Contributions from: Marie Vitkova
Abstract
The political reforms in the Czech republic ten years ago have brought also big reforms in special education and inclusion of special needs persons. Good results are seen especially in the field of including the visually impaired and physically disabled students. A couple of years ago a progressive step was made in the education of multi-disabled individuals in the Czech republic and nowadays a two-year experiment based on a new legislature promoting education of multi-disabled is going on.
The conscience of public about disabled persons has been rising in our country, the government and the parliament have made many legislative steps forward towards the inclusion. Also the universities have started to follow the ideas of inclusion not only by accepting more and more disabled undergraduates but especially through their departments of special education and their active participating in these ideas.
As well the Department of Special Education in Masaryk University Brno after Salamanca statement has done many innovative changes in forming the education of special teachers. Department made a big change in general education so the subject inclusive special education was included into all pedagogical majors studied in the Masaryk University and its Faculty of Education. The department in Brno is one of the few with a distance Master course in special education.
Dear ladies and sirs, dear colleagues,
It is my pleasure to meet you here in this conference and to have a possibility to talk to you. Let me introduce, on behalf of my all colleagues from the Department of Special education, some ideas and issues that we have confronted in the Czech republic since 1989. I will try to focus my presentation on a whole concept of special education in our country and in the end on some particular outcomes which our department has gained in the past few years.
In order to understand the whole concept of Special Education after the political reforms in 1989 and the approach to special education by special education teachers in the Czech republic, one has to look back to its roots.
The Czech republic has a long tradition of providing children with special educational needs. Already The Austrian-Hungarian Empire Law of 1869 legally ensured care for the handicapped. In the last part of the nineteenth century, the Ministry of Culture and Education mandated founding of institutions for the sensory impaired. With the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918, the new government faced a disunited service systém. Accordingly, several measures and resolutions were aimed at dealing with the situation. In 1929 legislation was made that stipulated the eight-year education for children with mental retardation and supported establishment of preschool education for severely handicapped pupils and sensory-impaired students. Special education principles concerning teacher training were formulated in 1937. One of the key professionals that took an important part in that process was Professor Miloš Sovák. As an outstanding expert in medicine he underlined a disability as a "defect" and proposed way how to understand and compensate the consequences of such a "defect".
After the Second World War teacher training institutions were established in Prague and Bratislava. As a result of the Education Act of 1948 schools and institutions for the handicapped became a part of a united educational systém. The Education Act of 1960 ordered an obligatory elementary or secondary education for children with disabilities and so gave them the opportunity for gaining a professional training. The Education Act of 1978 then prolonged compulsory education for the students with special education needs to ten years - which meant eight years of primary education and two years of secondary training. Alternative schools and first forms of integration got chance thanks to the 1989 Education Act.
Year 1989 with the Velvet revolution launched a tremendous change within Czech society. Collectivist approach accenting special schools and social care institutions as the only alternative to overcome "defects" started to turn into more individualist approach. This approach was giving more space to the person in question himself or in cases where the individual could not formulate his needs, the parents. We could say that partly the initiative for the changes was provoked by the information from abroad, mainly West Europe and U.S.A., but a very helpful factor was that the society was ready to change. The persons with disabilities started to formulate their needs, not anymore medically but socially based. The parents became, upon the new democratic principles, more aware of the power to change their children´ quality of life.
With the new socio-political situation in Czechoslovakia and in the Czech republic after 1993 split some issues of special education must have been addressed:
What was meant by new humanistic philosophy in special education? Special education is considered according to humanistic concept as an intervention with the aim to eliminate or reduce the consequences of a person´s disability towards a quality life. The ways of realizing it are prevention, remediation as training and education, and compensation. Therefore solutions have been seen in creating better early intervention system, better acces to the job market, a bigger stress on life-long learning programs. All that should in results lead to the real inclusion. It is highly clear that all those factors have been and will always remain dependant on human sources.
Regarding the curricula transformation, one could say, that with the rising demands on individual´s abilities in a modern world the life-long learning by persons with special educational needs is the most important. At present life-long learning programs in the Czech republic are developing in co-operation with Ministry of Education, Ministry of Social Affair and international projects. An accent is put on modules for adults who live in social care institutions. A systém of social rehabilitation is succesfuly developing, especially in the field of sensory-impaired adults. Within the elementary schools curricula the modern technology skills got more space, an obligatory factor towards nowadays multimedia communication.
