Inclusive education for children with disabilities in Kosovo

The project aims at the implementation of a university course for teachers to acquire skills that could facilitate the processes of inclusion of students with disabilities. Scholastic inclusion is necessarily linked to teacher training, which must acquire new skills and innovative teaching practices and / or reformulate, in an unprecedented perspective, the perception of one's way of teaching in the class group; it is inevitable, however, that this will rekindle new reflections, both on the cultural and educational levels, aimed at giving greater significance and new stimuli to the protection of learning rights for all pupils and, in a broader perspective, to the protection of the rights of all citizens to feel "active part" of the nation itself.

Save the Children, leader of the project, has allowed a joint work between the Faculty of Education of the University of Prishtina and the Department of Educational Sciences of the University of Bologna, with the aim of achieving these objectives:

• introduce content related to inclusive education into the standard curriculum for teacher education;
• develop a Master's program in "inclusive education".

The project allowed to draw up a first draft of the «Inclusive Education Program» for the Master level. On a strictly pedagogical plan, the accompanying and co-constructing action of the program was started by sharing, with the colleagues of the Prishtina University, the central nodes closely linked to the pedagogical-inclusive perspective and then allowing the drafting of the profile of a hypothetical "inclusive teacher". This profile was gradually defined during the missions to Prishtina, in the two years of work, highlighting the theoretical and practical skills that, in the context of teaching for inclusion, were to be considered indispensable.

The photos are taken in a primary school on the outskirts of Pristina (Kosovo). This is a class with pupils aged 8 to 16 years. In addition to "regular" students, there are:

• a pupil with Down syndrome, about 10 years old, accepted - on a voluntary basis (there is no legislation on the subject) - by the teacher. The student with Down Syndrome is followed by a partner, because the class is very large and the teacher is alone;
• three students (between 14 and 16 years) with intellectual deficit, always accepted on a voluntary basis by the teacher. To help the teacher, for the movement in the building, etc., there is a mother: the parents turn to help this good teacher.

Coordinator:

• Save the Children

Partner:

• University of Prishtina, Kosovo
• Alma Mater Studioum - University of Bologna, Department of Educational Sciences
• Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of the Republic of Kosovo