Reflection-My learning from the service Design workshop
An eye opener in this workshop was that people with disabilities are capable of doing things we usually presume that they cannot. Our biased attitude towards them doesn’t only roots to our presumptions but also our perception about them. The way we perceive things is the way we plan on them and hence forms our way of execution, that is, our actions. When we come across a person with disability, most of us start sympathising with their situation which creates a social exclusion unknowingly. We just know of “social equality” but hardly practice equity when it comes to respecting the needs of different sects of society. The discrimination extends beyond caste, race, gender and financial status and seeps in the right to practice the skills and capabilities possessed by people with different abilities. The environment we have formed tends to discourage the people with disabilities to grow with the mentality that they don’t possess the bodily capabilities which deserve respect in the society by the abled body people. The society has not been inclusive of PWDs considering all behavioural aspects and infrastructural practices designed to treat them as part of us and not ”apart from us”. It is only then, that we would realise that they too have aspirations and they too can excel in tasks they like doing if worked on, just like abled body people. This starts with embracing the capabilities of abled bodied people and not focussing on their disabilities, which is a shift of mind-set from “people with disabilities” to “differently abled people” rather than calling them special abled. The above were some insights I got from our visit to Enable India.
According to our chosen field of research — Learning of PWDs — we thought of looking into learning at the primary and secondary level of children with disabilities. We found out that the ratio of special schools to the mixed schools is more, which could bow down on the line of discrimination right from childhood, when children are just forming a mentality about what they come across by the way they see things. Educating CWDs in the special schools makes them believe right from that age that they are differently abled. We hence chose to research further on a form of education which takes the same baseline for both “CWDs” and “abled bodied students” ie; inclusive education. There were many glitches in the system we came across, through which we could quote that the scenario at present excludes the CWDs in the name of inclusive education. The glitches cover the lack of sufficient training of teachers, improperly defined curriculum and poor implementation of the technologies in making an inclusive environment for CWDs. All these three areas of learning were interconnected and relates directly to the “social discrimination” being talked about above. After researching about the context, we chose to focus on the training of teachers as the other two areas would also be covered. We proposed a service design which helps the effective implementation of already proposed ideas of imparting education in mixed schools. The existing system consists of a general teacher who teaches the whole class comprising of both normal abled and differently abled students. There are resource teachers (1 per school) and assistive teachers (1 per classroom) who specifically focus on the children with disabilities. The schools lack practice of an ecosystem which provides proper interaction of the CWDs with the normally abled students. The teachers don’t know how to address this issue, as even they don’t have a proper training to interact with the CWDs. The resource teachers and assistant teachers are quite less in number as compared to the number of CWDs, so the ratio is inappropriate. The proposal states a individual attention to the CWDs by an assistive teacher being assigned to a group of CWDs and a resource teacher assigned to each classroom who can be approached by the ATs and the CWDs in case of any help . Apart from chancing the teacher student ratio, a library similar to already existing online libraries for CWDs like Saugamya pustakalya should be there which make the use of assistive technologies and other affordable solutions which can be accessed by the CWDs. The system also proposes services like regular visit of specially trained teachers with disabilities by NGOs to take sessions of CWDs to provide them motivation and provide a better teacher student interaction. The NGOs can also send in the physiotherapists, speech therapists and psychologists as and when needed by the school to guide the CWDs. The interaction between CWDs and normally abled students is encouraged through a “buddy program” in which learning models will be designed to teach appropriate behavioural and interaction practices to the normally abled students to help them engage with their CWD peers in activities and teaching methods designed to educate all students from a common baseline. An important learning from the comments of the students while the proposal was showcased in the class was that the maintenance of the teacher student ratio is a challenge. Also, the efficient use of the assistive technologies in the libraries was questionable due to lack of sufficient funds, which we initially thought could be well funded by the schools. The success rate of buddy programme was also unknown as it is not yet predictable if the students would engage in such learning practices. This requires looking into the implementation practices more deeply.
While looking at the iterations, listing the threats and limitations of the project also become important to expand the further scope of the system design beyond the school and understand where can the system fail in terms of sustainability. In classroom there are limitations like students to teacher ratio and teacher selection criteria. Limitations at school level are that education restricted to only few disabilities, not all disabilities are considered. We did not focus on corruption involved in the school, ignorance and irresponsibility of staff and management of the school. There are other limitations outside the school like lack of social responsibility of communities, politics involved in the society and facilities for CWD’s outside the school. Threats are involved at classroom level, school level and community level. In classroom there can be threats like peer bullying, understanding levels of diverse students and their personalities by teachers, issues in group work among students and learning abilities of students. There can also be chances of unhealthy competition and clashes in the classroom. It might be overburdening to the classroom environment if there is large diversity of disabilities. Also, school might not provide enough resources for students and teachers. Staff, management and teacher’s behavior can also be unpredictable. Community may not participate because of lack of motivation and parents might not get enough time to spend with CWD children and assist with learning.
