The Integration Of Special Needs Individuals In The Society

The Integration of Special Needs Individuals in the Society
Name:
Institution
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract 3
Introduction 4
Discussion 5
integration of disabled young students with non-disabled students
Teacher avoidance attitude to special needs students due to the extra effort needed
Advantages and disadvantages of the integration process
Advantages and disadvantages of the integration process
Recommendation and Conclusion 11
References 12
Abstract
Children and persons with disabilities have long been put in designated schools and institutions detached from the rest of the society of able people. This ultimately makes them loose out about interacting with the real world hence enunciating their necessity for special needs. However, integration of these students into the mainstream education is the current trend to remove any kind of restrictive environment that may make the students perceive themselves as different from the rest. This paper critically examines the integration of special needs individuals in the society.
Introduction
Special needs students go to particular schools, different from the mainstream that offer equipment and tools that assist with the special needs and aid the staff to interact with them. The students are more regularly monitored and provided with attention required in the curriculum. This is intended to assist them to attain self-sufficiency that would be hard to achieve through regular education system. Using technology and different approaches of teaching and specially designed classrooms students for different individual needs such as disabilities in communication, emotions, behavior, and physical or developmental, they can learn in a single institution (Imber & Geel, 2004). In these schools, the ratio of teacher to student is kept far much lower than in regular school with 1:6 teacher- student ratio or lower.
Nonetheless, this mode of segregation is being disparaged, and there is an advocacy towards integration of these students into the mainstream education. In the past, disabled children were kept away from school and secluded from the rest of the society. Charles Dickens was instrumental in voicing the pleas of the special needs students ,who lived in inhumane conditions ,through his literature books ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Little Dorrit’ that helped stoke compassion from the public (Imber & Geel, 2004). He is attributed to reform in Europe. Only in late 18th century did the disabled students get their first institution in the world with the school for the blind in Paris, another for the deaf in the U.K and for visually impaired in Edinburg and Bristol. The mentally ill were put in the same institution as the physically disabled. There are still about 23 million children with special needs around the world. These children suffer from the aforementioned separation, and this has been highly recorded in the rural areas of the developing world. There have been great strides and efforts enrolled to improve the sense of attachment of the disabled into the rest of the community.
Other than being taught in designated institutions, they now learn in the same institutions as the able students though they have special classrooms and teachers equipped with the right tools to cater to the special needs (Imber & Geel, 2004). These students get to interact with the able during breaks and over meals. Further and further, the gap that bridges the two is being narrowed with greater inclusion through integrated learning. Both students get to spend most of the school day interacting with each other, nonetheless since this would require the whole institution and curriculum be aligned with needs of the special students, most schools allow for the least needy one in adoption of best practice that is being recommended in schools. Only when the special needs students’ needs special services such as therapy, counseling do they diverge from the rest of the group before rejoining.
Discussion
In its bid to integrate the disabled into the society, the Widad Center for Child Development in Dubai, UAE assists the disabled with their cognitive, creative and emotional attributes to give them the ability as in the able students, to conquer the world and be successful. They teach responsibility in the exceptional kids by giving lessons such as environmental conservation through recycling and are also taught tasks such as gardening skills for self-sustainability. Entrepreneurship classes are also taught such as in the Cookie Bar lessons and prudent management of resources through project management in occupational therapy.
In integrated learning, the exceptional students cannot be assessed with the same criteria as the able students. There are two modes of instructing that are used to assist them compete with the rest. One is accommodation that can be defined as a tenable alteration to the teaching practices whereby the exceptional students learn a common syllabus as the able, but in a form that is convenient for them such as Braille for the visually impaired with the same content as the mainstream textbook. Accommodation only seeks to modify the setting, the presentation, or schedule.
On the other hand, modification deals with radical alterations of the syllabus to make it simpler from that of the regular students or to lower the criteria of assessing the student. For example, for students with learning disabilities, test that are based on long novels can be shortened to a considerable prose or skipping strenuous subject all the same (Imber & Geel, 2004). As the society is clamoring for education of exceptional students in the least restrictive environment possible, special needs students, in an integrated system are usually offered examinations after the regular school term is ended and offered tuition classes. The tuition classes are meant to help them draw near with the other students who do not have any disabilities.
Since an ideal integrated system though research efforts is yet to be realized, there are more general conceptualized efforts that can be applied in this approach. Identification, assessment, and correct placement of exceptional student are critical in developing the viable integrated system. An individualized system for the exceptional students is regarded as the idealistic approach to meeting their needs. Their medical history needs to be critically assessed to help comprehend their health status. For the least apparent disabilities, discrepancy model of assessment can be employed to get a sense of the degree of learning difficulty by the student after which the necessary action can be partaken.
For the more obvious students such as the developmental disorder and mental disability, a prior intercession is recommended through the ‘response to intervention’ model. In the discrepancy model, an exceptional student could have more or less the same intelligence or IQ as the regular students but requires special learning difficulty service to assist his, her grades match that, or the average integrated class (Imber & Geel, 2004). In response to intervention, the exceptional students are given remedial service programs on the onset of their education and then their response to the intervention is assessed, and the ideal placement is recommended. Those who still show difficulty even after the intervention could be have a segregated class from the rest or given further facilitation. Through Individualized Education program, the students are designated a resource room for a proportion of the day. An IEP mostly formulated in developed countries such as the United States and Canada, is used to define an e...