Prague upon my first impression appears a mix of Budapest and Luxembourg, hills, canyons, magnificent edifices. City tours are offered in old-timers’ convertible cars, “donuts” are roasted, not fried, before your eyes in the old city square where a peaceful-seeming protest in progress while Hare Krishna disciples chant through narrow streets. I arrive upon their national holiday, October 28, a date that celebrates not the founding of the Czech Republic, but the independence of Czechoslovakia in 1918.
We academics stay in small, neat hotel rooms sans tubs, hair dryers, or frigs, breakfast not included, with tiny TVs (yet large enough for the world according to BBC and CNN). But the room fits me well, saving me from any sense of decadence and self-indulgence.
Sunday afternoon, October 30th:
A formal procession of dignitaries into the great hall of Charles University,
where a silver medal is presented to Professor Reuven Feuerstein (Israel) for his life’s work on cognitive modifiability, commences our conference. A lovely musical interlude follows.
At our first plenary session, Jo Lebeer (BE), gives us an overview of inclusive and cognitive education in Europe. I’m sad to say that my host-country, Belgium, has one of the worst records in this field. The leaders in the field are the United States, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Italy. The Netherlands has recently adopted inclusion as a policy and is doing well.
Professor Feuerstein (Israel) talks on his systems of mediated learning experience and instrumental enrichment: we can modify our innate being – human culture can change biology; not only can we change the software (a person’s behavior or performance) we can change the hardware (we can change the brain). A “state” that a person may be in (e.g. repetitive behavior) is a condition, and we can change the condition. Children develop by being included in the community.
Peetie Engels (NL), a remarkable young lady who has Downs, addresses us on some of her life’s accomplishments, accompanied by a slide presentation run by her mother. She drives a car, plays musical instruments, does sports, and has a job in a daycare center. She spoke to us in English.
Monday, October 31st, finds us in a different building of the university which houses the School of Education. The morning sees us again in plenary session. A CZ professor, Stanislav Stech, speaks to us on specific features of cognition and learning in the school context. I cannot understand this presentation as the static on the headsets makes listening to the simultaneous translation impossible.
Rafi Feuerstein (Israel): Between Geographic Integration, Special Education Integration of the Student with Special Needs:
This speaker, the son of yesterday’s award winner, speaks next in regards to inclusion which he sees as the moral choice. Separate schooling is a form of apartheid. He postulates two options: A - integration with an aim of getting the most academic, social and emotional benefit, and B – integration with an aim to advancing special skills, such as language, communication and social skills.
He goes on to say that “each human being has the option to modify, to change.” A lack of desire to learn is due to the fact that the student doesn’t’ understand the value of learning – he can’t envision the future. Intelligence is characterized by the ability to change.
The aims of integration or inclusion for him are as follows:
For integration to succeed everyone concerned must be prepared: student, parents, teachers, all of the school staff, and any additional helpers or tutors.
Sue Buckley (UK): Evidence-Based Practice – Designing Education Programs to Meet Specific Needs:
“We need to acknowledge that learning is a social process: we must speak to the baby in order for the baby to learn how to talk.” Her research has been with Downs children. She sees this difference not just as a pattern of global delay. Nor does she think it is fixed at birth. Inclusion and focused interventions yield many rewards.
Some of the weaknesses of the Downs profile are difficultly with hearing and seeing, speech and language delays, poor verbal short-term memory and difficultly learning by listening. Strengths include good social understanding (empathy and social skills), self-help, daily living activities, and good visual short-term memory. They learn better by seeing rather than hearing. A teacher should enable knowledge to be demonstrated other than by speaking (e.g. pointing, choosing, and/or selecting).
A study done in Hampshire, UK, in 1987, showed significant benefits for inclusion in mainstream schools for Downs students, such as a much richer spoken language and higher involvement in supported literacy. However, these students experienced better socialization in special schools. The danger of inclusion for Downs’ students is the lack of social inclusion which students in special schools have. This should be considered because of the fact that their adult life will be in a special needs society (e.g. sheltered housing and workshops).
Lou Falik (Israel/USA): Counseling and Consultation Parameters of Inclusion:
Mainstreaming in the U.S. is part of a political as well as an educational agenda.
Everyone who participates in the process of inclusion needs to change: the parents, the student, the peers, the teachers, and the school. Not all these participants have the same level of need. A “shadow” or support aide is often needed, at least initially when a child is included in a mainstream school. You need to prepare the child for the new situation and the new situation for the child.
He advocates having a consular consultant who would facilitate the process of integration and bridge the gap between the various parties concerned. The resources of the school district need to be weighed along with the needs of the child.
A stand-up, sandwich lunch was provided in the basement hallway of the School of Education where the posters of new research were also being exhibited. Ham and cheese or just cheese was the choice. Two apples, a candy bar, water, tea and coffee were the drinks. The area was so crowded I quickly left and sat outside on a bench with the smokers to eat.
The afternoon session of parallel workshops and presentations were unfortunately split into different buildings so that you couldn’t easily wander from one area of interest to another. The session I presented in was entitled, Adaptation of Learning Materials for Children with Disabilities, and it was located in a large primary school around the corner and down the street from the School of Education. We had two translators at our disposal, students at the university who were studying simultaneous translation. They were both very good. The drawback, however, was that we could only speak a few sentences and then had to pause for the translation. It made presentations quite lengthy. We were given a time limit of 20 minutes, but with the translations it took at least 40. However, this extra time had been figured in. You will be please to know that I finished right on time without any prompt.
