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Changing Attitudes in China

by Li Li

Inclusive Education

Inclusive education is an effective and affordable way for communities to ensure education for all. It advocates the right of children to attend school and have their learning needs met. It also challenges the notion that children with disabilities need to be educated in segregated schools often away from their local communities. In fact, once access barriers have been removed, what most children with disabilities need is merely good-quality education rather than special education.

Many children with disabilities are excluded from school because of physical barriers, perceptions about their abilities, and lack of recognition that they have an equal right to education and participation in their local community. Inclusive education is also challenging long-held prejudices about inclusion of people with disabilities in the wider community.

Save the Children China Programme (SCC) has been working with the Anhui Provincial Education Commission (APEC) in China to develop a range of initiatives aimed at improving the access of children with disabilities to education. APEC was looking for ways to implement legislation requiring provincial education commissions to work toward "education for all," including making provision for disabled children, and it was decided to start the inclusive approach on an experimental basis from the kindergarten level in 1990. This proved highly successful, and the new teaching methods have led to improved education for all children and high demand from "ordinary" parents for their children to attend the project schools.

In addition to its work promoting inclusive education, SCC has also developed projects in "sign-bilingual education" in which deaf children in special schools and rehabilitation centers are given the chance to become fluent in sign language and in Chinese, as well as initiatives in community-based rehabilitation and parents' clubs for special children and their families.

A boy, previously excluded from the school system, now in the Grade 1 inclusive education class at Xin Dian Primary School [Kalpesh Lathigra]

It's been over a year since Xin Dian Primary School in Anhui Province, China, started to implement an inclusive approach to education so that all children in the school catchment area, and especially those with disabilities, could access education. We have about seven children with different types of disability in our school now. Before we started, staff from Save the Children's office in Hefei helped our school modify our environment to suit disabled students' special needs by building ramps, altering the toilets, paving the pathway and so on. They also offered training for our teachers to prepare us. Recently, we realized that it was necessary to raise awareness for our able-bodied students to help them have a more inclusive manner toward their disabled peers.

Since we attended inclusive education training, we found that inclusive education makes sense for us as teachers. Several teachers with disabled students decided to conduct a training for all the students in our classes to raise their disability awareness.

Learning from Experience

During the half-day training, we talked about what disability is, what a person with disability can do in our community and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The student participants from Grades 2 to 4 also took active part in a "blind walk" exercise in which half the participants are blindfolded and walk with the other half acting as guides; later they repeat, switching roles. During the discussion afterwards participants talked about how they felt as vision-impaired people and how hard their life could be if they were blind. The children were really absorbed by the feelings they had; it was as if a window had been opened to them which allowed them to experience things from a different perspective.

Children at Xin Dian school taking part in the "blind walk" exercise [Xiao Yu]

First, after the students experienced impressions and emotions when unable to see, they understood better what life is like for a person with disability. They also began to realize that children with disabilities have the same rights as everyone else to education. We have found that this helps reduce their discrimination against the disabled children in our school.

Second, the students voluntarily set up support groups in the classes with disabled students. They help the physically disabled children, for example, go to the toilet in between classes, they play with them and help them with their homework.

Change of Attitude

Third, the students changed their attitudes toward disabled children. There is a student with cerebral palsy in my class. I used to hear the other students call him "creep" on the way back home after school. Now I observed that they started to call him by his name, En, and they walk home with him instead of leaving him to walk home alone. In other classes, the students stopped calling their disabled peers "fool" or "dummy" and call them by their proper names.

In conclusion, many students who attended the training have become advocates of inclusive education. They pass the information they have learned from the training on to other students and sometimes talk about their disabled classmates with their parents. They may not be able to explain what exactly inclusive education is, but they know now that it is their responsibility too to include all children in daily life.

Li Li is a teacher at the Xin Dian school which has been involved in the SCC-supported Inclusive Education Program.

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