Made by:
Cristina Nacif Alves
This study[1] was carried out at the invitation of the World Bank, with the objective of identifying the concepts and general characteristics that guided the organisation of Inclusive Education in Rio de Janeiro Municipality and to indicate possible actions and lines of theoretical support for the line of thinking that disabled people have the right to school education of a level of quality that ensures their full development.
It was necessary to choose a methodological path capable of embracing the time limits and the complexity of the questions considered important in the political, ideological and technical fields in which Special Education is immersed. Accordingly, it was decided to carry out a study of an exploratory nature, the main characteristic of which is to provide “guiding clues” for a consistent theoretical examination and allow the identification of working hypotheses to be examined in later studies.
The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Brazil, in chapter I, article 5, guarantees all citizens the right to life, liberty, and equality, among others. We know that although citizens are acknowledged as having such rights by the public authorities that legally recognises such a fact, this has not been enough to guarantee that all citizens really have such rights. However, public policies and proposals for action directed towards Inclusion represent a major advance in the full exercising of such rights. In other words, the fact that the highest law of a country emphasizes in its text the rights of citizens does not guarantee such rights – in our society we still see a lack of coherence between the equality proposed in the Law and the exclusion of those who live on the margins of society. However, the recognition of the contradiction between words and action is itself a major step forward towards the building of an inclusive society. Closing our eyes to the lack of a praxis is the same as accepting high levels of exclusion, instead of admitting that we have to accept reality before going out to search for alternatives in the struggle against exclusion, such as, for example: denouncing, creating, re-creating, seeding and gathering fundamental elements in the search for the improvement of the quality of life of people and groups in society.
However, although there are numerous access needs – to work, to housing, to transport, to food, to health, to education, to leisure, –, that the great majority of the population have to confront, we will not focus on these points in this discussion. We will only examine those questions related to the guarantee of the right of Education for those people with special educational needs, specifically in Rio de Janeiro Municipality.
Many ideas appear before us when we consider the choosing and systematisation of significant elements for the effective building of an inclusive society. We know these ideas are valid because we are aware that we are part of a group of people that wishes to see changes and that is able, through carrying out research and raising questions, to put forward coherent actions. We also recognise the need for and importance of debates and actions outside the specific context of Special Education, strengthened by the history of national public policies.
In Brazil, the organisation of education is directed by the Law of Directives and Bases for National Education (“LDB”) 9394/96 and by the Directives and Bases for Special Education in Basic Education (resolution nº 02/2001 of the National Educational Council (“Conselho Nacional de Educação” – CNE).
As noted in the previous chapter of this research study, Rio de Janeiro Municipality had been preparing the ground for the building of inclusive schooling. However, the establishment of the legal requirement ratified this vision and firmed up the objective.
LDB nº 9394/96, in its article 1, of chapter I, emphasizes that “education covers all moulding processes that take place in family life, in human socialising, at work, in teaching and research institutions, in social movements and the organisation of civil society and cultural manifestations” and, in article 2, of chapter II, it states that “the purpose [of education] is the full development of the person being educated, preparing him/her to carry out his/her duties as a citizen and to qualify him/her for work”. The Law also emphasizes principles such as (article 3) equality of conditions for access to and permanency in school and the guarantee of quality standards, setting out access to basic schooling as a public right of citizens (article 5), with it being a duty of the State (article 4) to “provide regular school education to young people and adults with characteristics suited to their needs and availabilities”.
The same law defines one of the responsibilities of the Municipalities (article 11) as being: “to organise, maintain and develop the official bodies and institutions of their teaching systems, integrating in them the educational policies and plans of the Union and of the States”, Special Education being considered as one of the levels and types of education and teaching (chapter V) that must be offered preferentially in the regular teaching system for pupils with special needs (article 58). The law also establishes, in article 59, that curricula, methods, techniques, educational resources and specific organisations, as well as teachers with skills for integrating these pupils in regular classes, should be provided to meet these needs.
In this sense the role and function of the Instituto Helena Antipoff (IHA) has been of great value in achieving inclusive education, ratifying in practice the theoretical provisions of the Law referred to above. This is because it has a Pedagogic Policy Project that takes into account the diversity of pupils and the needs to build curricula that ensure disabled people have access to good quality teaching.
Resolution nº 2, of 11 September 2001, set out the National Directives for Special Education in Basic Education, in which “the Teaching Systems should be designed to meet the real needs of pupils with special educational needs through the creation of information systems and the establishment of an interface with the government body responsible for the Demographic Census to satisfy the variables affecting the quality of the education process for these pupils”. Accordingly, as mentioned by Alicia Bercovich, of the IBGE, in her workshop talk “Inclusive education in Brazil: current diagnosis and challenges for the future”, the statistics presented show that Rio de Janeiro Municipality is the one that has given greatest coverage to the referred requirements.