The first speaker was Dagmar Rydlova (CZ), who introduced herself as a witch with dyslexia. Her website is www.dys.baba.cz, and evidently “baba” in Czech means witch. As we were presenting on Halloween, this seemed most appropriate. She has created a text book she calls English without Barriers. From what she showed us, it appears to be a very visual method of teaching English sequencing and grammar. She left as soon as she had presented, perhaps to get ready for some nighttime activities.
Dagmar Kaslova (CZ), a doctoral student in education, had the floor next. Her topic was System of School Instruction of Children with Special Needs in English, Physics and Chemistry at the Primary School. Now if I had to take Physics and Chemistry plus a foreign language while in primary school, I probably would have been identified early on as having special needs, but that is neither here nor there. She used these three subjects to show how you could adapt teaching topics to include the LD learners in regular classes. One example which she gave for English was to have the students pretend that they were tourist guides for their town or city and to show an English-speaking visitor around.
Barbara Kovacova (SK) told of the Applicability of a Puppet’s Programme in the Kindergartens. She uses puppets to help communicate with LD, preschool children. She doesn’t necessarily use a doll or a puppet. She could use a real object, like a book to use as a puppet. The children get to perform both as an audience and as an actor. They practice asking and answering questions (this is often a very difficult task for LD learners – my note). Both real and imaginary situations are explored. The skills that are enhanced are how to introduce yourself or someone else, asking questions (to get things and to enhance understanding), giving answers, describing events, telling problems, telling stories, and learning how to behave in real life situations.
Then it was my turn. Susan van Alsenoy (BE/USA), Learning Disability Support for Teachers Worldwide. As I often do, I ran my presentation by my reluctant family members for feedback and corrections. My husband asked what time I was going to present. I told him late afternoon. He said, “Forget it. Everyone will be asleep by then.” So while they were setting up my PP slides on the computer, I passed around a box of Belgian chocolates to enhance cognitive processing. As my time was limited, I basically just went through the one page of general considerations and strategies that was the result of my research into best practice for mainstream teachers which can be found at http://studentswholearn.fawco.org . Thanks to a member of Dyspel (http://www.dyspel.org), Tania Welch, I was able to hand out a translation in Czech as well as in English at the end of my talk.
Our session concluded with Sidsel Werner and Hallvard Hastein (NO), a husband and wife team who addressed us concerning, A Universal Approach to Teaching and Learning: Utilizing Learning Materials as a Pathway of Inclusion. They discussed the difference between integration and inclusion. They presented their theory that learning materials in the classroom can be used by all learners, but perhaps in different ways. Learning materials should help to organize the class and help to solve class problems.
Tuesday, November 1st, and the final day of the conference. We are back at the School of Education.
Alex Kouzlin (RU, USA, Israel) discusses the Integration of Culturally Different Students in Mainstream Classes:
Immigrant students everywhere constitute a special needs group. He gives the example of the integration of Ethiopian students into the Israeli educational system, citing their previous experience in their homeland and the requirements of formal education in Israel. In their homeland, Ethiopian students learn by listening to adults speak about events and recount traditions. It is forbidden for children to ask questions of anyone but their father. Placed in Israeli schools, these students were often mistakenly identified as LD learners. New methods of assessing their cognitive abilities were used. It was found that their learning potential proved to be much greater than their current performance. A group of 75 of these students responded positively to the Feuerstein Mediated Learning Cognitive Enhancement program. After 7-8 months of this intervention they raised their scores to above the Israel norm.
Peder Haug (NO), The National Curriculum – Closing or Opening Key to Inclusion:
In 1975 inclusion was made law in Norway. There was a political will for a unified society. It was felt that one way to achieve this would be to educate all children together. Schools needed to be changed in order to make all children comfortable. There were 4 tasks for inclusion, (1) fellowship, (2) participation, (3) democratization (all voices were to be heard), and (4) benefit (students were to be given an education to their advantage both socially and substantially). Parents, teachers and students supported inclusion on a general level as a main principle for compulsory schooling.
A lack of formal education results in a person having low cultural capital.
Schools tend to reproduce themselves making change difficult. The established tradition of work in school has an enormous power of survival and dominates what is happening there. Things tend to be seen as black or white with small tolerance for shades of gray. Teacher education throughout Europe is in crisis. Even in Norway today, which has had a policy of inclusion for 30 years, some candidates in teacher-training classes still think that they can send difficult students off to special schools. They don’t yet realize that they are it.
Dario Ianes (I), A Cooperative Model to Foster Inclusion and Development of Metacognition in All Students. Teachers would like a diagnosis from the health services regarding LD students that would miraculously enlighten them on how to conduct their daily practices.
Teaching metacognition (thinking about thinking: “students’ awareness of their actions, how thinking occurs, how strategies are used, and the effectiveness of one’s cognitive processes”) improves inclusion.
Individual Educational Plans (IEPs) should be a life-long plan, not just an academic learning plan.
Italy has experienced 35 years of full inclusion and this speaker has found it to be largely positive.
Vera Pokorna (CZ), Systemic Attitude in Assisting the Children with Specific Needs. This speaker was also the conference organizer, and for that we owe her many thanks. She presented a highly technical paper which assessed the effect of two systems, causal and systemic, on the intervention of therapists in the educational milieu.
The conference closed with a short, round-table discussion. Inclusion was seen as a human rights agenda. However on the European level, countries can look at the same law and have different interpretations.
Conferences such as this are invaluable as we learn from each other, seeing common problems and goals from slightly different perspectives, and return home committed to renewing our struggle to welcome all students into our classrooms in an effective manner.
Respectfully submitted,
Susan van Alsenoy
http://studentswholearn.fawco.org
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Students Who Learn Differently
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11/17/05 BB 11/17/05 BB