There is a line Anahit used in her capstone presentation that I keep thinking about.
Nobody asks what jobs are good for people who are blind. Nobody asks what careers suit left-handed people. But ask a blind teenager what they want to do with their life, and the question that almost always follows is: what jobs are good for blind people?
She is not angry about it when she says it. She is matter-of-fact about it, the way someone is matter-of-fact about a thing they have spent years navigating rather than years fighting. But the absurdity of it lands anyway. The assumption embedded in that question, that blindness narrows the field rather than simply changing how you move through it, is exactly the thing her project is designed to dismantle. Not for adults. For the students who have already absorbed that assumption themselves without anyone meaning to hand it to them.
Who Is in the Room
Anahit works with blind and visually impaired students across a large Denver Public Schools district. The students she serves are spread across the city, which means getting them in the same physical space is a months-long logistical operation. She finally pulled it off at a school picnic, and she used those few hours to start the conversation about what she has been building toward.
The school day for her students looks different from the beginning. A significant portion of every day goes toward two things: teaching students the skills to access their environment and materials, and making those environments and materials accessible in the first place. Braille, assistive technology, screen readers, note-taking techniques that sighted students absorb through osmosis from watching others take notes, all of it has to be explicitly taught.
By the time career exploration should be starting, there is often no room left in the day.
“When we talk about careers and our blind students, it takes on an entirely different meaning, because the majority of the effort gets dedicated to: A, learn the skills to access the environment and the materials. And B, make the environment and materials accessible to the students, so that they are able to equally participate.” — Anahit, Thinkering Fellow
The result is that a lot of her students reach the second semester of junior year with no sense yet of what they are working toward. For sighted students that is already too late. For her students, who need more time and more explicit instruction to build every pathway toward independence, it is much too late.
The Student Who Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
When Anahit started describing the project to her students and asking whether they would want to be part of it, one of them stopped her.
He said he could see where it would be beneficial for others to know about career possibilities. And then, as they were wrapping up, he said something she was not expecting: in fact, the more I think about it, I am not even sure what kind of profession a blind person could follow without a significant challenge.
This was a student she had recruited to help educate others. And he had arrived having internalized the same ceiling everyone else had placed on his future, without anyone meaning to put it there.
“Those limitations are artificially, unintentionally placed on our blind students. But then they take it on and believe it. So how do we work with our students to educate themselves, and then also for them to educate others on possibilities?” — Anahit, Thinkering Fellow
She did not treat it as a setback. She added a new line to the project’s list of goals. Not only will students learn to tell the story of blind professionals in the working world. They will also tell it to themselves first.
What the Project Actually Is
The structure is both straightforward and ambitious. Middle and high school students will identify careers that interest them, then find blind professionals currently working in those fields, then develop interview questions, conduct the interviews, film them, and produce a short documentary that other blind and visually impaired teenagers can actually watch.
Not a pamphlet. Not a resource list. Something made by people their age, featuring people who look like their future selves, talking directly to them.
“For the most part, it is adults talking to them. They do not hear from their own peers. If it is going to make a difference for even one blind person, I want to do it.” — Anahit, Thinkering Fellow, drawing on a student quote from the picnic
The internet, if you search it, mostly returns desk jobs when you look for careers for blind people. Not because that is the truth, but because that is the assumption the internet reflects back. A decade ago nobody would have put influencer or content creator on a list of viable careers for anyone. The job market is changing and the list of what is possible is expanding, but the representation available to blind teenagers trying to imagine their own future has not kept pace.
That is what Anahit is trying to close.
Her Own Why
Anahit is blind herself. She came to the United States from a country where the infrastructure for blind people was not a spectrum of services and possibilities. It was one building in her city, and one job.
The light bulb factory. She said it plainly. All the blind people in her city lived in one building and worked at the light bulb factory. She noted, without much editorializing, that somebody apparently had a very bad joke in mind when they made that decision. But the reality underneath the dark humor is that her future was meant to be predetermined before she had any say in it.
“That experience has really prompted me to do more, and support our students in exploring and asserting their independence.” — Anahit, Thinkering Fellow
She did not follow the path that was laid out. She built her own. And now she is working inside a school system to make sure her students do not spend their teenage years looking at a ceiling that was never real.
What Comes Next
The community infrastructure for this project is already taking shape. Anahit has relationships with the Colorado Center for the Blind, where she was once a student herself learning blindness skills. She has connected with Denver Public Schools Gifted and Talented and with Community Resources Inc., which runs its own mentoring program and could become a meaningful partner at the start of next school year. Space is secured. The buy-in from students is there.
The logistical challenges are real: transportation for students from underprivileged backgrounds, a budget for food because food brings people to the table, and support with the filming itself. These are solvable problems, and the Thinkering network is already moving on them. Evin has connected Anahit with a partner who leads sustainability and impact at Netflix, who in turn connected the team with the director of Blind Ball, a documentary about blind baseball players that has just landed in their orbit at exactly the right moment. There are people in the Thinkering community with film and documentary experience. There are researchers who can study the impact of career technical education pathways for this population, a gap that is well-documented and largely unfilled.
“Your ears might be burning, because I have been talking about you a lot within our network.” — Evin Schwartz, Thinkering Collective
This project has not launched yet. It is still a concept, carefully built and honestly presented. But the things that make a concept become real are already in motion: a teacher who lived this, students who said yes before they knew all the steps, a community building around them, and an idea strong enough that the people who heard it immediately started making calls.
That is the beginning. It is a very good one. We will follow this story and tell the world about Anahit’s superpower to empower future learners for career readiness.
Anahit LaBarre is a Thinkering Fellow and teacher of the visually impaired at Denver Public Schools. The Thinkering Collective fellowship supports educators in designing and launching projects that humanize learning and build real community impact. For fellowship information and applications, visit thinkeringcollective.org
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