After the revolution in 1989 the czechoslovak and the czech government adopted progressive changes in legislation. The first step was the acceptance of the Declaration of Human Rights in general which included also acceptance of the rights of people with special educational needs. The legislative conditions for the integration of children with disability prior to school entry were set out under the Czech National Law 390/ 1991 - Pre-school and School Institutions. This Law is supported by the Education Notice 35/1991 in which Paragraph 4 describes the integration of SEN pre-school age children into regular kindergartens and procedures expected to také place in an integrated class. A very important Public Notice 399/1991, today known as Public Notice 127/1997, describes the creation of special classes for the variously disabled within regular schools and also allows for further or partial integration. The principal of a regular school is thus able to create a special class catering for a specific disability. The students attend separate lessons, but are able to mix socially with their non-disabled peers. The Public Notice 291/1991 defines a possibility of setting a so called specialized class within a regular school where students with mild learning difficulties and behavioral difficulties have a possibility to fulfill their elementary school education. The activities of Resource centres in the Czech republic were set by Law 395/1991. The Law defines roles between the Resource centres and School Counselling Centres. The School Counselling Centres are to perform educationally oriented psychological investigation and management of children with learning difficulties attending regular schools while the Resource centres are to concern themselves with children and youth with more severe disabilities. The main target group of the Resource centres is the included children with disabilities in mainstream schools and pre-school children at homes. In 1996 "the Czech Government Comittee for the citizens with special needs" agreed with other national institutions for the disabled on actualizating the the National plan of equal opportunities for individuals with special needs. Since 1998 when the actualization happened and overtook the OSN Standardized rules of equal opportunities for persons with special needs the new millenium tasks of special education in the Czech republic were formulated. The topics within special education field that had not been fulfilled yet were depicted in the plan and thus have become the issues of contemporary special education community. Early intervention, transdisciplinary team work, beetter opportunities in education of the severely multidisabled students, better access to an employment, personal assistance, sheltered living, institutional care etc. etc., these are the tasksf to think of and to work on.
The changes in preparation the special education teachers and mainstream teachers had to be indentified after 1989. With a new approach towards the SEN individual a new approach in universities of giving more practise to students, offering them different types of lectures, more seminars, interactive sessions was needed. As a matter of fact already the idea Education for All - idea that special education basics should be given to mainstream teachers -was a big change. It´s been obvious year by year according to the annual statistics of persons with SEN that special education is becoming a phenomena and should be taken within general education for granted.
In every counry the university preparation is a crucial element in a national plan for delivering services. The public often views the level of special education through the teachers´ level.
The Department of Special education at Masaryk University in Brno was established in September 1994 at The Faculty of Education by Masaryk University in Brno. It became the youngest one in special education teacher training. The need of establishing the department was urged by students, professionals and other public. The basic strategies of the department curricula were formulated according to The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action issued by UNESCO in 1994. The idea of Education for All became a link of the department courses and of the department key subject called "Inclusive special education" . At present around 100 hundred undergraduates comes to study at the department every year. The department is the only teacher training institution that offers Master´s degree to distant students from all over the country. The team of professionals enables a rich foundation of teaching modules that gives a solid basis to all students in their future career. The curricula of the department includes the traditional subjects as psychopaedia, logopaedia, somatopaedia, ophtalmopeadia, etopaedia and more fresh modules as surdopaedia, education of the individuals with learning difficulties (ie. dyslexia), special education counselling, pedagogical diagnostics or social pathology.
Many experts in medicine co-operate with the department as lecturers. The most important partners are special schools, social care institutions, resource centres etc. where the students get their practiseships.
There is a range of various courses given to the students at the department: Please, let´s remember that a Master´s degree is an obligatory for an undergraduate to become a teacher in whatever field in the Czech republic.
The most numerous group of undergraduates is formed by distant students. They major in three specific specialisation within special education and while studying the Master´s degree course they can be given a new module of course - the education of the multidisabled which is a combination of psychopeadia, ophtalmopeadia and somatopaedia. The call for such an innovative teaching module was created upon an increasing number of the multidisabled children and not very well discovered approaches towards them. The Czech Ministry of Education started a two-year experiment in 1998 that enabled setting up so called "rehabilitation classes" for the severely multidisabled students and by that tried to solve one of The National Plan issues. This year the experiment is turning into a Public Notice and becomes a more reality. Unfortunately financing is being a big objections of setting more of these classrooms.
Distant courses of special education
Not only the distant students have a possibility to specialize in the education of the multidisabled. By last year extending some four-year day courses of special education into five-year day courses the daily students got a better chance to prepare themselves for the multidisabled persons education. Thanks to studying one year longer they also get a better theoretical and practical basis for teaching at secondary level schools, both mainstream or special ones.
Day courses of special education
If we come back to the teaching module "inclusive special education" we might say that this subject in accordance with the above mentioned idea Eudcation for all is provided not only to the special education students but also to all teacher training undergraduates at The Faculty of Education in Brno who will once become teachers at mainstream schools. With increasing integration and increasing number of children with mild learning difficulties at mainstream schools and secondary level schools the future teachers definitely appreciate any knowledge from the special education field. Ensuring the quality of education of the secondary level school teachers who happen more and more often to meet included SEN students, the subject "inclusive special education" was implemented last year into the teacher training courses at the Faculty of Natural Sciences.
Within the students study period placements within EU programme Socrates - Erasmus showed helpful. Very successful instruments have been lectures given by foreign lecturers, opened distant courses, workshops, various european programs. The laste project of the department that is now in its conclusion and about to be implemented into practise is a Leonardo da Vinci project "Improvement of the Acces to Education and Employment of People with Special Needs" which as an outcome sets up a training computer centre at the department. The partners are Great Britain, Lithuania, Norway.
This centre, starting to run since this September, is aimed at two target groups:
Even though the Department of Special education in Brno together with Prague and Olomouc departments of special education created a wide range of offered courses and a good foundation for bettering the special education systém one must admitt that a permanent struggle for improvement the inclusion is a challenge. Not well stabilized eonomic situation in the Czech republic is faced in every science field. Human attitudes are the ones to improve as well. On the other hand the improving governmental policy toward the disabled with a big support from non governmental organizations in our country is contribution to the development of a positive vision in lives of the individuals with disabilities.
Thank you for your attention.
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