Parents' Associations - Category F

We start by remembering what we know about disability. We will search our memories for any people we have met who have disabilities, the people with disabilities we have been told about, or simply the times in our lives when, due to an injury or accident, we have suffered temporary limitations in mobility, vision, hearing and/or communication similar to those suffered permanently by people with disabilities. We can take a few minutes for each of us to find those memories.

We will then show some brief videotestimonials from the Grupo Social ONCE. These audiovisual pieces deal with situations featuring people with disabilities in each of the four key territories: Leisure, Education, Employment, and Universal Accessibility.

Our aim is to come up with a proposal to make our school more inclusive. To this end, you may find it useful to read these testimonies:

Tony never misses any of his basketball team’s games. He loves playing with his friends on Saturdays. Tony uses a wheelchair to get about. His parents are worried because they don’t know if Tony’s new secondary school is adapted to allow him to do physical education with his classmates.

John has loved cooking since he was a little boy. His parents prepared step-by-step recipes for him with pictures, because John doesn’t use many words and he mainly communicates with images. John wants to work in a kitchen, which is why he would like to study a vocational training course.

Lucy absolutely loves design. She wants to do vocational training to be able to become a fashion designer. Lucy is deaf. She doesn't know whether the course she wants to do is adapted.

Valerie is sensitive to noise. When the other students move their desks and chairs in the classroom, Valerie experiences pain rather than just annoyance from the noise. She has to leave the classroom and find somewhere quiet where she can calm down.The same thing happens when bell rings every day to tell students when classes and break times start and finish.

Eric likes school, although there are a lot of places that he does not recognise. Eric has autism and communicates with images. He can never find the lavatory, the speech therapy area or the art room, because there are no images in the school that identify the different rooms.

We then set up a dialogue or group discussion about the possible unmet needs of students, parents and/or teachers with disabilities that exist or may exist in the near future in our school.

To put together the Parents' Association's proposal, we give each person three Post-It notes and ask them to think of three strategies or measures to better include people with disabilities in the school or college.

We then ask each person to share their proposals with the rest. It is a good idea to stick the Post-It notes to the blackboard or wall, pointing out which ones are the same, which are similar to others, and so on. This will give us a visual map of proposals.

The group must then vote on just one of the proposals to improve inclusion for people with disabilities in the school or college that has been generated in the previous step.