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Making Special Education inclusive

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Making Special Education inclusive: Gauging disability issues with learning and teaching.

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School is a place where vast pool of range of competences emotions, intelligence skills and morality exist together. Children come from various upbringings and are disciplined into a system in the school. Majority of the children adjust well after initial odontiasis problems. Students’ population in school does not entirely represent children's population in total. So many children in spite of their school going age are not in school.

Reasons are manifold: lack of awareness, financial reasons, cultural & gender differences, non-availability of a school, disability, distant of school besides many others. Doing away with all these reasons and putting every child in regular school irrespective of caste, creed, colour, intellectual and physical disability, economic insufficiency, lack of skills and proficiencies, sensorial insufficiencies etc. is called inclusion.

It may be good to build a basis for inclusion of the children with special needs. Social justice, democracy and economy command inclusion. Besides, inclusive school provides equal opportunities to them, they learn many things by replicating regular children, and at the same time regular children learn to be more sensitive, placements in special school may be short, inapt placement causes severe damage, and parents are generally not the partners in decision making to place the child in special setting.

Children who are severely & profoundly affected and those with multiple disabilities may not find a place in regular school. They need to be taken care of in different settings. The thumb rule is 'place the child in regular mainstream settings as far as possible

Talking of inclusion and implementing inclusion are usually different. Some of the issues related to disability as of today are: inclusion, classification based on valuation, and sexual alternatives for the disabled, proliferation, reservations. Here, we are concerned with the inclusion, categorization and working of regular teachers with the children with special needs since they happen in the class room while others outside of class, though, of course, sensitivity towards those may be developed in the class rooms.

Though learning and teaching are inseparable, we will observe these separately taking into consideration the need of students.

Learning

Learning in class room rest on many intellectual and emotional factors. Inclusion recommends all children with mental retardation, learning disability, visual impairment, hearing impairment, physical disability and those who are slow learners be put in the same class room. Student teacher ratio cannot be one to one. Student may not comprehend as others in the class do.

The learning will be facilitated by providing of enhanced visual input for the hearing impaired, enhanced and directed auditory inputs for visually impaired, lower level of concept and replication for the child with retardation, various remedial strategies and different modes for the learning disabled. Majority of children with locomotion disability do not find it difficult to learn in regular class room, though they may need structural changes in the class room.

Coming to emotional factors in class room, regular children may isolate a child with special needs which will retard his/her learning. If he finds friendships among peers in the class, his motivation to learn may be higher. Background, socio-economic factors, appearance and general upkeep and hyperactive behaviours in a child may affect acceptance levels among other children and development of relationships. His own acceptance of his condition also matters.

This in turn will enhance or retard his learning. Esteem in which the child holds himself, his self-confidence and determination also effects his learning. Learnt helplessness dominant among some children with special needs is an important factor. Attaching success to external sources and failure to his or her own self is harmful to learning. To believe that he will not be able to attain success proves to be self-defeating. The enthusiasm to do new things does not develop easily among such children.

Learning depends deeply upon language used and two-way communication. If medium of instruction in the school is not the same as the language used at home, of in the absence of preparation for the school language, the home school continuity does not develop which slows down learning of child.

Desire to communicate with the teacher and others in class, on part of the child facilitate learning. Suitable assistances used in class by the teacher initiate learning in positive direction. For learning to be meaningful and rewarding, each child must have a goal of his own, so is the case with the child with disability. After setting the goal, he can assess himself time to time.

Teaching

Teaching includes methods. materials and curriculum. Different modes have to be used for children who are deficient in use of sense modalities. Provision for tactual learning (Braille), auditory learning (talking books & calculators) & abacus (for mathematics) for the visually impaired is needed during teaching.

Teaching the children to use computers with speech synthesizers will work well with the visually impaired. Greater visual inputs. teaching sign language& finger spelling. Facilitating full view of teacher's mouth for lip reading while speaking is needed for the hearing impaired. Teacher can observe the hearing aid of the child daily whether the battery works, or whether it has been switched on or not.

Children with autism need to be trained in situations where human interaction is not required on them. Woking on computers yields an ideal situation in this case. Pictorial inputs enhance learning. Children with mental retardation are taught easy concepts while using more replication, behaviour modification, functional academics and generic skills.

Children with learning disability can be taught with the help of remedial approaches for their problems in reading, writing. mathematics, reasoning and language usage. Modified assignments, alternate methods of doing assignments, extra time, typed assignments instead of written ones, permission to use calculators using familiar and experienced situations to introduce new concepts are some of the general strategies for this group. Collaborative teaching will go a long way for inclusive settings whether it is collaboration of regular teacher with any of the following

 a) Special Teacher

b) Resource Teacher

c) Visiting Special Teacher

d) Parent

e) Other professionals and/or peer teaching which utilizes the skills of classmates.

Regular teacher gets guidance and aid in collaborative teaching. Planning the 'what' and 'how' part of the teaching with expert co-workers, with regular feedback from them and to them produces better results. Teachers have to accept children with disability, get trained to handle them, plan strategies to teach this group of children and to recall them, find their strengths and weaknesses.

Find suited partners according to profile of the child, create databases and resources. It is difficult for the teachers in service to get trained in all areas of disability. Schools can plan to select a particular teacher for a particular training according to the background. It must be ensured that school has a teacher trained in each disability area. Curriculum for the included children may not always be the same. It must be need based and suited to them.

A teacher may have to delete parts of the curriculum, modify and/or simplify it. Parts of the curriculum may be entirely new. Due to changes in curriculum, a teacher may have multigrade teaching in the class room. Peer teaching may find an important place here. Both learning and teaching, before initiation have objectives designed, which give a direction to evaluation. Objectives for the included children also may or may not be the same as those for regular children.

Accordingly, evaluation also changes. For the visually impaired, examination for assessment requires a writer who is below the level of the examinee. The child with writing disability also needs a writer. Children suffered with other learning disabilities., may need extra time to attempt an exam. Different modes of assessing them may have to be implemented. Oral exam instead of written, or vice versa (depending on the problem).

Typed exam instead of written exam, a separate room for examination due to different space requirements of the child. Some school boards have taken initiatives in this direction e.g., CBSE provides writers to children who can't write, allows exemption from some subjects etc.

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