Limited access to schools stymieing special needs education-Canadian Associate Professor

Apr 02, 2015 News

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By Desilon Daniels
She sits on her bed, watching intently as her brother and sister prepare for school. It’s Monday morning and their uniforms are freshly washed, prepared for a week of hard work and equally hard play.
However, for her, school is out of the question; her special needs keep her home with parents, her closest friends and confidantes in her life.
Though Guyana has been making strides in educating children with special needs, Canadian Associate Professor, Dr. Mary Jane Harkins, believes that much more needs to be done. She said that physical accessibility to schools is the first hindrance that needed to be addressed.
Dr Harkins recently concluded a year’s worth of intensive training in the area of Special Education Needs (SEN). The training was a part of the Guyana Improving Teacher Education Project (GITEP) conducted in association with Harkins’s institution, the University of Mount Saint Vincent.
During an interview, Dr Harkins explained that special education has become inclusive education and therefore includes all learners. During a presentation, it was also emphasised that children with special needs are not “retarded”.
The presentation showed that ‘retarded’ should be completely struck from everyone’s vocabulary.
Learners could be gifted children who need to advance in their learning, or a child whose grade is down but who must be included in the education system.
Dr Harkins added that a main goal was making schools accessible to all students. She said that in her time here, she recognised that Guyana has made it a priority in its education system to making schools accessible and inclusive. However, she said, physical accessibility in public schools still remain an issue.
According to Dr Harkins, Guyana is developing new schools with the aim of making them accessible. However, she said, not all students can go into a regular school.
“Some of them need a specialized setting; there are some of those who may have mobility issues and these are barriers to going to school,” Dr Harkins explained.
She continued, “That’s what they’re looking at now when they build the new schools; that they’ll be accessible to all students, whether they have mobility issues or not.”
In the Guyana context, Dr Harkins said it was important for SEN to be focused on because of the untapped expertise and knowledge among those not in schools.
She noted that many persons who have achieved great things in love had some form of a special need.
“There are always those that are struggling in the schools because they may have a learning disability and may need to be taught differently. So, we need to reach all of those students because they may have special expertise,” Dr. Harkins emphasised.
Dr Harkins said that teachers needed to be upgraded in the same way as physical facilities.
The professor said that things are “constantly changing in special education” and she opined that teachers needed to be prepared to meet the needs of all students. “There are students with different ranges, interests, needs and abilities so we’re training teachers with the newest techniques possible with assistant technology and all of these strategies and pedagogies so that they’ll be able to reach the students that have all these special needs,” Dr Harkins said.
Dr Harkins said that the intensive training occurred over a one-year period and was completed in eight cycles. “Each month we would come and do workshops; we would visit schools together and we would observe teacher trainees and coach teacher trainees. We also would help to support them so that they can implement the things they are learning in the programme.
“So it went for a year and we would have workshops every day, approximately two to three hours. It was very intensive so they would have the opportunity to try a lot of new strategies and ideas.
“In the time that I was away they would try implement it and then we would have discussions around that,” Dr Harkins explained.
She explained that the school visits were across Guyana and mostly at the primary and nursery levels.
She said that during the visits she recognized that the schools were well-run while the students were “the most polite children in the world”.
The professor noted that the main issue was the scarcity of resources in the schools and said that this was tackled by the provision of technology and other resources without a great deal of expense.
The year of training concluded last Friday with a closing ceremony.  Dr Harkins had been the coach for less than a dozen lecturers from the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) and the University of Guyana (UG).

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