Czech association Rytmus promotes good practices in Inclusive Education
The conference Inclusive
Education - Good practices took
place in Prague in November 9.- 11. 2007. The conference was organized by
Rytmus, an NGO in cooperation with the Special Education center Vertikala and the
Faculty of Education of Charles University (Prague).
The main goals
of the conference were
- to contribute to the
enhancement of the quality of the inclusive education
- to offer the proven
educational strategies to the teachers
- to improve the
teacher-assistant team cooperation
- to show good practices of cooperation between the
teachers of the mainstream school and the special school
- to zoom in at the
importance of the role of a special needs support teacher in the process
of inclusion
- to get familiar with
the situation of inclusive education in other countries.
About 180 of teachers, parents, teacher´s assistants and
others took part within the 3 days of the conference activities.
The first day was devoted to whole days workshops. The first
one was conducted by Mark Vaughan (Educational Change Consultancy,
Bristol, GB) and almost to 40 teachers from several primary schools was
intruduced the Index for inclusion.
The second one with
the topic - „Meaning of transition
planning for young people with disabilities“ was conducted by Mary Schuh
(Institute on Disability, New Hampshire, USA). She showed examples of inclusion
of children with severe disabilities, which showed that it is possible to
organize an inclusive school, which lets all the children participate, and
learn from each other,
make friends with each other, not at the expense of academic quality level. If this is
possible in one place, she said, it should also be possible in other places.
She highly recommends total inclusion.
Jo Lebeer (University of
Antwerp) presented the experiences within various countries of the Inclues
Network and elaborated on the necessity of having a cognitive-mediational
approach with a vision on modifiability of the child with a developmental
problem, in order to avoid that inclusion is interpreted and practised in a
reduced way, i.e. only social. He also demonstrated with cases how this can be
done.
Vera Pokorna
The workshop presentations showed a panorama of local initiatives in Czech and Slovak Republic as well as in Spain in the area of inclusive education or working with children with special needs. E. Lazaro, director of a regular inclusive school near Madrid, says that successful incluion is entirely dependent on good collaboration and changing the teachers' mind.
Rytmus, NGO provides the
supported employment services from 1994 and also serves as a centre of
support of the inclusion (www.rytmus.org)
Mary Schuh (left) and Pavla Baxlová,
Rytmus Director