Children with disability deserve equal access to quality education. Experts have suggested that an inclusive education should be encouraged by governments by way of providing infrastructure and other facilities that enhance learning, socialisation and the overall development of children with disability. Chika Mefor reports.
Chioma Aroh, became a pupil of one of the primary schools in Anambra State at the age of six. She was as smart and intelligent and as determined like her many classmates striving for the best, striving to earn praise from both her parents and her teachers. Only that she was crippled, attacked by the deadly polio disease when she was a baby.
Chioma didn’t stop at the primary school level. She went through secondary and university education and bagged a degree in Mass Communication.
In an interview with LEADERSHIP Education, Chioma said that she couldn’t achieve all that if her parents had shielded and prevented her from going out with her peers in spite of her physical challenges .
“The school has a kind of environment that should encourage instead of discourage you. It builds your confidence as you tackle one tasks after another . And you know that you can really make it no matter the difficulties.”
Though she was physically challenged, Chioma believed that her performance in school stemmed from what she learnt from socialising with other students in her class that were not disabled. That is what an inclusive education can do to a physically challenged child.
Inclusion or inclusive education can be defined as the philosophy and practice for educating students with disabilities in general education settings, according experts. The practice anchors on the notion that every child should be an equally valued member of the school culture. In other words, children with disabilities benefit from learning in a regular classroom, while their peers without disabilities gain from being exposed to children with diverse characteristics, talents and temperaments. The inclusive education model evolved out of the realis ation that all children have the right to receive the kind of education that does not discriminate on the grounds of disability, ethnicity, religion, language, gender, or capabilities.
While Inclusive education allows for students with special educational needs to spend all, or at least more than half, of the school day with students who do not have special educational needs, the practice has been criticised by advocates and some parents of children with special needs because some of these students require instructional methods that differ dramatically from typical classroom methods. Critics assert that it is not possible to deliver effectively two or more very different instructional methods in the same classroom. As a result, the educational progress of students who depend on different instructional methods to learn often fall even further behind their peers.
But the supporters of inclusive education say that it could help children to learn social skills in an environment that approximates to normal conditions of growth and development. Children during their formative years develop language more effectively if they are with children who speak normally and appropriately. Often, it is gratifying that where school and community environments can be made physically and programmatically accessible, children and youth with physical disabilities can function more effectively than would otherwise be the case. It is also apparent that such modifications to the environment often enable others who do not have disabilities to access their environment even more readily.
Inclusive education has also been seen as the first step of a child to make him adapt to live situation in his environment and not be isolated. It is reasoned that when he is done with school, he still has to face these situations, so there is need for him to start learning at a very tender age.
As Nigeria aligns herself with the whole world to pursue the objectives of Education For All (EFA), with the 2015 deadline, the question boggling the minds of exponents of inclusive education would be: what direction should a low-income country like Nigeria follow in its quest to provide quality inclusive education for special needs learners? Mr. Paul M. Ajuwon of the Missouri State University in his write up, Inclusive Education For Students With Disabilities In Nigeria: Benefits, Challenges And Policy Implications says that Nigeria like many other developed countries should understand that education is a social process that should be concerned with more than the traditional academic domains, and everyone should recognize that education deals with developing in children an increasing sense of independence, personal responsibility and belonging to their diverse community.
Ajuwon opined that, it has never been sufficient for government officials to merely endorse international protocols of special needs education that have not been adequately researched or tested in developing countries which are exactly what the Nigerian government usually do. It spent huge amount of money to bring in policies gotten from the developed countries only to come finally to realize that the policies couldn’t work in the nation thereby wasting power and resources. For the project to work, Ajuwon said that there was need to change the attitudes that prevent any sort of interaction with children, youth and adults who have disabilities adding that public enlightenment work in schools must begin the process of educating the school and the general community in order to eradicate superstitions about causation of disabilities, and to modify the fears and myths about children with disabilities that create misunderstanding and inhibit normal interaction.
He also said that researchers must determine empirically the educational and social-emotional impacts of inclusion on students with differing characteristics, emphasizing also the need to undertake rigorous research into the needs of the large number of general education students, and to assess how inclusionary practices will impact the general classroom atmosphere. He also recommended that new buildings constructed under the UBE scheme throughout the 774 local government areas, should be designed in such a way to anticipate the needs of the physically challenged so that changes after construction are unnecessary, thereby creating maximum accessibility for all students, not only those with special needs.
Even of great importance is the training and re-training of special educators and also the need for proper deployment of available trained special educators at primary and secondary school levels. As the argument still ranges whether the inclusion education would achieve the desired effect, the fact remains that there is need to grant education opportunity to every child, whether physically challenged or not.
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