Special Education Needs and Integration
Definitions
Deficiency:
Any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological, or anatomical structure. It can be motor, visual, or generalized, but there are always muscular deficiencies. We can talk about deficiency and disability.
Disability:
Restriction or absence (due to a deficiency) of the capacity to perform an activity in the manner or within the margin considered normal for a human being. It is an individual’s disadvantageous situation, a consequence of a deficiency or disability that limits or prevents the performance of a role that is normal (depending on age, sex, social, and cultural factors). It can be orientation, physical independence, or mobility.
Prevention:
Adoption of measures aimed at preventing physical, mental, and sensory deficiencies or preventing deficiencies from having negative physical, psychological, and social consequences when they occur.
Rehabilitation:
A process of limited duration and with a defined objective, aimed at allowing the person with a deficiency to reach an optimal physical, mental, or social functional level by providing them with the means and changing their lives. It may include measures aimed at compensating for the loss of a function or functional limitation and other measures to facilitate social adjustments.
Defect:
Structural or biochemical abnormality that implies a deficiency for normal performance.
Limitation:
Inability of the subject to perform certain functions.
Exceptionality:
Differentiation for causes that are positive or negative with respect to the standard.
Handicap:
Obstacles that a person can find in the normal development process as a consequence of their deficiency and their impact on the individual. In this case, we speak of disadvantage.
Integrated and Inclusive Education: Differences
Integration:
- Competition
- Selection
- Individuality
- Appearance of prejudices
- Individual vision
- Technical-rational workload
Inclusion:
- Cooperation/solidarity with respect to inequality
- Community
- Assess inequality for the better students
- Reflective research workload
Inclusion is an alternative to integration, an attempt to alleviate the situations of excluded students, to rebuild the individualistic approach (as only individual), so that all students with or without special educational needs receive the best quality education in regular classes.
Students with Learning Difficulties
Acne:
Students who present any degree or type of learning difficulty in a continuous manner that goes from the most temporary and mild levels to the most severe and permanent.
Warnock Report 1978: Conceptual
- All children have educational needs.
- All have the right to education.
- No child will be considered unteachable.
- The purposes of education are the same for everyone.
- The goal of special education is to respond to SEN to achieve common goals.
- There are not two types of children: normal and special.
- SEN form a continuum of needs.
- Special education means a continuum of services.
- Special grants are additional to the ordinary.
- Aid must depend on need, not the category of disability that is diagnosed.
Link Classrooms
These classrooms are also intended for students who are starting their schooling in our country for the first time and who do not know our language and have basic knowledge gaps as a consequence of irregular or non-existent education in their country of origin. The classrooms are organized in the educational center according to who they are and what they develop.
Educational Compensation Classrooms
These classrooms are intended for students who are at a disadvantage in their studies, who are 15 years old when they start compulsory secondary education, and who have accumulated a large curriculum gap in most classrooms, who have difficulties adapting or carrying out a late or irregular adaptation process, who are at risk of dropping out of school due to family causes, or who are not in a position to meet the objectives of education. (Requirements)
It is a special education measure of promotional organization. The objective is to ensure the education, integration, buffering, and development of skills that make it possible to join a social security program or professional qualification program in each case, starting with curriculum diversification (= adaptation).
Inclusion
It is the educational response to the needs of the student in which methodological proposals will have to be developed that encourage the participation of all students. Inclusion is opposed to any segregation, to any argument that justifies the selection of students in the exercise of the right to education.
Warnock Integration Levels
Integration can never be equal; it has different forms, depending on the objective pursued. There are three types of integration:
Physical Integration:
There are special education units within a mainstream school, but they maintain their own organization and curriculum, so they only share spaces with the other school.
Social Integration:
The units are in the mainstream school and even maintain a differentiated curriculum, but children participate in extracurricular activities together.
Functional Integration:
The classrooms have no curricular differences, but share all or part of the regular curriculum, so that children with SEN share part or full time in ordinary activities.
Soder added to this threefold classification a new one called community integration, which is the integration that occurs in society once they have left school, continuing into adulthood.
1982: Law on Social Integration of the Handicapped (LISMI)
- Advocates for the integration of people with disabilities in all areas of society.
- It gives form to the principles of the National Plan for Special Education.
- It makes the difference between impairment, disability, and handicap.
- Principles of Special Education (standardization, sectorization, integration, individualization, teaching)
- Advocates for the disappearance of Special Education and distinct schooling.
- Group of people with disabilities in regular school.
Special Educational Needs (SEN)
It is a unique education system where everyone has a place. It has to respond to the needs of everyone so that everyone has possibilities and everyone has their own needs. The only thing that varies is the degree of specificity, so we have a concept of individualized, standardized, and inclusive education. The problem is not in the child but in the educational system that does not give the response that it has. From this perspective, the causes of the learning deficiency are intractable in origin, that is, it only depends on how the child and the environment are, with the difficulty, and it will determine what aid is needed. The concept of SEN is not a substitute for deficiency, handicap, or disability, but it tells us if a student has difficulties and what special educational resources are necessary to address those difficulties. The term allows us to determine the pedagogical aids or educational services that a given student may need throughout their schooling. The concept has changed in three major ways: the great educational goals are the same for everyone/a strictly equal educational concept, the emphasis is placed on the deficiency in the response/responses to SEN, which are not sought outside the regular curriculum but which will determine the adjustments and special adaptations.
We can determine that SEN has an intractable and relative character, that the learning difficulties depend both on the personal characteristics of the student and on those of the educational center, assuming that these characteristics of the student’s needs will be changing and relative, because they will depend on the opportunities of the context.