This week, we will focus on accessible curriculum for quality education, looking at each of the impairment categories. When we begin talking about inclusive education, we usually start from the point of getting children with disabilities into school. We know from our previous discussion that such children continue to be excluded from education systems. Where they are included, it is often within special schools and there's a further push now towards inclusion in mainstream schools. Getting into schools is not an automatic process for children with disabilities as we have learned and there's still much advocacy to be done to get all children their right schooling. However, we need to be clear that it is never enough just to get access to the classroom. It is quite possible to exclude a child who's in the classroom and to do a great deal of damage to their self-esteem and learning prospects if they are not given equal access to the curriculum. Opponents of the idea of inclusive education have used the term 'maindumping' to refer to a process where a child is placed within the mainstream with little or no adaptation and therefore limited access to the curriculum. While I can agree with the sentiment that this is not the way to go about inclusion, I would caution on seeing special schools as always being ideally placed to provide curriculum access. We need to rather be aware that in whichever classroom the child with the disability finds him or herself, whether it be in special mainstream or in any other arrangement, this child must be able to benefit in a meaningful way from the curriculum. The presentation of materials, engagement with materials, and the assessment of learning should allow the child equitable access to the curriculum on a par with his or her non-disabled peers. This might require additional support for the child with a disability in terms of assistive devices, additional teaching time, classroom assistants, and so on. In this regard, I would like to remind you of how we discussed the difference between 'equality' where everyone gets the same, and 'equity' where everyone gets what they need to be able to participate on an equal footing. In this week's sessions then, we will look specifically at equitable access to the curriculum for learners with severe to profound sensory or intellectual disabilities. There are three points I would like to make as a background to this idea of equitable access. Firstly, delivering an accessible curriculum is more of a process than an event that reaches completion. This is because despite having the same impairments such as a group of children having low vision, or being blind, or being hard of hearing, all children are unique and have unique learning needs. Curriculum adaptation for equitable access can be undertaken by both special schools and regular schools in different ways. It is not a law of nature that this can only happen when children with the same type of impairment are all taught together in an environment separate from their non-disabled peers. On the other hand, it is also not the case that children with disabilities will automatically have their needs addressed in classrooms with an inclusive orientation, but without specific disability supports that are directed at their impairment. The second point I want to make is that there is a critical element across hearing, visual, and intellectual impairments which is that these children have a reduced ability to learn in passing from the environment, due to the fact that the information they receive is restricted. Possibly to either only the visual or auditory channel, auto-limitation on interpreting this information in the case of intellectual disability. They therefore lose out on what is been called 'incidental learning'. This refers to the fact that people learn a lot without explicitly trying to learn or being taught. For example, they learn new vocabulary through imitation and social interaction, they learn social norms through playing games with other children and many other things beside. Incidental learning is unintentional or unplanned and results from other activities. It happens in many ways: observation, repetition, and so on. This natural way of learning is situated, contextual and social. Many students with disabilities miss out on opportunities for incidental learning. Consider this example, a young person walks into a crowded lunch room and looks for a seat. He notices a group of people about his age, who are similarly dressed. One of them is wearing a baseball cap with the name of his favorite team. They are talking, smiling, and looking friendly. Now imagine another young person walking into the same situation, who cannot see. He's led to the first available seat and does not know the gender or age of the person sitting beside him, and cannot rely on the visual cues to find common ground. So, when it comes to developing social skills, people with vision have the advantage of incidental learning as they naturally observe their surroundings and the interactions of other people. But for students who are visually impaired, social skills must be explicitly taught in the curriculum. The same implies to children who are deaf, who miss out on conversations and environmental noises. Children with an intellectual disability might find difficult to understand and interpret what is going on in a particular social situation and need to be explicitly taught things that others learn effortlessly. Thus, the curriculum should include ways to integrate incidental learning, with structured learning, exposing students to as much of the incidental learning that other non-disabled students are able to access. Thirdly, there are specific languages or media associated with the different types of impairment. That's braille and screen reading devices play a central role in education for the child who is blind or has low vision. Sign language is very important for the deaf child, and possibly alternative and augmentative communication methods for the child with a profound intellectual disability. These tools need to be taught to the child, which requires a specific expertise, much as the teaching of a new language requires skills in language teaching. We know that it is not enough just to speak English to be able to teach English. However, there's also the need to be able to teach with these languages or media, after the child has acquired the basics. Teachers need to be able to present information, provide learners with opportunities for engagement and practice with the learning materials, and assess the learning that has occurred using these media and languages.
