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
No comments:
Post a Comment