”She attended a public school, but the other children’s parents didn’t want her to study with their kids and I was forced to drop her out of that school. I cannot send her to a special school because of financial problems. As we live in the Arzni village, it is hard for me to take her to Yerevan every day. In my opinion, a child with a disability should go to a special school to avoid psychological stress. In rural societies, not everyone understands that a disease is not a subject for laughter. There is nothing more painful than the fact that your child can not live a full life. She is at home all day long. She cannot do anything individually,” Polina Ivanova, whose child Ludmila Ivanova is mentally ill, told “Aravot”.
There are several degrees of disabilities at which children do not attend school. Specialists are working with the included children. They perform a medical, psychological and pedagogical assessment to estimate whether the child can attend an inclusive school. For example, children with complex and multiple disorders do not attend an inclusive school.
The teachers of inclusive schools have to work with normally developing children and children who have some disabilities at the same time. As the teachers said, the difficulties while working with such kinds of children could be:
- The teacher sometimes cannot accept the child the way he or she is.
- They can be disgusted because most of these children have problems with the trimming apparatus. There could be splitting, having a specific scent, an obsession, and so on.
- The teacher needs to react properly to the inadequate behavior of a child.
- The teacher needs to know how to establish a proper relationship between teacher, parent, and child. He should be able to explain to the parent what the problem of his or her child is. Often parents do not accept that their child has a problem. In that case, the educational process is not effective and almost impossible.
Inessa Martirosyan, who studies in the “Special Pedagogy and Psychology” faculty mentioned: “I think the child with a disability should attend public school because they need more communication with their surrounding world, need to feel love and affection, through which they receive psychological support. This initiative is important not only for these children but also for the society. Seeing such children, people learn that society also consists of individuals with a disability”.
“When a child with a disability hugs you and says “Mommy”, you feel obliged toward the child,” says sign language teacher Mariam Galstyan. “You want to give them what they need. I love my profession and the children I will educate and bring up”.
Shushanna Khachatryan
Photo source: www.globaldisabilityrightsnow.org
