Ashwin Tombat

A dedicated group of educationists in Goa is helping children with learning difficulties keep up with their peers in school — and rediscover their self-esteem

Mariam is a 10-year-old Std IV student. She can answer most questions in class but, when asked to write them down, produces incomplete, untidy work with many spelling mistakes. She is constantly distracted and has failed more than once. Mariam's parents were referred to the Paying Attention to Learning (PAL) project at Goa's Sangath Centre for Child Development and Family Guidance. She was assessed and found to have 'specific learning disability' (SLD), a condition that leads to inattentiveness in class and poor scores in reading, spelling and writing. The social worker at PAL visited Mariam's schoolteachers and convinced them to assess her more on oral work, to ignore spelling errors and to focus on content rather than form in languages. This has helped Mariam get better marks, and boosted her confidence and self-esteem.

Funded by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, PAL is Goa's first learning centre for children with learning disabilities. It has a 13-strong, multidisciplinary team consisting of a developmental paediatrician, teachers, special educators, psychologists and counsellors, a social worker, a speech therapist and a paediatric physiotherapist. It is developing a training programme for teachers in remedial techniques — including a training manual — and trains regular schoolteachers to identify and help children with learning problems. PAL is also facilitating the setting up of 'resource rooms' in schools for kids with SLDs.

PAL estimates that up to 10 per cent of schoolchildren could be affected by SLDs in varying degrees. Though intelligent, these children have specific processing problems in one or more areas of reading, spelling, mathematics, comprehension or expression. They get labelled as lazy, stupid or slow by those who cannot comprehend their problems and they often drop out of school. Those who manage to scrape through have low self-esteem, lack faith in their abilities and are likely to navigate life while being unaware of their actual potential.

Children afflicted by the condition known as 'attention deficit hyperactivity disorder' (ADHD) are any teacher's nightmare. They are fidgety, distracted, impulsive and disruptive. ADHD is often compounded by an associated SLD. Those with 'autism spectrum disorders' have problems in dealing with language and in social interaction and they can be extremely stubborn. Slow learners and those diagnosed as 'mildly mentally challenged' have an intelligence quotient that ranges between average and low. But with appropriate intellectual stimulation they too are capable of getting ahead.

"All these children need to be taught and they need to be evaluated differently; it is their right," says PAL coordinator Marita Adam. "The world needs all kinds of children rather than just the academically brilliant ones." Dr Adam believes that developmental learning difficulties affect up to 15 per cent of schoolchildren and that all kids — irrespective of their abilities and skills — should be educated in regular schools.

The need for PAL came up when its parent body, the Sangath Centre, found that 30 per cent of the children referred to its child development centre had scholastic difficulties. Initially these problems were handled by a part-time remedial teacher, until the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust grant enabled PAL to be set up.

When a child comes to the centre, a psychologist decides on whether he or she requires a detailed psycho-educational assessment. Children under seven are assessed by the developmental paediatrician. Teachers trained by PAL conduct individual and group remedial sessions, including basic skills training in reading, spelling and writing, through phonic inputs as well as an integrated, graded sight-word reading programme that uses pictures. Development of emotional well-being is integrated in a language programme conducted by the teachers and the speech therapist.

For Std IV and V kids who struggle with basic skills, PAL is formulating an altered curriculum, sifting out essential facts, using multi-sensory teaching for understanding, and creating appropriate associations for memorisation and retrieval. It uses a maths kit devised by Navnirmiti, a Mumbai-based organisation, to teach arithmetic in primary classes. Pre-school skills, including matching, sequencing, classifications and categorisation exercises to develop fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination, are part of the remedial sessions, in which the physiotherapist takes an active part. PAL facilitates parent support groups and hopes to assist in setting up teacher support groups in the future.

PAL has developed a training module and manual and has held several training sessions for teachers. It has conducted two intensive 10-day workshops in Goa with doctors, teachers, school managements and parents, as well as two in Karnataka, in addition to several sensitisation sessions for parent-teacher associations. A three-day day workshop on learning difficulties conducted by PAL has now been included by the Goa government's District Institute of Educational Training as part of its regular refresher courses for teachers. PAL has been writing to schools recommending concessions for children referred to it and the Goa government is now seriously looking at these requests.

Since the project started in July 2002, 217 children have been referred to PAL. Of these, 105 actually came for remediation, 42 have shown signs of improvement, and 24 have managed to cope with the curriculum in regular schools. Three kids in the last category were given concessions and six were allowed some leeway in their examinations by sensitive school authorities.

Changes in the education system cannot take place within a couple of years, and PAL's present project will be coming to an end in June 2005. Sangath is looking for further funding, until the government can be persuaded to make the necessary policy changes and finance schools to set up adequately staffed resource rooms. However, the first breakthrough has already been achieved. Two students being treated by PAL — one in Std IV and one in Std V — have managed to secure concessions from the Goa government's education department for the academic year 2004-05. While these are one-off, case-by-case concessions, the important thing is that they create precedents, both in the primary and middle school sections, on the basis of which other students with similar problems can press their claims. These are the very first steps towards a comprehensive policy.

Similar work being done elsewhere, like at the Alpha Omega Centre in Chennai and the Nalanda Institute in Mumbai, has resulted in the setting up of special schools for children with learning difficulties. But PAL believes in an inclusion policy, and is working to make resource rooms at regular schools a workable solution for helping children with learning difficulties, within a mainstream setting.

Dr Adam is working to create a model resource room for kids with SLDs — with an altered curriculum and a different evaluation system — that can be emulated by schools. This means that children with learning difficulties will attend regular classes till Std VII, after which they will be ready for a school system that is more vocation-based. For Dr Adam and her colleagues at Sangath, it is a mission to help these children of a lesser god realise their potential.

Uploaded on March 2005