The National Education Council, in its article 3, refers to Special Education as ”an educational process defined by a pedagogical model that guarantees resources and special educational services, organised institutionally to support, complement, supplement and, in some cases, substitute the regular educational services, in order to ensure the school education and promote the development of those pupils with special educational needs, in all the stages and types of basic education”. For this, it is necessary to reflect on the processes that generate exclusion, seeking a fresh scenario where difference is an expression of a certain way of acting and thinking in this world and not a motive for considering individuals less worthy according to pre-established standards. The Rio de Janeiro SME and the IHA have made major efforts in this regard, such as:
The IHA has been implementing and implanting various actions aimed at constructing the Inclusive School. Apart from seeking to guarantee access of all disabled people to school enrolment, it accompanies the pedagogic work done with disabled pupils, developing strategies for:
For this it has 10 (ten) teams to accompany the work done in the Public Teaching System, providing support to the professionals who work with pupils having special educational needs. In addition, it has a Special Education Guidance Centre for developing new knowledge, constructing resources adapted to contributing to pedagogic practices with pupils with special educational needs, to help overcome difficulties encountered in teaching, and carrying out research in the different areas of Special Education in accordance with article 11 of the Law of National Directives for Special Education in Basic Education. The work carried out by the Guidance Centre is done with the special educational needs of pupils enrolled in the Municipality’s public system and is organised into different departments, as described in Structure and Operations/IHA – 2003:
In the Special Education system of Rio de Janeiro Municipality a pupil with special educational needs can enrol at any scholastic level, from Infant Education, including crèches, up to the 8th level of basic education. This is set out in the corresponding organic law and is in accordance with articles 1 and 7 of the Law of National Directives for Special Education in Basic Education.
LDB 9394/96 states in article 59, chapter III, that teaching systems must provide “mid or high level teachers with suitable specialisation to provide specialised assistance, as well as regular school teachers qualified for integrating these pupils into regular classes”. In this regard the IHA has a team for coordinating the outside school attendance centres. This team guides and trains professionals who look after those pupils who are enrolled in the public Basic Schooling system and who encounter psychological, physical, auditory, mental or social difficulties or impediments.
The disabled child needs and can, from birth, receive specialised educational assistance, aimed at fully developing his/her potential and enabling he/she to participate effectively in society. In order to be able to guarantee these rights, Special Education in Rio de Janeiro Municipality is organised in the following manner:
The other types of assistance given to children and young people with special educational needs offered by the Special Education public policy of Rio de Janeiro Municipality are:
The enrolment of pupils with special educational needs is done, preferably, in the regular teaching system. After that has been done the school can request IHA to carry out a pedagogic assessment to determine the support requirements or the type of assistance that is best suited to the pupil in question in order to allow he/she to develop fully.
The Special Education assessment procedures are as follows:
Inclusive Education assumes education is given to everyone, not just from the point of view of quantity but also in terms of good quality. Pupils must be able to absorb teachings about matters already existing in the world and have the possibility of producing new forms and possibilities through their participation and everyday actions, creating them and making them available to other pupils in an interactive dialogue and dialectic with life.
The construction of Inclusive Education is not straightforward; it needs the involvement of everybody in the search for good qualify of life. And this, in terms of quality in education, means real access to what life demands for effective social participation: knowing how to read, write, tell, but also knowing how to re-read, re-write and re-tell the various stories that frequent our universe and make this the scenario for new stories that will emerge as a consequence of interacting with the world.
The concept of “necessidades educacionais especiais”[2] (“n.e.e.” – special educational needs) is ideologically opposed to those pedagogic works that are centred on the pupil’s disability for the organisation of the curriculum, its contents and the activities carried out.
The term “n.e.e.” has its origin in a curriculum proposal prepared in 1992 by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture. In 1993, the term was adopted by the IHA, looking for a pedagogical concept for Special Education practices, marking the importance of the transformation of the referred practices for supporting and building Inclusive Education.
The concept of special educational needs moves the focus from the disability to different ways of thinking and acting, with the new pupil emerging from this vision as being a person who has needs, specific and special needs, as a function of his/her identity, his/her own way of acting and living in this world.
