As part of the Gati programme, Atma is exploring more deeply the approaches to education of students with disabilities. This is the first blog is about the differences between an IEP approach to curriculum and a standardised approach to curriculum.
For a curriculum to appropriately stipulate students’ learning outcomes, it needs to take into account both the age and learning capacity of the student. These factors are more often than not exclusive of each other, irrespective of the disability in concern.
One focuses on exclusiveness and the individuality of how a disability interacts with a student. This perspective emphasizes that in spite of efforts at tracking and plotting learning capacities and outcomes for each child with disabilities, there will always be a learning gap faced by a student with disabilities that can be satisfactorily reduced by hands-on guidance and teaching by a special educator and their group of therapists. This perspective upholds the importance of the IEP (Individualised Education Plan) which aims to take care of learning for both academic and life skills.
Another emerging perspective is that which attempts to plug the subjectivity of learning of children with disabilities, putting to practice- inclusive education. Using standardized curriculum as its primary tool of implementation, this perspective highlights the need of common knowledge and practice for students with or without disabilities. In a truly inclusive environment, they believe that irrespective of their ability or disability, students should be given the opportunity to learn and determine for themselves, their potential to learn. The standardized curriculum uses tools and apparatus that aid children with disabilities pick up and learn concepts that are made mandatory syllabus for students in mainstream schools. The idea here, is to set stage for the eventual mainstreaming of the student, given that all children (irrespective of whether or not they have a disability) are learning the same modules and concepts when following their respective syllabi.
What we need a curriculum to be A curriculum consists of syllabus, textbooks, needed teaching-learning materials, teaching strategies/processes, and assessment and evaluation processes. When defining the curriculum for a student or a group of students, certain criteria emerge to be important. For children with disabilities (and for any child), one would benefit from paying attention to:
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