Year-Long Disability Campaign in Four Delhi Public Schools
The Right to Education is a fundamental right. Today schools have a growing need to develop skills to handle differences. In India, we have a government policy in place for Inclusive Education called Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan.
But fear of laws does not necessarily change reality. What we need is a collective will to bring positive change in us and our environment. Currently, the main barriers to equality for people with disabilities are attitudes towards them.
At Trinayani we believe that proper communication is needed to raise awareness of disability, which is too often perceived as merely a health issue, approached with pity, stigma and unknown to the public at large. We design Communication Campaigns to educate people on disability and encourage acceptance of disability as part of the diversity of the human condition (gender, religion, culture, etc).
As a step toward demystifying issues of disabilities, we partnered with Takshila Education Society which manages and runs four Delhi Public Schools each in Patna, Pune, Ludhiana and Coimbatore to conceptualize and design their Annual Theme for the academic year March 2015 -March 2016, which we aptly titled Celebrating Diversity- The Difference is in knowing.
We incorporated the theme of this disability awareness campaign in as many aspects of the school as we could Including the libraries, classrooms, assemblies, school notebooks, the summer assignments, the curriculum and many extra workshops, hosted quizzes, debate and elocution competitions that dealt with the same.
We developed two illustrated workbooks, titled I AM SPECIAL SO ARE YOU for primary school students and CREATING A BETTER WORLD for secondary school students as teaching tools, to be used as a starting point for teachers/parents to develop lessons on understanding disabilities along with providing This-Ability articles for its inclusion in the ORBIT Magazine of Takshila Education Society to be distributed in all 4 schools.
Our motto was not only to spread awareness to the pupils but also to the teachers of the schools, through Powerpoint presentations, healthy discussions, case studies and interactions to deepen their understanding of disabilities and diversity a little bit more. We organized a Learning Disability Simulation Lab conducted by Padma Shastry, to give teachers knowledge about how invisible difficulties affect the learning process and expand their understanding of the actual trouble experienced by students who struggle during the process of learning.
Apart from this, the administrative, ancillary, housekeeping and transport staff attended sessions on the role that language plays in the way we think about disabled people, words that need to be avoided and positive empowering words/phrases that should be used. To add a twist of fun and play we created our version of the Snakes and Ladder game. 10 by 10 feet flex with a custom-made dice, where the students become pawns themselves and play the game in teams to enhance knowledge and respect for disabilities and build a moral compass for themselves, differentiating right from wrong. Film screening sessions, like the screening of the audio-described version of ‘The Little Terrorist’ were held to show how entertainment is provided to persons with disabilities.
For the celebration of World Disability Day, we arranged for a Deaf instructor- Harpriti from Deafway, Delhi to conduct a Sign language workshop in DPS Ludhiana, for DPS Pune we arranged for Bhushan Toshniwal who is blind and an accountant and singer to address the staff, for DPS Coimbatore we arranged for Akila Vaidyanathan from the Amaze Charitable Trust, to organize a workshop and exhibition on understanding Autism and lastly, for DPS Patna we had Embracing Diversities workshops for all students in the secondary section throughout the day.
To commemorate World Sight Day the school took proactive measures by creating awareness about the rampant disability by taking the eighth graders to the Blind School situated at Thondamuthur. It’s a global initiative launched in 1999, which aims to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020.
Partners, including governments, working together under VISION 2020 can make a major difference in the lives of millions of women, men and children already visually disabled or at risk. Preserving or restoring vision can be accomplished at little cost and can help lift people out of poverty.
On 9th October, the students were escorted by the faculty members Ms Suseela and Ms Shanti left the school around 7:45 am immediately after the attendance and reached the Blind School to commemorate the special event, which sparked off with a Prayer song sung in unison indeed made the ambience more solemn for the ensuing events. It was then followed by an informative speech delivered by Vidunya, which gave a glimpse of the significance of the day in the broader spectrum. Thereafter, the students of the Blind School enthralled the assembly with the wide array of mellifluous songs, which stole everyone’s heart immensely.
After this, a movie titled ‘Little Terrorist’ was screened emphasizing the lofty ethos that regardless of caste, creed and religion, one ought to embrace all religions graciously. The story was then interpreted in the Tamil language as they were not well-versed in English. Eventually the event culminated with a vote of thanks by Ms Shanti.
A short film can be viewed below