removed from her teaching position at Belvedere and placed at Polytechnic High School. Due to misconceptions of blindness, Grant was moved forced from school to school. She was required to have a sighted adult in the classroom at all times as a safety precaution.
She was a skilled teacher. Once students showed improvement, they were removed from her classroom. She retired from teaching in June 1962. Her teaching career spanned thirty-two years. During her retirement celebration, her colleagues gave her a book filled with letters of appreciation. In August 1962, she received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to educate teachers in Pakistan about teaching blind children. In 1964, she received another Fulbright Fellowship to continue her work in Pakistan.
Activism
Due to her experiences as a teacher who was blind, Grant worked on legislative and organizational efforts so that blind teachers would not have to experience such discrimination in the workplace. In conjunction with the California Council of the Blind, Grant fought to get the California legislature to eliminate discriminatory practices for teachers who are blind. The California legislature passed legislation to remove the requirement that teachers be keenly sighted in order to be certified as teachers and banned discrimination for teachers in the university application process, their education, and their job search process.
Grant felt blind students should be educated alongside their sighted peers. She believed this helps to prepare the children who are blind to live in a sighted world. This was most positively received in developing countries where they lacked funding to build separate schools for blind students.
Before she retired from teaching, Grant took a sabbatical from teaching in 1959 to travel around the world with her white cane she lovingly named Oscar. She was in Pakistan from September 1959 to February 1960 organizing the Pakistan Association of the Blind. The aim of her trip was to learn as much as she could about education in the countries she visited. Her particular interest was in the education of children who are blind. At the time of her trip, she had been completely blind for twelve years, and society considered women and people who were blind too helpless to travel alone. During one of her yearlong trips, she visited twenty-three countries, including Great Britain, Fiji, India, Myanmar, and Pakistan.