The pedagogic work that follows from this term is the starting point and reference point not for the simple identification of the pupil’s difficulties – “focus on the disability” –, but for an assessment that seeks to understand the pupil in terms of what he/she already knows, his/her autonomy, and what he/she can know, do and produce in spite of his/her difficulties. These are the foundations for a process of pedagogic intervention with work being directed at seeking out possibilities for the pupil. This requires that those people involved in the process should constantly assess the relationship between development and learning, as well as identifying the educational needs of the pupil, so that the milestones of providing good quality education can be achieved.
Considering special educational needs means, therefore, not just being alert to the personal characteristics of each pupil and his/her disability, but also foreseeing the way in which the school organises the educational process. In other words, needs are not established in a definitive manner but are looked at from the pragmatic everyday pedagogic perspective, seeking paths and responses, going beyond difficulties, giving the pupil the possibility of full development, aimed at participating in society and not just reaching the limits of his/her disability – the latter being something that generates social exclusion.
So that the educational needs of the disabled pupils can be met in such a way that they acquire knowledge and scholastic skills, different types of adaptations are required, namely:
The concept of special educational needs, seen in this way, is in line with the theoretical conjectures of the socio-historic theory proposed by Vygotsky.
Vygotsky pointed to the need for us to evaluate the qualitative aspects of development rather than looking at the quantitative aspects. And, in relation to the development of the disabled child, he states that we are not dealing with a child who is less developed than other children but rather a child who develops in a qualitatively different way, under, however, the same general laws of development – which will be considered below.
The educational panorama shows – in spite of the efforts made in the struggle against social exclusion and towards improving quality in education – the presence of mechanistic and organistic meta-theoretical models in current pedagogic practice, giving a reduced and limited view of the development and learning of pupils, and, in addition, in the case of those who are disabled, contributing to a pedagogical focus based on both the pupil’s “primary disability” and his/her “evolutionary plateau”. Accordingly, the referred models lead to educational practices that concentrate on preparation and compensation, based on conditioning factors and training in habits or games activities or other stimuli, in both cases, devoid of significant content and pedagogical targets in the real sense on the expression[3] .
This perspective, opened up by Vygotsky, took on well defined characteristics in psychology in the 1920s and is currently experiencing resurgence in academic circles in the area of Education.
The concept adopted of man is that of a person as a social being, constituted in and by culture, at a certain time and in a certain historical context. The types of action, conscience and human subjectivity are products of interpersonal relations, starting from certain social, cultural and historical conditions.
The bases for a new curricular focus and for new pedagogical practices can be established by adopting this socio-historical model and theory.
History is produced by the way in which people think, act, preserve or transform the meaning given by social relations established in interactions with the environment and other people, producing ideas and representations from which they attempt to explain reality. History can thus only be understood from the standpoint of social relations between people as a function of real conditions at the time. Thus, each individual attitude was, once, an attitude between people.
Understanding of individual people has to be made in the context of social relations as historical processes. However, the historical aspect that stands out is not a historical concept of a succession of facts in time or the evolution of ideas but rather the way in which real people in actual objective conditions create the action mechanisms and cultural expressions of their social existence, creating and re-creating, reproducing and transforming social, political, economic and cultural aspects.
Vygotsky’s socio-historic model establishes a new relation between the subject and the object in the process of constructing concepts and knowledge, supplying a theory of cultural development of the human psyche with entirely new bases.
For Vygotsky, the typically human phenomena, such as conscience and language, can only be explained as the product of relations established in a development process deeply set in individual and collective histories. Human psyche, the ways of thinking and acting are, thus, conceived as being produced socially, as the result of the appropriation by individuals of culturally produced elements and features.
In this approach, man is the product of the dialectic relations between body and mind, between the biological and the social. Thus the higher psychical functions emerge in the area of relations between people: they are internalised, individualised, consolidated and transformed dialectically. What is individual was, once, collective.
Rio de Janeiro Municipality consolidated, with the publication of MULTIEDUCAÇÃO (MULTI-EDUCATION) in 1996, a new concept for curricular organisation, reflecting ideas of what a curriculum is and seeking to link these to reality and to what living signifies.
When we look at the design of curricula in the context of education we see the theories that guide or guided its authors, as well as their concepts of education, knowledge, development, learning, schools, teachers and pupils, infancy, etc.
The curricular organisation proposed by MULTIEDUCAÇÃO asks us questions “on the nature of the contents to be incorporated in the curricula, on the social and historical context in which education occurs and on what type of knowledge is in harmony with the times in which we live and with the pupils that we have” (MULTIEDUCAÇÃO: 107).
In this perspective, the educational policy of Rio de Janeiro Municipality seeks a school capable of developing a common curriculum of experiences where the local and universal – the multiple[4] – are emphasised, transforming the school into a democratic space of cultural production.
