lunes, 21 de marzo de 2011

ATTENTION TO DIVERSITY

ATTENTION TO DIVERSITY

One of the major challenges with which one finds nowadays the basic education in practically all the democratic developed countries is: How to approach with quality and equity the increasing diversity of the student body that in a model of comprehensive education comes to the classrooms every day. Or what for us is the same thing: How to open and to arrange our educational ordinary systems to stop to live in them who up to only two decades ago still had them excluded, guaranteeing that all the persons without exception could enjoy their right to a quality education.

In our context the above mentioned challenge started being confronted by certain delay from the approval L.O.G.S.E., on having recognized the internationally defended right that all the persons have - be which will be their personal and social condition - to a good basic education, as well as to extend the age of obligatory and common education up to 16 years. This recognition has supposed the incorporation to the ordinary school of a population increasingly wide and diverse. And that the educational state Administrations and the Autonomous Communities have been assuming the responsibility of regulating different measures curriculares and organizational generically called " measures of attention to the diversity ", with that every school center can adapt the general education to the diversity of his concrete student body. The response to the diversity that the LOGSE raises takes form of the concept of adaptability of the curriculum. This relation turns out to be explicit in the article 61, which contemplates the need to respect the capacity for understanding of the curriculum and the principle of individualization of the education. To achieve the balance between the capacity for understanding and diversity, the LOGSE is praised by an opened and flexible curriculum by several levels of concretion, that is to say, adapted to the needs of each one of the centers.


The concept of educational special needs appears when importance stops having the description of the deficiency of the person and more importance passes to have the type of help that the individual needs to attend to these needs. This concept is defined by his interactive character, since they influence both the characteristics of the person and the response and adjustment of the programs that are carry out to attend to these needs. It has also a dynamic and changeable character, since any person can present educational special needs and these can change with the development of the person and with the modification of the program that is in use for this person. In addition, they possess a not descriptive character not classified. The evaluation of the educational special needs must adopt a formulation that allows to analyze potentials of learning and development, at the time that it values the resources and the means that are precise, the most suitable school emplacement and the adequacies of curriculum that are necessary.

Since then our educational system in general and every center especially, understood as microcosms in which there is reproduced the current society and its increasing diversity, they try to arrange two that cannot be waived and complementary principles of a school and society democratic:  

a) The principle of attention to the diversity. It is based on the obligation of the States and its Educational Systems of guaranteeing to all the right to the education, recognizing the diversity of its needs, attacking the inequalities and adopting an educational opened and flexible model who allows the access, the school permanency of the whole student body without acceptable exception, as well as school results. To satisfy it, the system and the centers have to take the opportune decisions directed to offering an education of quality adapted to the specific needs of their student body and contexts, without resigning a frame of necessarily common reference and of belonging.

b) The principle of inclusion, which is required to recognize the right of all the persons to take part evenly of opportunities and achievements in the basic learnings, sharing the same curriculum and a school ordinary space, so that, respecting the differences and cooperating the whole community, is possible the development and the full socialization, as citizens and citizens, of all the persons without exclusion.
The inclusion is a theoretical concept of the pedagogy that refers to the way in which it is necessary to to give response in the school to the diversity. It is a term that arises in the 90s and tries to substitute that of integration, up to this moment the dominant one in the educational practice. Its basic supposition is that it is necessary to modify the system to answer to all the pupils, instead of understanding that they are the pupils who have to adapt to the system, joining it. The inclusive education appears as a right of all the children, and not only of those qualified like with educational special needs. The incorporation treats the differences in terms of normality (the normal thing is that we are different) and from equity in the access to a qualit education for all. The inclusive education not only respects the right to be different as something legitimate, but it values explicitly the existence of this diversity. There is assumed so every person differs from other one in a great variety of forms and that because of it the individual differences must be dressed as one of the multiple characteristics of the persons. Therefore, total incorporation would mean the bet neither for a school that receives the general diversity, without any exclusion, not for motives relative to the discrimination among different types of needs, nor for motives relative to the possibilities that the school offers.  


On having analyzed, therefore, if the measures of attention to the diversity are useful, we have come to the conclusion of which the fact that the student learns, not only it depends on him, but of the degree in which the helps of the teacher adjust to the level that the pupil shows in every task of learning. If the adjustment is adapted, the pupil will learn and progress, anyone that is his current level, but if such a adjustment does not take place between what the pupil is capable of doing here and now and the attention that the teacher offers him by means of the strategies of education, a problem will take place, undoubtedly, in the learning of the student.

In agreement with the previous thing, from the point of view of the plannings and of the adjustments curriculares that give response to the educational special needs of the pupils, in the teaching-learning process when the differences in the styles of learning, the capacities, the skills of the student and the diversity cultural associate and ethnic, are not taken in account, arise difficulties to develop the potential maximum in every person, which reverberates in the academic performance, in the indexes of promotion and contributes to the increase of the desertion of the students.  

There is looked, so, that the plannings and the curricular adjustments help to improve the evaluating processes of the students with educational special needs and contribution you improve in the quality of the education.

Thereby, instead of continuing adopting measures they remedy that they can generate parallel ways of education for certain student body, probably let's be able confront better, of once, the transformation of the selective system of education in the inclusive system that a democratic society needs and is forced to provide. Especially, if indeed it wants to continue advancing in the plan of converting into a fact the right to an education of quality and equity for all without exclusion.  

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