Disability and education

Thinking about our visits to Domino Preschool, our Assistive Technology Workshops, our various school visits, and what we've been discussing in our academic classes, what did you discover about how disability affects students' capacity to be successful in school? In what ways is this similar to your home country? In what ways is this different than in your home country? As an educator, how do you understand your role in assisting students with a variety of special needs to be successful in school?

As with socio-economic status, it depends on the school and, also, on the disability of the children.

I’ve discovered in that visits that if the children have people to help them, assistive technology… then they are more likely to be in a mainstream classroom, following the lessons without any problem. I haven’t heard about assistive technology until I have been here, and it’s something that I find very interesting. Only by giving them a small object, a small improve… they can be much more independent than before, letting them live a better life. Also, I’ve realized about the importance of the social health care to pay this objects (especially in the case of high tech objects) because they are really expensive. Anyway, now I now that a small thing can make a difference. Also, I’ve found interesting the idea of one of the woman in the assistive technology project, as she said that every of us have different disabilities, but some of them interfere in our normal lives.

In Spain there are also different ways of seeing disabilities, but in general children with disabilities are in mainstream classrooms, only some of them are in special classrooms if the disability makes them unable to follow and adapted curriculum in a mainstream class. I think is something necessary for this children, because they can learn in a normalized environment, and their classmates can grow up in a opened and different environment, which will let them see the disabilities of their classmates as something that make them special but not worse,   and it’s very easy for children to follow a classroom, but the problem is that teachers have to be more prepared for that. I think that all the future teachers should learn how to deal and help students with disabilities, being able to prepare for them assistive technology and also knowing how their disabilities can be counteract with other abilities that they will have.              

I think that we, as teachers, have a big part in the process of including children with disabilities, especially in nursery school and preschool, as children have us as a model. The way we will talk with children with disabilities and also what we think about them will make de difference. Even if we don’t realize what we are doing, we will take more care and listen more children that we think can learn better or we think they are more interested. So we have to know that children with disabilities learn differently of other students, but they learn.