"Disability is not Inability"

On Monday and Tuesday, Katie and I taught at a teachers college called Patandi.  It is the only teachers college in the country that trains teachers of special needs children.  The college is split into 3 main departments: hearing impaired, vision impaired, and intellectually impaired.  LTP can work so well with  special needs groups and I really enjoyed myself here.

We started out asking teachers to tell us some of the special talents that special needs students have to compensate for their "need".  Teachers had a hard time answering this question, so I offered an example: deaf students are better observers than I am because they rely on their sight so much.  They might notice cars coming before I do because I often rely on my hearing.  After that, teachers began to give more examples.  I think this was a good exercise because it forced the teachers not to think about the “special need” but rather what gifts a special needs child has.

We then split the teachers up into their 3 departments.  Each group had to come up with a cartoon storyboard that told a story about the special gifts that special needs people have.  The idea was to educate the general public, schools, and parents about special needs groups.  We learned that schools will often not take special needs children because they can’t support them and treat them as though they don’t deserve an education.  In addition, parents often will favor a non-special needs child and send them to school instead of the child with special needs.  So, we told the teachers that this is their chance to educate the public about “special needs”.  

 The groups then took pictures to represent each scene on their storyboard.  After printing the pictures, they assembled the pictures into cartoon books and accompanied the pictures with speech bubbles and paragraphs.  All of the stories were so great!  

The vision impaired story was titled “Learning Through Tactual Sense” and told a story about a blind person who is able to do his own laundry because he has a great sense of touch and can feel the fabric that is his.  The hearing impaired story was titled “Disability is not Inability” and told about 2 sisters, one that was deaf and one that wasn’t.  The father didn’t want to send the deaf child to school, but the deaf child threatened suicide, so she was sent to school.  In the end, the deaf child outperformed her sibling and got a job.  Finally, the intellectual impaired story was also titled “Disability is not Inability”.  This story was about a boy that was disabled through a motorcycle accident.  He was not able to help himself for a long time and eventually got up the courage to ask for a loan and became a successful entrepreneur.

Our final activity was a listening activity.  We asked them to close their eyes and listen to a sound and then they had to use their imagination and write down how that sound affected their 5 senses.  We gave them the prompts “I see….I hear….I smell…I touch….I feel….I remember”.  Some of the teachers didn’t quite understand and wrote down literally what they smelled (e.g. I smell nothing).  Once we started discussing, many started to understand that the exercise was not a test but rather a time to share ideas.  One teacher said that the sound reminded her of chicken frying in a pan and described her 5 senses in the context of the kitchen and frying chicken.  Another teacher said it sounded like a waterfall, and described a memory he had at a specific waterfall. 

I think one of the biggest breakthroughs was when one teacher asked us at the end whether there was a right or wrong answer to the listening exercise.  Since teachers and students alike are engrained to teach right and wrong answers rather than using critical thinking activities with many right answers, it was great that the teacher thought to ask this question.  We explained that since each of us has different experiences, different ideas, and different ways of using our 5 senses, every answer is right in this exercise.  You could see the lightbulb come on for this teacher as she understood that the point of the exercise was to think creatively and share personal experiences rather than memorize a right answer.

Word of the day:  Ulemavu siyo kushindwa kutenda - Disability is not Inability