Under this vision of education, the Basic Curricular Nucleus has to establish what is fundamental in the interaction between school and life. And, in this regard, MULTIEDUCAÇÃO shows its essence: “to provide the pupil with the means to place him/herself in the world in which he/she lives, understanding the relations that are established in this world, criticising and participating in its transformation” (MULTIEDUCAÇÃO: 108).
What is proposed enables the school to be dealt with as it presents itself: a place that is plural in nature, not just on account of the possibilities for action but also for the variety of social and cultural contexts of people in different places, ages, values, beliefs, ideas, habits and, above all, needs.
Multiplicity is present throughout the concept of MULTIEDUCAÇÃO, and this encouraging respect for diversity, considering the variety of situations and different ways of acting and thinking, is a possible way of transforming exclusive education into Inclusive Education – for everybody.
The insertion of pupils with special educational needs in the regular teaching system has been the object of much reflection and some anguish for Special Education. Many educators do not look on such a move favourably as they believe that a specific – segregated – education is more suited to guaranteeing that these pupils have access to knowledge. Very often, the rejection of the inclusive process is justified by the idea that Regular Education is lacking in quality even when the focus is on the “normal” pupil.
Special Teaching, in general, has special procedures centred on the disabled individual with the objective of integrating him/her in society through the “teaching of habit and attitudes”, at the expense of access to scholastic content.
However, starting from the principles of the Federal Constitution, that sets out Education as a social right, describing it as a “right of all and a duty of the State and the family, (...), to fully develop the people and prepare them for exercising their duties as citizens and qualifying them for work” (article 205 – Federal Constitution), with it being the duty of the State to establish “specialised educational assistance for disabled people, preferably in the regular teaching system” (article 208, chapter III – Federal Constitution), and the disabled citizen thus becomes a pupil, subject to specific pedagogic attention in Education. The status of disabled people as pupils gained more weight with the promulgation of the new Law of Directives and Bases for National Education of 1996. However, it was only in 2001, when the national public policies were expressed in a Law (National Directives for Special Education in Basic Education) specially directed at Special Education, the content of which strengthened the access and quality of teaching for all, stating that: “by Special Education, a type of School Education, we mean an educational process defined by a pedagogical line that guarantees special educational resources and services, organised institutionally to support, supplement and, in some cases, substitute, the regular educational services, in order to guarantee school education and promote the development of the potential of pupils with special educational needs in all stages and types of basic education” (article 3, of Resolution nº 2, of 11 September 2001).
The new directives and bases for Special Education represent efforts to reach democratic educational goals for all people in Basic Education. However, considering Special Education as a type of scholastic education means highlighting the pedagogic character of Special Education, giving rise to the definition of a pedagogic line that guarantees teaching quality for all.
Although Special Education in Rio de Janeiro Municipality – since it has been handled by the Instituto Helena Antipoff (IHA) – has been making significant advances in improving the quality of teaching and seeing to the needs of disabled pupils, it still, in a contradictory sense, shows elements based on the mechanistic model – emphasis on the forming of habits and attitudes to integrate the pupil in society – and on the socio-historic model – emphasis put on social building of learning and development.
This work has highlighted some successful experiences, trying to establish a dialogue that can point out ways past the barriers faced by teachers with disabled pupils in their classrooms in their everyday pedagogical practice. The theory adopted here is in harmony with the education policies of the Education Secretary of Rio de Janeiro Municipality, where efforts for inclusive schooling have been gaining ground.
It is believed that the socio-historical theory can provide the necessary support for a democratic educational line, critical for expanding the potential of pupils with special educational needs as well that as those people who directly or indirectly are part of this process.
The Education Secretary of Rio de Janeiro Municipality has made efforts and assigned technical and human resources towards implementing a pedagogic line capable of defining and re-defining classroom practices in order to guarantee the effective social participation of all pupils. Many training courses, field investigations and action research projects have been carried out with backing and investment resulting from the Municipality’s educational policy. Similarly, efforts are underway for re-launching MULTIEDUCAÇÃO to all education professionals, with a view to getting all of them to participate and engage in the process of building Inclusive Education.
It is very important that we reach a unified meta-theoretical perspective so that the educational practices give meaning to teaching work, and to the pupil, to reflect the linkage of Special Education to social policy. In this manner, ethical principles are being consolidated and new historical trends are being established. However, this milestone will only be reached when Education attains:
Changes are still being made in Education in Rio de Janeiro Municipality but major advances are being made with new values and beliefs being internalised after reflections on and questioning of the milestones and objectives imposed by the political commitment to overcome exclusive practices.