Short Desciption

This project bring together 6 Special Schools from EU all with a slightly different area of focus and expertise but all school are aware of the social isolation of their pupils. Our project aims to tackle this issue and enable our pupils to play a more productive and involved role in our European society. Our efforts aim to ensure we raise skill levels of these vulnerable students and have a direct and life long impact on the connectivity with society in general.

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

SLOVENIAN IMPRESSION - mobility to Schulzentrum im FIDS Quellenstraße, Wienna , Austria

ERASMUS PROJECT »GET TO KNOW US«, Vienna, Austria, 3.10.2022 – 7.10.2022 

First week of October brought us spending very interesting time in Austria, Vienna. We spent quality time with people, who work with pupils with special needs from Croatia, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Austria, which hosted us that week.

Our hosts organized for us every day something special. During the week, we got different lectures: about school quality management in the Vienna school system, about the Austrian school system in relation to “Inclusion, Diversity and Special Education” and about special educational needs in the Vienna School system. We also met a member of the provincial parliament, municipal councillor of the city of Vienna and director of the Academy of Education, who friendly welcomed us at the Vienna town hall in the provincial parliament. It was very exciting to be there. Of course, we also had time for Vienna sightseeing town walk and we were all thrilled about the city.

The most interesting time for all of us was spending time at different schools (they told us, there are around 700 schools in Vienna!), with children with special needs and with their teachers. So, we could join a class at the motor skills park, technical work in the workroom and music and singing in the class/at the gym. We could saw, all children in all classes were able to be inclouded in all activities, it means, those were inclusion classes with children with high skills. But, what the most surprised us, was the number of migrants children. Only in one school there are 37 different nationalities, what means 37 different languages in just one school. Because of so many nationalities, there is sometimes a native speaker in the class with the teacher, who helps the pupils with the language. Vienna is very open city to migrants and their school system works the same. Teachers are always ready to translate and help “new” pupils feeling as much as possible comfortable and welcomed in the school.

Pupils with special needs visit lessons together with other children. Very surprising for us was the information, that teachers usually don't even know, who has special needs in the class. There is a special education teacher (and, depends on the number of pupils with special needs, also more other teachers) working together with class teacher. An example of good practice was the desk in the middle of the class, where every pupil could sit down for few minutes (or the whole hour), if needs some help. The pupil doesn't need to ask a teacher; he/she could just stand up, walking to that desk, sit down and the (special education) teacher knows, that pupil needs some help. It is also aloud for other pupils to go there and help. As soon as the problem is being solved, the pupils just go back to their desks and the lesson goes on. Definitely one very good idea also for Slovenian school system.

Danke schön, ViennaJ.

Slovenian Erasmus+ team Tanja, Nataša, Marjetka and Tina







 

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